page xv All quotations from Manny Farber in the Introduction, except when indicated otherwise, are drawn from conversations with Robert Polito. The epigraph is taken from “Farber on Farber” by Leah Ollman (Art in America, October 2004); this is also the source for Manny Farber’s recollections of teaching and UCSD. The remarks on criticism, writing, and mimesis in the opening paragraphs are from “Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson Interviewed by Richard Thompson” from Negative Space, expanded edition (New York: Da Capo, 1998). The quotes by William Gibson and Paul Schrader are from Negative Space; by Susan Sontag, from “Against Interpretation” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966); by Pauline Kael, from “I Still Love Going to Movies: An Interview With Pauline Kael,” Cineaste 25, no. 2 (2000); by Duncan Shepherd, from San Diego Reader, May 25, 2006.
page 138 “Movies in Wartime”: An accompanying note indicated that this was the “third of a series of articles on American civilization in wartime.” Other wartime topics included architecture and science.
page 460 The original opening of “Preston Sturges: Success in the Movies,” by Manny Farber and W. S. Poster (City Lights, Spring 1955):
While Hollywood, in its post-silent period, has produced many directors of unusual skill and competence, it has only developed a handful with enough temperamental endowment to establish themselves as individual artists. To be successful and strongly individual in the present-day industry is only possible to artists of a peculiar, cross-grained character, who combine instinctive resistance to fashions with personality that is naturally prominent and popular. As the result of such a combination, about thirty or forty Hollywood players (stars and minor actors) have been most responsible for keeping movies alive, for preventing the industry from disintegrating through sheer slavery to its own conventions. By virtue of their skill and because of the peculiar tensions and ambivalence of their situation, they have also managed to project more of contemporary life than is delineated in nearly any other art, more of the violence, morbidity and confusion than can be evoked in genres dominated by traditional moral goals.
It is a different matter when one comes to consider the situation of Hollywood directors. They are, by and large, subjected to such crushing, box-office generated pressure that it is nearly impossible for them to survive as individuals except through an almost psychotic integrity, some deep-rooted idiosyncrasy of character which cannot be eradicated. By all odds, the most outstanding example . . .
William S. Poster, aka William Shakespeare Bernstein (1916–1960), published poems, reviews, and essays in The New Republic, Commentary, Poetry, Partisan Review, Nation, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune during the 1940s and ’50s and was a film critic and editor for the American Mercury. Usually identified as “a poet and critic,” he was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and attended City College and Columbia University. Reviews for Commentary include Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos (November 1948), J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (January 1952), and Kenneth Fearing’s New and Selected Poems (August 1957). According to Janet Richards, Farber’s first wife, “Willy was thin and frail, tallish, and bent into a permanent hipster slouch. His face was gaunt, with high cheek bones, thick lips, a pointed chin and beautiful pale blue eyes luminous with intelligence and hilarity.” After two years in a psychiatric sanitarium, Poster committed suicide.
page 550 Farber started writing a “movies” column for Cavalier in December 1965. His first piece, “Nearer My Agee to Thee,” is not the essay that appears under that title in Negative Space (see p. 497). Cavalier introduced his debut with this note: “We are proud to present Manny Farber in this new department. Mr. Farber is renowned for some of the finest film criticism of the ’50s and early ’60s and has been published in The New Republic, The Nation and Commentary. For his first column, he has chosen to assess the present state of film criticism.”
page 584 After their meeting in the summer of 1966, Patricia Patterson, although initially uncredited, collaborated with Manny Farber on all Artforum, City, and Film Comment essays; however originally published, these should be considered joint Farber-Patterson writing productions. An interview with Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson by Richard Thompson published in the May/June 1977 issue of Film Comment (and subsequently printed in the 1988 edition of Negative Space) throws light on some aspects of their collaboration:
RICHARD THOMPSON: When you began writing with Patricia in the late Sixties, what did she bring into the process?
MANNY FARBER: Patricia’s got a photographic ear; she remembers conversation from a movie. She is a fierce anti-solutions person, against identifying a movie as one single thing, period. She is also an antagonist of value judgments. What does she replace it with? Relating a movie to other sources, getting the plot, the idea behind the movie—getting the abstract idea out of it. She brings that into the writing and takes the assertiveness out. In her criticism, she’s sort of undergroomed and unsophisticated in one sense, yet the way she sees any work is full-dimension—what its quality is rather than what it attains or what its excellence is; she doesn’t see things in terms of excellence. She has perfect parlance; I’ve never heard her say a clumsy or discordant thing. She talks an incredible line. She also writes it. She does a lot of writing in her art work; she gets the sound related to the actuality in the right posture. It’s very Irish. You don’t feel there’s any padding or aestheticism going on, just the word for the thing or the sentence for the action. I’m almost the opposite of all those qualities: I’m very judgmental, I use a lot of words, I’m very aesthetic-minded, analytic.
PATRICIA PATTERSON: If it were up to me I’d never dream of publishing anything—it always seems like work in progress, rough draft. But he’ll say, “Just leave it at that.” I’m more practical than he is. Manny is willing to stay up all night long, take an hour’s nap, and then do another rewrite, retype, collage. He’s the workhorse of the pair of us; he does the typing. He will initiate many, many rewrites, come up with new tacks to explore when we’re way beyond deadline and patience.
MF: I’m unable to write at all without extraordinary amounts of rewriting. The “Underground Movies” piece took several years to write. An article on bit players was stolen from the car—a funny thing to steal on Second Avenue and Second Street, but it was stored in the lid of an Underwood at about the fifth year of its evolution. I’m not a work-ethic nut, but the surface-tone-composition in everything I do—painting, carpentering, writing, teaching—comes from working and reworking the material.
PP: Maybe we could paint a little picture of the writing process. Also, I’m a little more scrupulous. I’m less willing to let the statement be made: I’m always saying, that’s not exactly true, or that’s not fair, or look at this other side.
MF: They go together—to get the sounds right and to get the idea attached to it. She cannot be unscrupulous. We have ferocious arguments over every single sentence that’s written.
RT: What are the arguments about?
PP: For example, India Song has never been resolved and boils both of us. I still balk at the languor, the fashion-model look, and I have no patience for the slow tango pace Duras sets up with camera and actors. It’s beautiful but it offends me.
MF: Straub was wrong when he said India Song’s soundtrack interested him but not the image. The image, a tracking shot through the grounds and across the building of the consul’s residence, is determined by the music. The music was played constantly on the set to regulate the way the camera and actors move. Even though it’s slow action, the people are never still: action has been slowed down and stasis speeded up. There is barely a difference in the two; as in late Snow, Altman, Rivette, everything has been pushed to the periphery, characters constantly entering and exiting a movie that is mostly at the edge of the frame. What about the deep plum glowing color—what would you call it, Victorian? Like Caravaggio, but softer than that.
PP: I have the same difficulty reading Duras. I don’t quite buy the leftist politics. Marxism with a silver spoon in your mouth, Marxism expounded while lolling in an exclusive Alpine health spa. Although I liked Nathalie Granger very much. What troubles me is the pampered droning voice. There’s so much narcissism in these rebellions against capitalism.
MF: No one sticks to Duras’s difficulty enough. It has to do with the emptying out, the willingness to have bare stretches: the time it takes a washing-machine salesman to move from a car, up the path, and into the suave company of two elegant women. That’s the kind of thing I like in Duras. It’s the join between persistent, drawn-out time passing and the fact that life is at a standstill. It’s cut itself off from active life as it was lived in the colonial past and is waiting for some utopian state of affairs. But the movie is going to remain stubbornly implacable until that time. Duras should direct a Continental Op story: two grudging, monosyllabic writers.
PP: It occurs to me that a difference between us is Manny’s pull toward Minimalism, whereas I’ve never been able to do abstract work. It usually comes down to a difference on Herzog’s cruelty, say, or the safe-playing in History Lessons.
RT: So it doesn’t come down to this verb or that noun?
MF: No. I like to get an opinion, and Patricia’s obsessionally against opinions. There’s always another side to every fucking movie or painting; there’s always an assuaging side.
RT: Often you two resolve that through multipurpose sentences. You run the idea through the first half of the sentence and then reverse it through the second half, but you don’t end up canceling out the meaning: you end up getting both meanings.
PP: If you ever saw us at the end of writing an article, it’s . . .
MF: It’s death. It’s like a cemetery.
PP: It’s unbelievable, having sat through this sedentary thing of fighting, eating junk food, not washing your clothes—oh, it’s awful.
MF: Except she sleeps.
PP: I sleep. I haven’t Manny’s stamina, and I don’t have his dedication, at all.
MF: For one thing, Patricia doesn’t have a history as a critic, or a love of criticism.
PP: That’s not true. What do you mean?
MF: What I meant was that she disbelieves, I think, in judging the work.
PP: I like seeing creeps get their just due.
RT: But you two seem the opposite of that with your advocacy pieces. The Taxi Driver piece (Film Comment, May/June 1976) is carefully balanced—but some of the pieces for City! The corner turns so suddenly. In the first article about Hollywood’s hotshot young directors, the first two paragraphs read like a recruiting poster for the new Hollywood, then in the next few paragraphs it goes through a corrosive tone change. So many of the references, like referring to Ferguson’s citation of the iron fence in Citizen Kane, I take to be references to Coppola’s own Charles Foster Kane lifestyle.
MF: I’m very proud of that first article for City on the New Hollywood.
PP: I kept saying, “Unnhhh”—not because I was afraid of Coppola, but because I thought we weren’t covering each film enough, and that to write this provocative a piece, you really have to back it up.
RT: Are there things in common in painting and criticism as you practice them?
MF: The brutal fact is that they’re exactly the same thing. American criticism doesn’t take cognizance of the crossover of arts, and American painting doesn’t take cognizance of it either. It’s always very provincial. I don’t get why other critics don’t pay more attention to what’s going on in the other arts, because I think the Godard-Straub-Herzog-Fassbinder moviemakers do; the styles are so pertinent. The kind of photography you see at any point is that way because of what’s being written in novels and painted in pictures. Like the crossover from Hopper into writers like McCoy and Cain, the film noir movies—scripters like Furthman and Mainwaring—all over the place at the same moment. You couldn’t have had that kind of imagery that directors and screenwriters were trying for, unless it were the most important thing for painters to be doing. It’s as if there were a law in film criticism that you’re not supposed to get involved in the other art forms.
PP: My first experience with Fassbinder’s Merchant of Four Seasons was a painter’s reaction, shock and envy that someone had gotten there first. Specifically the scene in which Irm Hermann, the wife, bustles around the kitchen with the daughter doing her homework, dejected Hans staring out the window. Visually, the scene has to do with the wallpaper, patterned oil cloth on the table combined with the enamel-like color, shadowless Fra Angelico lighting, with everything both ecstatic and ordinary at the same time. Straub and Fassbinder in 1972 were far in advance of what representational painters were doing then. Pearlstein was doing the studio thing, the photo-realist Estes-Goings were doing a single item Americana, a pickup truck or a close-up of an escalator.
The first impact Straub had was visual. I even made a small painting of a still from the tense dining-room encounter between two old political enemies—“Would you trust a Nettlinger”—Schrella and Nettlinger. Not Reconciled is terrifically interesting, visually. The curious motif: a bird’s-eye view of a two-shot, the soberness of the people combined with the black/white richness, the kind of rigor and integrity with which the documentary shot is heightened. The fact is that visually the Straubs are so beautiful. History Lessons; the scenes in the garden with the big flowers. I always liked the oversized stage with tiny actors in The Bride-Groom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp; it’s such a misreading to say that he’s only about dry intellectualism.
MF: To go back: I think what I set out to do with criticism in the Forties—it was always the same goal, I had about 800 words, a column-and-a-half in The New Republic—was to set out the movie before the reader’s eye in as much completeness as I could, in that topography. I had to develop a picture which could pull the audience in and give them these sights without their realizing it, and which would divulge the landscape of the film as accurately as I could get it. That involved a lot of color work in the language and in the insights—color work in the sense of decorative quality. Topography changes every decade. Now we’re into a new topography.
In the same issue of Film Comment, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson defined their critical principles as follows:
(1) It’s primarily about language, using the precise word for Oshima’s eroticism, having a push-pull relationship with both film experience and writing experience.
(2) Anonymity and coolness, which includes writing film-centered rather than self-centered criticism, distancing ourselves from the material and the people involved. With few exceptions, we don’t like meeting the movie director or going to press screenings.
(3) Burrowing into the movie, which includes extending the piece, collaging a whole article with pace changes, multiple tones, getting different voices into it.
(4) Not being precious about writing. Paying strict heed to syntax and yet playing around with words and grammar to get layers and continuation.
(5) Willingness to put in a great deal of time and discomfort: long drives to see films again and again; nonstop writing sessions.
(6) Getting the edge. For instance, using the people around you, a brain like Jean-Pierre Gorin’s.
(7) Giving the audience some uplift.
page 680 The essay on 1969’s ten best films as it appeared in Artforum ends with Easy Rider and does not include any discussion of several films on Farber’s list at the beginning of the piece.
page 691 In 1970 Farber also published “Film (Space)” (Artforum, March 1970), a shorter version of his introduction to Negative Space. Because that introduction is so crucial to Negative Space, his original column is reprinted here:
Space is the most dramatic stylistic entity—from Giotto to Noland, from Intolerance to Weekend. How an artist deploys his space, seldom discussed in film criticism but already a tiresome word of the moment in other art, is anathema to newspaper editors, who believe readers die like flies at the sight of esthetic terminology.
If there were a textbook on film space, it would read: “There are several types of movie space, the three most important being (1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers.” Bresson deals in shallow composition as predictable as a monk’s tonsure while Godard is a stunning de Stijl-ist using cutout figures of American flag colors asymmetrically placed against a flat white background. The frame of The Wild Bunch is a window into deep, wide, rolling, Baroque space; almost every shot is a long horizontal crowded with garrulous animality.
Jeanne Moreau, always a resentful wailing wall, works in a large space which becomes empty as she devastates it with scorn. Ida Lupino, an unforgettable drifter in a likeable antique, High Sierra (1941), works close and guardedly to the camera, her early existentialist-heroine role held down to size: she’s very unglorious, has her place and, retracting into herself, steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching. While Moreau is a sensibility ember burning from beginning to movie’s end—there’s no specific woman inside all the emotion—and Lupino is a specific woman in a cliché pushed-around-gal role, Laurence Olivier’s Archie Rice is a specific man as well as a flamboyant type. In an Entertainer role that is part burlesque and then pathos, he works from small nuances of exchange with his daughter to broad gestures, while brazening his way through cheap, humiliating skirmishes with his creditors.
Since it’s the uniting style plus the basic look of a film, the third kind of space controls everything else—acting, pace, costume. In La Femme Infidéle, Chabrol’s completely controlled horizontal moves, arch and languorous, picking up an insurance exec’s paralyzed existence of posh domesticity, set the tone, almost blueprint the way actors eat, like a paper cut-out family, the distanced politeness of their talk. Virginia Woolf, an American marriage, 1960, seen for all its vicious, despairing, negating features, is middle-aged Academe flagellating in a big, hollow, theatrical space. The George-Martha shenanigans, hokey and virulent, are designed grand opera style as though the curtain were going up or down on every declamation. In a Lonely Place, a 1950 Nick Ray, is a Hollywood scene at its most lackluster, toned down, limpid, with Ray’s keynote strangeness: a sprawling, unbent composition with somewhat dwarfed characters, each going his own way. A conventional studio movie but very nice: Ray stages everything, in scenes heavily involved with rules of behavior, like a bridge game amongst good friends, no apparent sweat. A piece of puff pastry, Demy’s Model Shop (1969) comes together in a lazy open space: overblown, no proportions, skittering, indulgent. The scene is an absolutely transient one—drive-in bank, rock-roll group, J. C. Penney houses—that saunters lackadaisically in the most formless imagery. The Round Up (1966), stark overhead lighting from beginning to end, geometric shadows, hard peasant faces, stiff coats, big sculpture hats, is a movie of hieratic, stylized movement in a Kafka space that is mostly sinister flatness and bald verticals. Sometimes there is violent action, but Jancso’s fascinating but too insistent style is based on a taut balance between a harsh, stark, imagery and a desolate pessimism. Of all the movies mentioned here, the space here is most absolutely controlled, given over to rigidly patterned male groups.
The emphasis being given to space by today’s leading directors forces a backwards look at what has been done in movie space. In What Price Glory (1926), space is used innocently for illustrational purposes, which is not to say that it isn’t used well. Walsh’s film is still an air-filled lyrical masterpiece: the haphazard, unprecious careers of two blustery rivals who swagger around trench and village exquisitely scaled in human terms to the frame of the screen, suggesting in their unhesitating grace the sweet-rough-earthy feeling that is a Walsh trademark. This is a very early example of Walsh’s special aptitude, getting people from place to place gracefully, giving an enchantment to bistro or barracks through repetitions in which the engineering slightly alters each trip, jump-cutting his movie into and out of events with unabashed shorthand and beautiful detail.
Where Walsh bends atmosphere, changes camera, singles out changes in viewpoint to give a deeper reaction to specific places, The Big Sleep (1948) ignores all the conventions of a gangster film to feast on meaningless business and witty asides. Walsh keeps re-establishing the same cabin retreat; Hawks, in another purely spatial gem, gives the spectator just enough to make the scene work. One of the fine moments in forties film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one book store to another, looks up at a sign. There is as much charm here as Walsh manages with fifteen different positioning setups between Lupino and Arthur Kennedy in a motel cabin. All the unbelievable events in The Big Sleep are tied together by miserable time jumps, but, within each skit, there is a logic of space, a great idea of personality, gesture, where each person is. Bogart’s sticking shirt and brain-twisting in front of a princely colonel, which seems to have present tense quality, is typically out of touch with other events and probably dropped into its slot from a facetious memory of Faulkner.
Touch of Evil (1958) is about many things: murder, gang-rape (an American blonde marries a Mexican attorney and all her fears about Mexicans come true), a diabolic sheriff and a dozen other repellent figures. Basically it’s a movie about terrorizing, an evil-smelling good movie in which the wildly Baroque terror and menace is another world from Hawks-Walsh: an aggressive-dynamic-robust-excessive-silly universe with Welles’s career-long theme (the corruption of the not-so-innocent Everyman through wealth and power) and his inevitable efforts with space—to make it prismatic and a quagmire at the same time. Welles’s storm tunnel has always the sense of a black prankster in control of the melodrama, using a low angle camera, quack types as repulsive as Fellini’s, and high contrast night light to create a dank, shadowy, nightmare space.
Basically the best movie of Welles’s cruddy middle peak period, when he created more designed, less dependent on Hollywood films (Arkadin, Shanghai Lady) mostly about perverts, Touch of Evil is a sexual allegory, the haves and have nots, in which the disorienting space is worked for character rather than geography. An amazing film, the endless bits of excruciating black humor are mostly involved with illogical space and movement, pointing up some case of impotence or occasionally its opposite. A young Mexican lawyer jumps around jackrabbit fashion while a toad-like sheriff floats away in grease: a whacky episode has the lawyer stuffing an elevator with old colleagues while he zips up the stairs (“Well, Vargas, you’re pretty light on your feet”). The funniest scenes, spatially, revolve around a great comic grotesque played by Dennis Weaver, a motel night man messed up with tics who is last seen clinging to a leafless tree, and, before that, doing woodpecker spastic effects at the sight and thought of Janet Leigh on a motel bed.
His allegorical space is a mixture of tricks, disorientation, falling apart, grotesque portraits. A deaf mute grocery clerk squints in the foreground, while Heston, on the phone, embarrassed over his wife’s eroticism from a motel bed, tries to suggest nonchalance to the store owner. A five minute street panorama develops logically behind the credits, without one cut, just to arrive at a spectacular reverse zoom away from a bombed Cadillac. Just before the car goes up in fire, the car’s blonde has given a customs agent one of those black speeches that dislocate themselves from the image: “I’ve got this ticking noise in my head.”
Those who blew their cool in the sixties, shipwrecked on spatial problems, among other things. Winning and Polonsky’s Willie Boy seem the perfect examples, the former a race track film with no action but inflated with slow motion, slight and oblique acting, a leaky savvy about marital dalliance, and the latter a racial Western with affected photography and ambiguous motivation. Though there is smugness neither film comes to a head because of the vague, approximate way in which events are shown, the confusion about being spatially sophisticated.
So much is possible or acceptable in camera-acting-writing now that films expand with flashy camera work, jazzy heat flutters, syrupy folk music, different projection speeds, and a laxity abut the final form that any scene takes. Gypsy Moths, Goodbye Columbus, Arrangement, The Swimmer, The Graduate, Pretty Poison are caked with these glamour mechanisms. Polonsky’s invective against the crushing of the Paiutes, a disappointing but hardly loathsome movie, loses itself behind the unwieldiness of the very wide scenes.
There’s a fiesta going on at Willie’s reservation, and the point of any shot is gracefully ignored while a lyrical snowstorm occurs. In a scene of big heads and upper torsos, an interesting crowd of Indians are involved in something interesting, but what is seen is tinted coloring and Willie, a heavy jerky wave moving through a crowd of shoulders and hats. Seen between two of the sententiously parted shoulders is Willie’s Lola, an ambiguous solitary gardenia in an otherwise maidenless tribe. The movie implies no Indians can act: Katharine Ross is the only Paiute maid and the only actual Indians are bit players.
A film cannot exist outside of its spatial form. Everything in a good movie is of a piece: Joe Calleia, scared out of his wits, is a grey little bureaucrat fitted perfectly into Touch of Evil with the sinister lighting and tilted scenes in which he’s found bug-like at the end of hallways and rooms. Godard doesn’t start a project until it is very defined in its use of space: La Chinoise, an indoor picture with primary colors to look like Maoist posters and stilt-like, declamatory actors to go with a didactic message. It seems so dramatic and variable in Weekend (1968); this exciting shake-up movie is made up in progressive segments, each one having a different stylistic format, from the fixed camera close-up of a comic-porno episode (“. . . and then she sat in a saucer of milk . . .”) though the very Hawks-like eye-level dollying past a bumper-to-bumper tie-up on the highway, to the Hudson River pastoralism at the end when Godard clinches his idea of a degenerate, cannibalistic society and a formless, falling-apart culture. At least half the moviemakers are oblivious to the space excitement that is front-center in Weekend; the other half are flying off in all directions.
It’s very exciting to see the stylistic unity that goes into Weekend or the new Fellini, where a stubborn artist is totally committed to bringing an idea together with an image. After a whole year of varied films, it’s pertinent that Weekend seems to increase in resonance. These hopped up nuts wandering in an Everglades, drumming along the Mohawk, something about Light in August, a funny section where Anne Wiazemsky is just sitting in grass, thumb in mouth, reading a book. Compared to the podium-locked image of They Shoot Horses, Weekend is a rambling mystery not unlike the long, knotted tail swirling under an old dime-store kite.
page 770 Farber received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a project titled Munich Films, 1976–1977: Ten Years that Shook the Film World. The application refers to another book, on the subject of “Seventies film,” in collaboration with Patricia Patterson. The Seventies film study would have combined their already-published essays with revised class notes and lectures from Farber’s film courses at the University of California, San Diego. Both books remained unfinished.