My Budd by Manny Farber

Bill Krohn

1

1

1

1. See Jean-Pierre Gorin et al, ‘Manny Farber: Cinema's Painter-Critic’, trans. Noel King, Framework, no. 40 (April 1999), pp. 35-51.

I. Microcosm

Manny Farber, probably America's best film critic, was also one of the first critics anywhere to write well about genre specialists like Sam Fuller and Don Siegel, but he has had little to say in print about Budd Boetticher: an early review of Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) doesn't even mention the director, attributing both the film's virtues (a clearer explanation of bullfighting than The Brave Bulls [1951]) and vices (homoerotic scenes of locker-room camaraderie) to the producer, John Wayne, while Arruza (1972) is brought up in passing in a Cahiers du cinéma interview only to explain why it would be ridiculous, in Farber's opinion, for him to talk about that film at all in 1982. (1) Fortunately, Farber is one of America's best painters, and in 1978, as part of his ‘auteur’ series (painted homages to great filmmakers), he did a painting inspired by the ‘Ranown Cycle’ (the nickname film buffs have given to Boetticher's seven westerns with Randolph Scott) entitled My Budd. Framed by these two missed opportunities to speak, My Budd is the perfect example of how Farber, in the ‘auteur’ series, put into action the proverb ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’. As far as Farber on Boetticher is concerned, this picture may be all we ever get.

My Budd, like every Farber painting of the '80s I've seen, is a still-life: objects arranged on a surface and painted, in this case, more or less life-sized. Against a background constructed from (a) colored segments of what looks like wallpaper, a playful child has created a little Boetticher-world out of (b) toys (dolls, a miniature railroad and a few miniature buildings, one of which is actually a tea canister) and (c) pieces of the natural world (rocks, a bug, a couple of turtles), to which have been added (d) mementos, mostly photographic, of more adult activities (a book open to a picture showing Boetticher and Scott with Wayne on the set of Seven Men from Now [1956], the name ‘Burt’ scratched on the lid of the tea canister, a color photo of an Indian on horseback, a newspaper with Scott's photograph that is either the Racing Form or a copy of the mythical Agrytown Sprint, a racetrack betting ticket, a torn movie ticket) and (e) things belonging to the artist himself (yellow notepads and teachers' gradebooks with jotted critical notations, a candy bar out of Farber's earlier ‘American Candy’ series) to create a painted world that refers in myriad ways to the larger world of Boetticher's films, while belonging clearly to the world of Manny Farber, artist-critic. That candy bar, for example, isn't a Baby Ruth: it's an internal repetition of the painting's title: My Budd, at once an affectionate reminiscence (curiously, since Farber and Boetticher, who live within an hour's drive of each other, have never met) and an act of appropriation.

While punning on the very idea of ‘Western painting’, My Budd extends an old idea of that tradition, the painting as a scale model of the world, by being an imitation of a tabletop construction which is itself a scale model of the ‘world’ of someone's films – art imitating a child's game imitating art. (That big swatch of blue that is the central fact of the painting refers no doubt to the blue of the sky, but at a triple remove: the painter is painting a sky-like piece of wall-paper or a table-top that has itself been painted blue in imitation of the blue skies of Boetticher's westerns ... ) In fact, the history of the visual arts contains many precedents for what Farber has done: My Budd is an allegorical painting which takes the place of an essay that was never written, just as Dürer's Melencolia I is the visual equivalent of a hypothetical neo-Platonist essay on the subject of Melancholy inspired (according to Erwin Panofsky) by the writings of Ficino, Cornelius Aggripa and Pico della Mirandola. At the same time, the fact that an essay on Boetticher's films can be translated into this kind of painting exposes the allegorical underpinnings of auteurist film criticism – in particular its reliance on the Renaissance idea of the microcosm, the little world which attempts to exhaustively map (and thereby to magically control) the larger world whose form it imitates: out of bric-a-brac that includes scraps of information about the filmmaker, jotted notations from screenings, bits and pieces of one's own life and pleasurably recollected images arranged like toys in a child's playpen, the critic constructs a microcosm of the cinematic world he or she wants to describe, which becomes discourse when it is rendered in words, or paint.

What kind of discourse? Drawing on what I know of Farber's criticism, I would say one that aims to be all-inclusive while refusing to be systematic. The spatial coordinates of My Budd are subtly undone, as in an Escher print. Take that little wooden bridge from the last scene of Buchanan Rides Alone (1958) over in the lower right-hand corner, with the dead bodies arranged in a pattern reminiscent of a famous shot of three dead gangsters from The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960). Is it resting on the blue surface below? If so, what about the turtle crawling under it? If not, how can the train-tracks, which seem to form a border between blue and yellow, run over it? While all the objects in the painting are more or less life-sized (if we assume that the turtles are babies), the dolls in the upper left and right corners are very different sizes. The relative tininess of the doll on horseback about to be hanged (a reference to a scene from Ride Lonesome [1959]) may be an effect of perspective, but the painting as a whole is not governed by the laws of monocular perspective. Seen from above, the objects on that hypothetical table are flattened out by an uncertain high angle which denies them full spatial reality, while making them available to the viewer's eye as symbols for reading, in a text which can be entered at any point, without hierarchy, center or vanishing-point.

In Farber's criticism the refusal to systematise takes more forms than can be enumerated here – suffice to say that it's often impossible to tell from the beginning of an essay on a film or a filmmaker where it is going to end up: There is no thesis, no antithesis, no possibility of synthesis, in part because the need to ‘get it all in’ works against the more traditional critical ambition to ‘say everything’ about a work by constructing a microcosmic model that includes, by definition, everything that can be said. Farber works against that idea of system by creating a microcosm whose powers of control over the object of its discourse are seriously handicapped by playful gestures which deny its internal coherence. One of the features in the Agyrtown Spring (presumably the newspaper of the town where Buchanan Rides Alone is set) is the ‘Renown Box Score’, a little microcosmic text which lists in parallel columns the names of all the ‘Scotts’ and ‘Villains’ in the films of the Ranown Cycle (playfully mis-spelled), but while the names of Scott's characters appear in the chronological order of the films to which they belong, the order of the villains' names has been garbled to avoid a symmetrical pairing-off.

If you are unable to read that notation in a small reproduction, it's because the ‘Renown Box Score’ is penciled in lighter letters than the heading over Scott's picture next to it: ‘Always Seventy Minutes Plus’, which may also be hard to read because the second line is lighter than the first. The same is true of the signs on the two little buildings near the painting's center: ‘Agri Meat Market’ on the building next to the tea-canister is boldly painted in, while ‘Agry Store’ on the building next door looks unfinished, as does the building itself, not to mention the faceless doll leaning against it. (The difference in spelling, another blow to consistency, serves to bring out the etymological root, ‘Agri-’, hidden in Buchanan's mythical ‘Agrytown’: a typical movie-western small town where every store in town belongs to one Boss, presumably because ‘Agrytown’s’ agricultural economy is organised like a feudal society.) In fact, on closer inspection, other indications appear that this ‘world’ is not quite finished – notably the illegible three-dimensional pencil figure that is sketched into the slats of the Death Bridge, which suggests that that puzzling architectural wonder may have started life as one of Farber's yellow pads ...

In his writings as well, Farber is process-oriented, and this aspect of his thought is probably easier to get into a painting than into an essay. If we simply pull out all the bits of writing that appear in My Budd (most of which would be illegible in any but a full-size reproduction like the one I'm working from), they include:

a) Critical aperçus: At the top of the Agrytown Sprint appear the words ‘Illusive Minimal Form’, and in its lower right corner is the scribbled notation ‘Different from Stewart/A straightline hero’. (The slashmark indicates a caesura with no punctuation in the text. ‘Stewart’, of course, is Jimmy, the ambiguous hero of many of Anthony Mann's best Westerns.) As if to elucidate these two ideas, the notepad at the bottom edge describes Boetticher's ‘illusive’ form in dramatic and pictorial terms: ‘Boetticher builds around villain, also builds around passive two thirds of screen’. These four statements could be the cardinal points of a critical discourse which, if someone took the trouble to connect the dots, would offer no insult to an Aristotelian mind, but those dots will never be connected – at least, not by Farber.

b) Lines of dialogue quoted from the films (a favourite Farber device): Over the nostalgic photo of Boetticher, Scott and Wayne appears Bart Allison's startling put-down of Morley at the end of Decision at Sundown (1957): ‘Where I come from folks don't celebrate when a man does what he's supposed to’. This hard wisdom, together with a line from Chink and Billy Jack's conversation in The Tall T (1957) which is noted on the pad at the bottom page – ‘A man's got to amount to something’ – would seem to be all the materials needed to construct a tribute to Boetticher's moral world-view in the style of early Robin Wood ... But why is the first line presented as a word-balloon in a comic-book about the adventures of John Wayne and his friends in Hollywood? And why did Claude Akins' rationale for his suicidal insistence on shooting it out with Scott in Comanche Station – ‘I've come too far to turn back now’ – also stick in Farber's mind? Perhaps because it resonates with the famous last line of Buchanan Rides Alone, which is also entered in the gradebook that abuts the Death Bridge over on the right: ‘Don't just stand there. Go get a shovel’. Is Boetticher a humanist with a rude existential ethic forged on the American frontier, a macho psychotic whose films always end with bodies piled up like kindling, a sophisticated ironist? Maybe Farber just liked the sound of those particular lines, or thought he could use them to get a laugh.

c) Odd impressions, unattached to anything: ‘Indians look like caveman’, muses the critic in the gradebook on the right, adding under it: ‘Crane-shots of groups at right angles to the screen. ‘On the pad at the bottom, like the third line of a haiku, ‘Marvin's acid green scarf’ (with ‘acid’ added as an afterthought) has been obsessively retraced until it stands out much more boldly than the faintly pencilled-in A+ generalisations next to it on the same pad. (‘Marvin’ is Lee, who plays Masters in Seven Men from Now. His acid-green scarf has been given to the Scott-doll lugging the saddle from the opening of The Tall T.) Such observations, which are not unrelated to Barthesian critical concepts like the punctus and the ‘obtuse sense’ are among the more refined delights of filmgoing, and My Budd offers pleasures of its own of this kind: Among the notes I am struggling to integrate in this article is the uneasy question: ‘Why does the big rock in the lower right quadrant look like a pickle?’ It's doubtful that any critical study can answer that kind of question, but Farber's essays make abundant use of these enigmatic details, which function as foreign bodies, parodies of critical remarks, banana peels for the argument.

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2. Ibid, pp. 38, 40.

In particular My Budd seems to refer to Jim Kitses' chapter on Boetticher in his book Horizons West, from which Farber probably copied the production still of Boetticher with Wayne and Scott on the set of Seven Men from Now, the portrait of Scott in the Agrytown Sprint (taken from a still from Comanche Station [1960]), the Tall T portrait of Scott with his saddle, and the image of the hanging from Ride Lonesome. He may also have referred (as I have frequently) to Kitses' filmography in constructing the ‘Renown Box Score’, and it would be interesting to know how much attention he paid to Kitses' statement (which the alternation of light and dark background colors in My Budd seems to reflect) that ‘The meaning in a Boetticher movie resides less in its bright moments of good humour, its dark moments of violence, than in the continuum, a seasonal movement, a perpetual interplay of light and shade ... ’. (3) But primarily, Farber would have had Kitses' intelligent, nuanced essay before him as an example of auteurist film criticism: its ambition to construct microcosms of cinematic worlds, its formalism, its appreciation for variations played out within generic formulas, its propensity to allegorise (Kitses more than once describes Boetticher's films as ‘morality plays’). Behind Kitses' study is André Bazin's seminal essay on Seven Man from Now, ‘An Exemplary Western’, (4) which hailed the inaugural film of the Ranown Cycle as a re-birth of the classical western – in his own essay, Kitses, a sophisticated second-generation auteurist, is already revising Bazin, creating an image of Boetticher that is halfway between John Ford and Samuel Beckett. And My Budd, coming nine years later, in turn revises Kitses, a little savagely, by taking into account how ‘people's attitudes towards these films have changed completely’, doing in paint what Farber had already done for the truisms of Raoul Walsh criticism in an astonishing essay published in 1971 in Artforum, ‘He Used to Be a Bigshot’. (5)

Compare Farber with Kitses on Boetticher's treatment of women. Whereas Bazin, describing the scene of Gail Russell's bath in Seven Men From Now, credited Boetticher with humorously carrying the traditional Puritanism of the western to the point of abstraction, Kitses notes: ‘The scripts insist that the woman is important because she assuages loneliness and offers meaningful contact – she is the keeper of 'the place'. However, this spiritual view is undercut as the films unwind, the heroine invariably taking on overtones of great physical desirability. Boetticher's women always suffer indignities, forced to stand in a downpour, tripping into mud, ducked in a water-trough; yet they come out sparkling, their often tattered clothes hugging their bodies’. (6) By playing those ‘overtones of physical desirability’ against a more Puritanical image of woman (implicitly, that of Ford) Kitses here is defending attitudes toward women which, though certainly preferable to Ford's, are simply indefensible today – it is no longer possible to react with anything but embarrassment, for example, when Scott gratuitously whacks Karen Steele on the ass before shoving her out of the stable in Decision at Sundown. Like all auteurists of his generation, Kitses is too concerned with rescuing his heroes form the junk-pile of popular culture to pay attention to this kind of thing, but in the little figure of a woman in crinolines (Gail Russell, as it happens, in Seven Men from Now) tumbling off the yellow pad on the left edge of the painting, Farber captures both the cheerful eroticism of the scenes Kitses describes and the twinge of embarrassment that their sexism provokes today.

‘Displacement’ can also come about because as cinema evolves, the aesthetic with which we look at older works changes, too. The example Farber gives comes from Hawks: ‘I saw Rio Bravo (1959) the other day. It's impossible to watch Rio Bravo without taking its racial and political aspects into account. But what interests me now is how it resembles a Chantal Akerman film; say, Jeanne Dielman (1975). There's no action. (...) Rio Bravo is a film of interiors, people speaking, very little action. Surfaces’. (7) Farber could be applying Borges' aphorism that ‘artists create their own predecessors’, but the aesthetic context he evokes for looking at Boetticher in My Budd has less to do with his direct descendants (Peckinpah, Hellman) than with the cinematic ‘minimalists’, masters at creating rarefied cinematic worlds from variations on a small number of elements, who were often the subjects of the essays Farber wrote with Patricia Patterson in the '70s – when Farber taught a course about Boetticher and three other filmmakers at NYU in 1976, the three other filmmakers were Herzog, Oshima and Rivette. Presumably Rivette and Herzog were there to represent what Farber and Patterson, in a 1977 Film Comment article on Jeanne Dielman, call ‘dispersed’ form, while Oshima and Boetticher represented ‘shallow-boxed space’: ‘A shallow stage with the ritualised, low-population image squared to the edges of the frame. Facing a fairly close camera, the formal-abstract-intellectualised content evolves at right angles to the camera, and usually signifies a filmmaker who has intellectually surrounded his material’. (8)       

The description doesn't cover all of Boetticher, who uses deep-focus compositions in his exteriors and sometimes in his interiors, but it is strikingly close in most of its details (those ‘crane shots of groups at right angles to the screen’, for instance), and invites more specific comparisons to other exemplars of the tendency, like Jeanne Dielman, where objects have as much right to exist before the camera as people, creating what Farber and Patterson describe as a ‘still-life film – a genre painting by a Seventies Chardin’. (9) Compare this with Kitses' description of an image from Ride Lonesome – distant horsemen in early morning light shot from inside a darkened building, with a water vase swaying gently at the left edge of the frame – as ‘an animated still-life’; in the next paragraph, he compares Boetticher to Ozu, cited by Farber and Patterson as an early master of minimalist frontality. (10) It is within this complex of associations that the formal idiosyncrasies of My Budd can be read, like using empty space in the middle of the image as a compositional element (‘Boetticher ... builds around passive two thirds of screen’), as in a film by Snow or Duras, or adopting the Straub-Huillet strategy of injecting elements of the natural world (the rocks, the turtles, the spider) into a canvas that would otherwise stifle on its own formal perfection.

This drafting of Boetticher into the Tradition of the New is, as I suggested at the beginning, an act of appropriation: For example, Boetticher liked to fill up the sides of shots because he hated Cinemascope and didn't want the audience to crane their necks to follow the action, while Snow and Duras, as Farber observes in a Film Comment interview of 1977, have pushed the action itself to the periphery of the image. (11) But at the heart of the gesture is Farber's respect for the capacity of these films to ‘move into different realms’ and his sense that, as a critic, he has a duty to keep up with them. Whence My Budd, where stiff, doll-like human figures, flattened into frontality, co-habit with a bunch of pebbles and a tea canister in a boxed-in space bounded on the right by death and on the left by characters who are trying to crawl, fall, ride or build their way into that rarefied, cerulean center. In the photograph copied in faded colors in the upper left-hand corner, Boetticher and his smiling collaborators seem to be in possession of a secret which they aren't about to share with us. Bazin thought those smiles promised a classicism that could laugh at itself, recovered from the wreck of self-consciousness, while to Kitses they spoke of serenity conquered in the face of an absurd universe. But for Farber, this Sphinx possesses the secret of ‘Illusive Minimal Form’, the secret of modern cinema, and it is that secret which the cool surfaces and empty spaces of My Budd seek to invoke, as a spirit at once intimate, familiar and permanently mysterious.

Postscript

Just before this essay went to press in 1988, Charles Tatum pointed out to me another striking proof that My Budd refers rather intricately to previous Boetticher criticism: Marty Rubin's interview with Boetticher in the 1970 book The Director's Event, (12) where Farber found the photo from which he painted Cody crawling through the rocks in the upper left-hand corner, all the lines of dialogue he quotes from the films, and the scribbled critical observations about ‘a straight-line hero’ (a remark by Boetticher) and the Indians that ‘look like cavemen’ (a question in the form of a remark by Rubin: ‘In that opening of Comanche Station, the Indians look and communicate just like cavemen’). I don't doubt that more discoveries like this await us. Farber's numerous American admirers revere him as master of the flamboyantly idiosyncratic perception expressed in the totally unexpected mot juste, and like them, when I started writing this essay, I assumed I would be interpreting the unmediated encounter between a sensibility and an oeuvre. But the fact that some of the critical observations in My Budd are from other critics suggests that this very tradition-minded artist is aware of his predecessors when he writes as well – from this standpoint, a key essay for understanding Farber's criticism would be his surprisingly astringent 1958 eulogy for his most formidable predecessor, ‘Nearer My Agee to Thee’. (13)

Close comparison of how those borrowed bits of writing function in My Budd and The Director's Event, where they are already being used to develop a second-generation auteurist argument akin to Kitses', just serves to reiterate what I've said about the formal strategies common to Farber the artist and Farber the critic. Consider how Rubin re-uses his observation about the Indians in his brief introduction to the interview: ‘An outstanding example of Boetticher's method is Comanche Station, the last of the Scott Westerns. The opening shots of the film show, in long-shot, a lone rider moving through the empty desert. The point of view changes frequently and gracefully, and we see a man apparently at ease in his environment. As we move closer, however, this relationship dissolves. The desert turns into a foreboding moonscape, inhabited by hostile almost prehistoric savages. Boetticher's films present a seemingly fluid relation between man and his environment which, like quicksand, gives way under scrutiny’. (14) Rubin squeezes the life out of his own remark to fit it into an argument about Man and Nature in Boetticher to which it is virtually irrelevant, while Farber goes in the opposite direction, stripping the remark of its discursive attachments to recover the telegraphic form of the critical satori: ‘Indians look like cavemen’. By treating critical perceptions as formal elements, My Budd reduces them to insignificance (the moment of satori) in order, paradoxically, to liberate their suggestive and sensuous power – which is what really interests Rubin about this particular perception, too, to judge from the way he combines (circa 1969) ‘moonscape’ with ‘prehistoric’ to surreptitiously link Boetticher with another modernity, that of Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I suspect, in fact, that the critical strategies made visible in Farber's ‘auteur’ series are surreptitiously at work in most good film criticism, and that displaying them in an exemplary fashion is one of the less obvious aims of the painting which concludes the series, My Budd, whose real subject, as its title suggests, may be criticism itself.