Painter of pictures: The Farber equation is never simple - Manny Farber

ArtForum, April, 2002 by Robert Polito

Few critics have written on cinema with the verve and dexterity of Manny Farber, whose essays have garnered a cult following--particularly among fellow film critics. In 1977 Farber bade farewell to writing to devote his energies fully to his painting (a retrospective of which is scheduled for fall 2003 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego), but the connection between his pursuits is a marked aspect of his work as an artist. In December Artforum and the New School Writing Program cosponsored a tribute to Farber. Here Robert Polito, the evening's moderator, provides an overview of the critic and his career. Rounding out our appreciation are excerpts from contributions by the four panelists--writer Greil Marcus, art historian Jonathan Crary, and film critics Stephanie Zacharek and Kent Jones.

That sentence is a variation on a Samuel Beckett line I've wanted to adapt for an essay, review, even poem, ever since I read the original in college. As the opening sentence to his first book, Beckett wrote, "The Proustian equation is never simple," and from the outset I was comforted by the promise of persistent, accelerating, perhaps eternal difficulty and puzzle. But as I repeated to myself the sentence over the years, at the blind start of any obstinate piece of writing, I found myself startled by Beckett's conflation of "Proustian" and "equation": his brisk juxtaposition of involuntary memory and the painstaking working through of quantities and variables.

I never found a space for the sentence because the bewilderment that Beckett's six words in my head customarily signaled turned out always to expose only a lack of preparation or confidence, a private anxiety that refused to intersect the subject at hand. But for Manny Farber's work as a writer and painter, the introductory oddities, muddles, crises, contradictions, dead ends, multiple alternatives, and divergent vistas spiral along "chains of rapport and intimate knowledge" (to quote his Artforum essay on director Don Siegel) into still more tangled and intractable mysteries; and, following Beckett on Proust, the Farber equation "creates a sustained, powerful, and lifelike pattern of dissonance" (to quote his City Lights essay on Preston Sturges) that insists on insinuating the steeped-in-time personal and sensual alongside the abstractly intellectual, formal, and conceptual.

For much of his writing life Farber was branded an advocate of action films and B movies--as though it might not be distinction enough merely to have been the first American critic to advance serious appreciations of Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, and Anthony Mann. Yet Farber resisted many noir films of the '40s as inflated and mannerist, and he also was among the first critics to write about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, an early champion of Werner Herzog, and an exponent of such experimental directors as Michael Snow, George Kuchar, Andy Warhol, and Chantal Ackerman. As J. Hoberman remarked in the introduction to his collection Vulgar Modernism, Farber played "both ends against the middlebrow."

Still, Farber's notoriety as a film critic largely resides in his B movie-steeped, careering slams of the '50s and '60s--"The Gimp" (1952), "Underground Films" (1957), "Hard-Sell Cinema" (1957), and particularly "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962). The termite/white elephant essay cashiered "masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago." White elephant directors "blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion" or "pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance." Farber instead tracked the termite artist: "ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it." Termite art (or "termite-fungus-centipede art," as he also tagged it) is an "act both of observing and being in the world, a journeying in which the artist seems to be ingesting both the material of his art and the outside world through a horizontal coverage." Against the white elephant "pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing a masterpiece," termite art mainly inheres in moments: "a few spots of tingling, jarring excitement" in a Cezanne painting "where he nibbles away at what he calls his 'small sensation'"; or John Wayne's "hipster sense of how to sit in a chair leaned against the wall" in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Farber traveled among the late-'30s generation of writers and critics, many aligned with The Partisan Review--Clement Greenberg, James Agee, Saul Bellow, Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Weldon Kees, and Otis Ferguson, among others. For his reviews and essays for the New Republic, The Nation, Time, Commentary, Commonweal, the New Leader, Cavalier, City Magazine, and (starting in 1967) his monthly column for Artforum, Farber tracked obvious and enduring affinities particularly with Ferguson, Agee, and Greenberg. Yet his approach to writing could not be more divergent, incongruous, idiosyncratic, perverse. Where Greenberg aimed at what might be termed an elegant lucidity, and Ferguson and Agee offered distinctive variations on conversational lyricism, Ferguson tilting toward '20s jazz, Agee canting into rhapsody, Farber as a critic is perhaps the only modernist to write as a modernist. He emerged as the boldest and most literary of film and art critics of the '40s and '50s by proceeding along almost stridently ant iliterary tangents. Farber advanced a topographical prose that aspired, termite fashion, through fragmentation, parody, allusion, multiple focus, and clashing diction, to engage the formal spaces of the new films and paintings he admired.