"Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies", Manny Farber


Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a painter and film critic, regularly contributing to publications such as The New Republic, The Nation, Artforum, Film Culture, and others. He was distinguished by its inventive, iconoclastic writing, and for being a defender of action– Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann – and underground filmmakers, like Michael Snow and Andy Warhol. One of his most remembered essays is "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art", in which he writes about the virtues of "termite art", the excesses of "white elephant art", by championing the first, “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it”, against the second, that treats “every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity” and lacks the economy of expression of “termite art”. Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies gathers Farber's most influential writings.



Excerpts
“The saddest thing in current films is watching the long-neglected action directors fade away as the less talented De Sicas and Zinnemanns continue to fascinate the critics. Because they played an anti-art role in Hollywood, the true masters of the male action film—such soldier-cowboy-gangster directors as Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, William Wellman, William Keighley, the early, pre-Stagecoach John Ford, Anthony Mann—have turned out a huge amount of unprized, second-gear celluloid. Their neglect becomes more painful to behold now that the action directors are in decline, many of them having abandoned the dry, economic, life-worn movie style that made their observations of the American he-man so rewarding. Americans seem to have a special aptitude for allowing History to bury the toughest, most authentic native talents.” from Underground Films.

“Fuller is one of the first to try for poetic purity through a merging of unlimited sadism, done candidly and close up, with stretches of pastoral nostalgia in which there are flickers of myth.” in Samuel Fuller.

“Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the first half of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” from White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art

Link to the complete book in PDF

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