April 16, 2003

By Edward E. Crouse

"Pauline Kael was very good on plot. I never was." Manny Farber's voice crackles on a tape recorder hours after I talked to him. The recording is more or less intact, though for stretches of tape, his voice hums in and out, probably due to a faulty microphone patch. As I start to type, my eye picks up a couple of phrases, weighing them for possible inclusion in this article: "Each film picks up the current fascination with keeping things a little bit amateurish ... grandness and pettiness are blended in skeptical visions that significantly go against heroic careers."

The above fragments, from the last article Farber published (Film Comment, November-December 1977), are probably not the best way to begin. There's nothing particularly grand or petty about the writing of this year's Mel Novikoff Award winner in the San Francisco International Film Festival, but his bizarre career path, one which led to his current status as the next most influential movie critic after Kael, is distinguished by its share of antiheroic activity.

After a stint at UC Berkeley, studies at a now defunct art school in Chinatown, and a brief residency at Haight and Fillmore, Farber commenced a carpentry apprenticeship that led to building, among other things, tract houses in the Sunset District and some buildings at the Treasure Island incarnation of the world's fair. His incarnation as a film critic – begun in 1942 and best documented in the nutty, awe-inspiring, indispensable sprawl of his book Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies – reflects a sensibility that makes significant, stubborn "swerves" (as he calls them) as soon as other critics start to write like him, see like him, or be like him.

What can you tack on Farber? Cahiers du cinéma, interviewing him in the early 1980s (Farber on the phone: "Oh, that was a terrible article"), issued the following proclamation: "It was he who single-handedly introduced the notion of the auteur into Anglo-American film criticism at the same moment that André Bazin put that term into circulation here in France." Writing a few years ago in this very paper, clutching for a way to describe his style, I stepped into a minefield of words like "unstarry-eyed," "practical," "nontopical" (huh?), "stubborn," "wily," "dense," "weirdo." All were meant as compliments. When I started writing this article, I realized that no amount of souped-up adjectivizing could nail down the man better than J. Hoberman's claim that "Farber played both ends against the middlebrow."

In the wake of her death last year, ink was spilled regarding Kael's odd apprentice system, in which critics would submit their work to her at pivotal points in their careers, get effectively graded, and then be placed in an influential, nigh-feudal network. Many of the Paulettes now occupy prominent positions at major newspapers and magazines, writing solid journalism that often seems penned with blinders on (e.g., Elvis Mitchell on Moulin Rouge's overwhelming use of the color red). The Farberites, or whatever they're called, are a stranger group, less figures in some kind of papal order than an oft-shambolic mix of nuts who, when they work as well as their antihero, top the sadistic insistence of straight writing with a spurt of curt, unkempt sentences. When it doesn't work, a critic often sounds like she's quipping herself to death.

I sometimes wonder if critics see too many movies, are locked too much into the monotony of a system of screenings, screening tapes, openings, interviews, larger profiles, think pieces, and deadlines. What remains startling about Farber's writing – besides its sheer velocity or the mock-glib contradictory lurches that bury any sense of pretense or seriousness – is the onrush of associations that are not strictly TV- or movie-related, that merely have to do with exactly how your senses assimilate the information. Famous for blowing deadlines, Farber took the time (when he could) to get a walk, a glare, a framing, an attitude, a precedent right.

Three years after cinema's centenary, when Susan Sontag, among others, gave cinema a toe tag, the reissue of Negative Space reminded you that more was, and still is, at stake than the needs of those who feel like they're living through some golden age or golden decline. Or as I wrote in my review of the book (me on the phone: "Oh, that was awful"): "The vast majority of film criticism was and still is a single-minded, railroading rush to judgment – you will see it my way, this is cinema.... Farber's voice was more scattershot and wide-ranging. He would burrow into, out of, and around filmic material. If his [spatial charting] sounds to fans of plot proctology exceedingly superficial, Farber took its simplicity to great depths. He could scatter your perception one way with a point and scrape it away with another."