"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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer", Paul Schrader

Image
Paul Schrader is a director, screenwriter and film critic. Raised in a Calvinist family who deprived him of the cinema in his youth, Schrader was only able to see the first film at age 17 ("Other college kids had to vandalize government buildings. go to movies. ", as he would say later). This led to the construction of his late cinephilia in a more intellectual than emotional way. Hence, in the films written by him, the spectator feels uncomfortable with the imperfection and lack of attachment to his protagonists, existentially disturbed and self-destructive, but redeemed in the last scene that justifies the long process of violence to which they had been subjected. Although he is most remembered for his collaboration with Martin Scorsese in 4 films - Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) - the ones he directed are equally astonishing [ Hardcore (1978) and Affliction (1997)], with a strong and inn...
Read more

"Signs and Meaning in the Cinema", Peter Wollen

Image
Peter Wollen (1938-2019) was a theorist, screenwriter (he co-wrote Antonioni’s The Passenger ), film critic (in addition to Screen magazine, where he developed his film theories, he wrote for the New Left Review under the pseudonym Lee Russell) and filmmaker. His most famous films were co-signed with his wife Laura Mulvey. His most remembered work is the seminal book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema , which discussed, in a captivating and accessible way, the semiotic and structuralist approach in the cinematographic context.  The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the theoretical and filmic work of Eisenstein. The second, about the auteur theory, investigates the recurrence of themes and images in some directors' careers, namely Hawks and Ford. And the third one develops how a film should be seen as a system of signs and codes, a bearer of a personal language to which the viewer has to adapt himself, referencing also the aesthetic innovations of Jean-Luc Godar...
Read more

"Cahiers du Cinéma", Nº: 1-300 (French Edition)

Image
Cahiers du Cinéma is a French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. The controversial texts published in its first decade revolutionized the way the world thought about cinema. In this period, critics that would soon become an acclaimed group of filmmakers (Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, later known as part of the movement Nouvelle Vague ) wrote about la politique des auteurs (the auteur theory), that is, the director as the only author of the film, and became known for its violent attacks in the literary cinema, la tradition de qualité (quality tradition), that pleased the older generations, also called cinéma du papa (daddy's cinema). In the next years, Cahiers developed further its theories until the events of May 1968, where it became radically politicized in Maoism. These are the first 300 numbers of the film magazine. They begin in April 1951 with the iconic photography of Gloria Swanson in Suns...
Read more