More on Manny Farber.

With last week's entry on Manny Farber about to slip off the front page, it's time for another. First and foremost, Girish describes how a discussion of Farber's work about two years ago shifted the general direction of his blog (and with it, the focus of the incredible community that gathers there). "Let me offer, as a small homage, ten reasons why I like Manny Farber." Far too modest, of course. That's a must-read list. Girish also notes: "In the 60s, Donald Phelps put together a Farber collection for his magazine For Now. It's available here."

Updated through 8/28.

"Farber's intense, collage-like paintings and his tangy prose (collected in Negative Space, expanded and reissued as Manny Farber on Movies) boast the quickness, spontaneity and bursting physicality of his favorite B pictures," writes Michael Sragow in the Los Angeles Times. "Reading Farber makes you realize anew all the sensations and bits of recognition that go into watching a real live movie." Sragow thinks back to 1971, when he and Farber helped "pick movies for the USA Film Festival.... [H]e knew I loved the work of his pal [James] Agee and could sense that I was in awe of him, Manny treated me as an equal."

Update, 8/26: "Is it legitimate to begin an obituary by talking about personal appearance?" asks David Thomson in the Guardian. "I can hear Manny Farber growling that it is - if you get on with it. So Manny, who has died aged 91, was tall, lanky and comic looking. He might have played Popeye, or one of those old-timers in the Anthony Mann westerns he cherished.... He never raved. He was sometimes merciless in a put-down, and it is not that his taste was unerring - taste can't be: it is meant to be personal. You couldn't always tell if he liked a film or not. But Manny was the first person in English who wrestled with words to arouse the feelings produced by imagery on screen."

Update, 8/27: "I don't think that rendering an Olympian opinion was crucial for him," writes Richard Corliss in a vital appreciation in Time. "It was more important to look at the work closely, tunnel into its rhythm and visual texture, then write it up, with special attention to originality of expression and sentence-solving, so that the reader can approach the finished piece with the same concentration, and expectation of rewards, as any work of art. 'I believe most of what I wrote,' Manny told [Leah] Ollman with a disconcerting blitheness, 'but I'm more interested in the elegance of the word and what it throws up at you.'"

Updates, 8/28: "Farber called space 'the most dramatic stylistic entity' in film, by which he meant not just the literal way in which a movie uses the canvas of the screen, but also the psychological space traversed by the actors and 'the area of experience and geography that the film covers,'" writes Scott Foundas:

In short, he wrote about movies as though they were art or architecture, in sentences packed with the tersely lyrical detail of an Anthony Mann setup. His way of seeing a film was one of active participation - an innate inability to look at any scene or shot without wondering why the actors were positioned the way they were in the frame, why the camera was placed where it was, why the lighting was just so, and whether or not the porch in an old Western movie would really have been built like that. The question of how deliberate these choices were on the part of the filmmakers was all but irrelevant. The elements were there, and, as in any work of art, they demanded to be grappled with.

Also in the LA Weekly: Recollections from Kent Jones and Robert Walsh.

Duncan Shepherd, a student of Farber's, and later, a friend and house-sitter, doesn't even have to revisit the piece he wrote in the San Diego Reader a few years ago to remember just a few of the many things he left out:

How could I have overlooked the parade of cineastes drawn to the university by Manny's gravitational pull? - Rossellini, Franju, Godard and Gorin, Wenders, Herzog, et al., not to forget the critics Raymond Durgnat and Jonathan Rosenbaum. These were without question a valuable supplement to a film student's education, and Manny was more than amenable to setting them up in their personal forums. But in my recollection, Manny, who never had enough time to dissect a movie in a three-hour class, never ran out of angles of attack, never exhausted the possibilities of juxtaposition and rearrangement, would never give over his own class time to these luminaries. He suffered no doubts that the critic's voice was as vital as the artist's.

"Farber's frankly macho, pugilistic style could be cruel and testy with films, filmmakers, and performers he loved (and get out of the way if he didn't love) but had everything to do with the way his insatiable intelligence dug into a whole movie as moment-by-moment, accumulating experience, scratching at its every feint, contradiction, and curlicue to unearth all its pleasures, whether intentional, unintentional, or unknowable," writes Spencer Parsons in the Austin Chronicle. "In a typically explosive 1966 piece titled 'The Subverters,' Farber penned not only the most direct and convincing broadside against auteurism that I could imagine but offered perhaps the most rewarding and exciting lens for looking at all movies, good and bad, focusing on the subversive nature of the movie experience, the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of a film.'"

Jonathan Rosenbaum posts a letter from Farber's wife, partner and collaborator, Patricia Patterson, to John Powers: "Manny was not a 'Conservative,' a 'Libertarian,' a 'Republican,' an anything.... Obama thrilled him and he fretted about his winning.... Manny thought Barack was a new Lincoln - one of the great ones."

Posted by dwhudson at August 25, 2008 7:55 AM