Manny Farber described a spectator emerging from a 1950s big city fleapit into the daylight, “like a pirate discharged from a giant sponge.” His film reviews seem to start from a point of having partially absorbed a movie, and taken on some of its properties.
Farber reckoned that you “can’t be mimetic enough” in writing film criticism. He explained that in his 1940s work in The New Republic, with “an undemanding readership” and 800 words to work with per week, he wanted “to develop a picture which …could divulge the landscape of the film as accurately as I could get it.”
The accuracy of Farber’s evocations of film is a moot point. I get the impression he’s often pirating elements of the film to suit his own sense of things. You end up with some imaginative thumbnail sketches, as he tries to pin down the fleeting logic of a film from memory:
“William Powell, an artist in dreadful films, would first use his satchel underchin to pull the dialogue into the image, then punctuate with his nose the stops for each chin movement… basically a conductor, composing the film into linear movement as it went along.”
Mimesis is more than fidelity to the actuality of the film. It has a lot to do with trying to summon up its energy, laws of motion – for some purpose or other.
This act of ripping off the manner of a person or thing, with a more or less lucid idea in mind of the social machinery that props it up, remains an integral part of the practice of life. A way of getting on, or getting by, asserting or defending or extending yourself.
When I was a kid, my mum would take me round with her on her cleaning jobs. When we entered these houses, she would more or less accurately take on the accent and tone of the owners, if they were in. And some of the logic of their speech. These were suspense moments. She had audacity and skill. It was confusing and exciting to see she’d quickly altered in this way to to temporarily make us feel at home, or because the owners demonstrated qualities that she liked. One time, when a snobby & condescending house owner was surely still in earshot, my mum shrank the room to the size of a Hula Hoops box and summoned up her own mother’s phrase: “It’s alright, it’s just that she thinks her shit don’t stink.”
In film and art criticism, mimesis has its problems. It might come over as a tacit endorsement of the work and the circuits it moves in. A critic shouldn’t just reproduce the values invested in cultural products. But as Patricia Patterson says, “mimesis is not always flattery”. Farber seems to be involved in critically reconstructing films and investigating cinematic values, through the economy imposed on his often impressionistic and anecdotal writing.
Desperate facts
Farber on Film: The Collected Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America 2009) is an almost complete collection of reviews and essays on film by Farber, an American painter who paid for his practice through carpentry and criticism. The pieces were first published in The New Republic, The Nation, Artforum, Film Comment, Cavalier and City between 1943 and 1977. Between 1966 and 1977, he wrote in collaboration with his wife; artist, writer and teacher Patricia Patterson.
The specific interest in Farber and Patterson for readers of this blog might be that they paid equal consistency of attention (if not equal column width) to Hollywood, documentaries, newsreels and artists’ films. Rather than work in an easy flow between them, the writers suggest all films are “difficult objects”, the product of different milieus with different rules, in shifting historical moments.
Farber and Patterson displace critical expectations: Most appealingly, through remarks about, say, Michael Snow’s Wavelength as a murder mystery. Or by reviewing Yvonne Rainer’s films at a festival that isn’t showing them.
There are detailed observations of the places and milieus these films were shown in and discussed. There’s an ear for how values are invested in film culture – at least along the dimension of talk – all the gossip and work of persuasion that props it up. On the New York Film Festival 1969: “One of the desperate facts about being part of movies today is that every thirtieth word might be ‘Truffaut-Moreau-Godard’, a depressing, chewed-over sound… this is often a joyless sound that couldn’t inspire anybody, but it suggests that modern moviegoers are trying to possess the film or at least give it a form or a momentousness which it doesn’t have.”
You’ll find present-tense discussions of the 3D craze, cinema sweets, Tex Avery cartoons, wrestling films, experimental film venues and New German Cinema. The pieces come in a relentless flow, from 1942 to 1977, without much context. Part of me thinks, who read these reviews when they came out? Not to mention what articles, ads, editorial lines they butted up against in any one magazine. Farber’s reputation is very much as a critic’s critic, but I hope this thick, expensive book can somehow find a wider audience because the writing is so ripe and readable.
Background interest
If there’s an organising principle in Farber and Patterson’s writing, it’s not usually laid out in terms of directors, thematics, or genres. They reject “the massive attempt in 1960s criticism to bring some order and shape into film history”, with specific reference to auter criticism. Instead, they gather films together through their feel for things. The very particular and very loaded senses of the world, or parts of it, that they detect in cinema. There’s a tension worked up between moments of “background interest” that seem to provisionally essay modest pockets of practical knowledge or experience; And the fact that they’re found in fantastically truncated places, like in the flow and economy of 40s studio films where the ruling idea is, as Howard Hawks put it, “it’s not high art – just keep it moving”.
“The imagination of Ousmane Sembene… covering all the ground that his experience can encompass” (and no more or less?) in La Noire de…(1966); The way hardboiled detectives like Marlowe seem to constantly weigh up the limits and possibilities of their made-up worlds as they move through them, “swinging in indeterminate space.”. These fragments – evidence of intelligences testing themselves inside and against the structures of film and society – Farber gathers together out of the stuff he has to write about, assembling an intuited, heterogenous culture he calls “Termite art”: “An ambulatory creation which is an act of both observing and being in the world, a journeying in which the artist seems to be ingesting both the material of his art and the outside world through a horizontal coverage.” (What is the difference between ‘observing and being’ and ‘ingesting’?) He explores termite art in late-fifties to mid-sixties position-pieces like White Elephant Art Vs Termite Art, Underground Films, The Subverters and Hard-Sell Cinema.
Farber and Patterson act to turn the perspective of mainstream film criticism inside out. They draw attention to a particularity in experiences that undercut or test established discourses. They pay attention to the dynamics of teamwork, bit-players and their codes of conduct, documentary subjects, old troupers doing little bits of business to keep themselves amused, forgotten corners of the set. These previously critically neglected subjects are made to leap out of even the most rigorously structural cinema, like the Lords and Ladies of Misrule.
For me the interest in Farber and Patterson is their emphasis on practice and sensibility: Understood as the way performers and film-makers navigate through the worlds they depict: the hidden logics of performance and life that guide and are manipulated by them: “Private runways to the truth”, which is more generous than it sounds.
Bread and Butter
Warner Bros slanted abutments. Still from The Roaring Twenties, by Raoul Walsh, 1939
The writers also draw attention to the relationship between the experience of working in Hollywood as an institution, and the way that experience affects the things depicted in a Hollywood film. Films set off a game within a game when they engage in representation. One or more sets of social and economic positions refracts and shapes the terms for the depiction of another. That can be as true, in different ways, for artist film-makers or critics as for the pre-50s studio system that Farber seems to like as a test-case of ingrained film-making institutionality.
The push and pull pragmatism that comes with working as “man-under-a-toadstool” at Warner Bros is found to be buried in the depiction of everyday life in Raoul Walsh films: “[Walsh’s] position deep within the studio served to inspire his treatment of earthy, bread-and-butter human conditions, where the spirit as well as the body is yoked, burdened, slack, unassertive.”
Can there be an affinity between a “little big shot” director in the position of being able to make B films in a big studio, and the “bread-and-butter human conditions” of made-up ex-cons and bar hostesses? There’s no accounting for the many ways films are appropriated by the viewer. But I’m interested in these structural rhymes or half-rhymes Farber perceives between very different walks of life: The layers of truth and falsity they work up.
He finds a secret rhyming game between American institutions in the economy of the “all purpose Warner Bros backlot [of the 1940s]… with mysterious, all-white, slanted abutments, which could be a brewery, munitions factory, chemical plant, or penitentiary wall”. I’m reminded of Anja Kirshner’s use of the modular set structure in The Last Days of Jack Shepherd, which sets into train a play between the 18th Century gallows, Jack’s workshop, and the construction of the set; robbing for life and appropriating a life for what? Kirschner and Panos make the social and historical distance much more overt and open to inquiry.
Filigreed
There’s a constant play in Farber on Film between a painter’s feel for composition, and an idea of relative critical positions. Farber’s idea seems to be that these knowledges are transferable skills for criticism. No one type of knowledge is privileged over another. Instead they lead on through “continuation”, which implies that cultural criticism can be additive as well as dialectic: Not a zero-sum game.
Readers who became aware of Farber and Patterson through an earlier collection, Negative Space, might be surprised to find a different tack in Farber’s early writing. In his tenure at the New Republic, a middle class liberal journal of ideas, Farber was temporarily committed to expanding on his reviews with structural criticism of the film industry. He attacks “segregated” films like Cabin in the Sky and Tales of Manhattan (1942): “No less Jim Crow than a bus where whites sit in front and negroes in back, because the film is owned, operated and directed by whites.”
He made inroads into the then-fashionable rudimentary sociology that movie critics were drawing upon. But where many critics were playing “plot-sociologist” through attention to the symbolic content of propaganda films, Farber seems more interested in the fact that New York audiences in wartime were talking amongst themselves and to the screen, and the fact that service men and women were using the cinemas as a place to just sit down.
Later, he dropped a lot of the socio-political critique, though there’s an abiding sensitivity to perceived social hypocrisy. In some ways I think he could have developed his early positions beyond the limits expected from movie criticism in the 1940s. But it’s too late for that. If there is sometimes silence in his objective understanding of the film industry, within his own limits he goes for broke. I think Patterson adds lot to the later reviews in the book – a productively jarring counterpoint that becomes apparent in places Farber alone might earlier have just left off.
Although he said he was always “for something and against something”, much of Farber’s idea of critical positioning is implicit in his writing. Richard Thompson says that he “would instinctively move to another position if others got too close.” Part of the interest in reading such highly individual voices in criticism is the secret story they tell about the internal politics of criticism as activity: The scrambling over difference and consensus, the contingent reactiveness which makes it difficult to reduce an individual writer’s position to pure integrity or cynicism.
Audiences at large, are an absent centre which on the most part Farber and Patterson refuse to generalise about. This is refreshing, but in the scheme of criticism, it also puts the critics in a tricky position. I think they’re worth reading because they look forward to a much broader, spikier context for criticism as well as film-making. In 1977, not long before they stopped writing criticism to focus on painting and teaching film, they were moving toward a position that foregrounded discourse as a primary agent in film production. “The whole thing needs rearranging… the audience should be fantastically dialectical, involved in a continuing discussion of every movie.”
Maybe this is wishful thinking, even prescriptive, and easy to say: If “the audience” is taken in the most general sense – the writers are not specific about it – then how do you find the time? When there are bigger things to worry about. There can be a one-sided relationship between those who have heavy stakes investments in film, monetary or not, and everyone else. I’m sat here writing this. But Farber and Patterson also recognised that as paid critics, “[they] have more time” and therefore a self-defined motivation to ensure their work is “filigreed” with questioning cuts and replays.
I feel an ambivalence about Farber and Patterson’s work – perhaps because they invite such close and ambivalent readings of film. I love their writing because at the very least, their approach to films and the values bound up in them sent me back to look at the films anew, and find them transformed and reactivated.
April 2010
