Editor’s Choice
Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writing of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Polito; Library of America, 824 pages ($40)
“The liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country ever produced,” wrote Susan Sontag of Manny Farber. “The greatest, by far, of American film critics,” wrote brilliant Chicago film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. “The most overrated film critic in American history,” I say. One Farber essay alone— “White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art” from 1962—has been increasingly praised with ridiculous excess for the popgun thing it is. The idea that the Library of America has decided to collect HIS work in one of its long-lasting black beauties for libraries—and not, say, Dwight Macdonald or Leslie Fiedler, to take two very great American cultural critics of brazenly opposite ideology —is more than a little depressing.
At the same time, what is incontestably true of Farber—who died at 91 last year—is that there has never been a film-sensitive reader who hasn’t learned enormously from reading him. In the great American tradition of intellectual thorniness (“every composer to be his own carver,” advised American composer William Billings), Farber WAS his own man from the early ’40s to the mid-’70s. A painter by trade, he was weirdly and astonishingly sensitive to the subtleties and meanings of performance. It is impossible to think quite the same way about actors and how they inhabit movie screens after reading him, no matter how much misfired, bad writing often describes them (there are those who compare Farber’s improvisational style to jazz, a gross and somewhat malevolent misunderstanding of how much precision and structural rigor is required for jazz, even the phrases that miss). His “cussedness” IS enjoyable, even at its clumsiest and most exasperating.
This, then, is a hugely valuable book, however overly dependent it may be on current intellectual fashion.
—Jeff Simon
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