The Qualities I Like

		The Qualities I Like Impressions of Manny Farber Adrian Martin

Why even invent two such categories: white elephant and termite, one tied to the realm of celebrity and affluence and the other burrowing into the nether world of privacy? The primary reason for the two categories is that all the directors I like – Fuller’s art brut styling; Chuck Jones’s Roadrunners; the inclement charm Godard gets with drizzly weather, the Paris outskirts, and three nuts scurrying around the same overcast Band of Outsiders terrain – are in the termite range, and no one speaks about them for the qualities I like.

- Manny Farber, 1971

To write criticism that places itself beyond verification or challenge is to define criticism as an art, not a science, and to define that art in terms of art rather than scientifically.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1993

1. Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (New York: Da Capo, 1998); all further page references within the text.

The Way In

The preface by Robert Walsh to the augmented, 1998 edition of Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (1) assures us that: ‘Film criticism, of course, is Manny Farber’. On the back cover, Paul Schrader declares: ‘In the beginning was Manny Farber’. Inside the front cover, two pages labelled ‘Praise for Manny Farber’ include Susan Sontag’s line that he is the ‘liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country [i.e., America] ever produced’, among scattered descriptions of him as a sensei, a Titan, essential, and ‘one of the few movie critics who have mattered in this country’ (Richard Schickel).

2. Robert Polito, Greil Marcus, Jonathan Crary, Stephanie Zacharek and Kent Jones, ‘Painter of Pictures’, Artforum, April 2002, pp. 122-7.

This is all well and good, especially in the wake of the announcement of Farber’s death on 17 August 2008. But I have to wonder whether such introductory comments to the work and achievement of Farber will necessarily win immediate assent, or even recognition, among most movie fans. The fact is that Farber still occupies a marginal, troublesome place within the canons of film writing – beyond, that is, the feverish intensity of his undoubted cult, swelled in recent years by events including Chris Petit’s art video Negative Space (2000) and an appreciative roundtable in Artforum. (2) But cult followings, as Herman Weinberg once remarked, can confer a sad, recessive, twilight aura upon the worshipped object. For the majority of ‘general’ readers and film fans, I suspect that there is still only one great, popularly revered critic of cinema: Pauline Kael (with David Thomson of Biographical Dictionary of Film fame on the ascendant). Farber’s particular enshrinement is both grand and accursed: he is (as so many refer to him) the ‘critic’s critic’, the writer who inspires other writers and reaches his wider audience only indirectly.

3. Robin Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976), p. 37.

4. Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), p. 31.

5. Raymond Durgnat, ‘Durgnat vs. Paul’, Film Comment (March-April 1978), p. 65.

6. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Rosenbaum, Jonathan (1995), Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 71.

Farber has occasionally been criticised or even outrightly dismissed on account of his ‘impressionism’. Robin Wood’s verdict, for instance, is severe: Farber’s ‘extraordinary associational processes’ come ‘very close at times to stream-of-consciousness’, and propel discussions ‘so vague as to be unchallengeable’. (3) But there is a small, subterranean history of passionate support for such impressionism – even, or especially, when it gets things wrong. A retrospective footnote in Noël Burch’s Theory of Film Practice explains that he did not correct certain descriptive mistakes because ‘the viewer’s faulty recollection of a film (...) is a subject that deserves thorough study in itself’ – and moreover, such faulty recollection can have a ‘very positive effect’ on ‘the creative faculty’. (4) Raymond Durgnat defended his occasional ‘dysfunctional foreshortenings’ of description by stressing an approach to ‘the film as an organic whole in an ongoing context’, including much that will be necessarily only suggested or submerged, virtual or phantasmic. (5) And Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his challenge to regard and use certain critical practices (such as Farber’s) ‘in terms of art’, imagines what it would be like to read William Faulkner on film: he ‘might have theoretically gotten the detail wrong as well. But what he would have had to say about the image he wound up with might well have mattered more than whether it was accurate or not’. (6)

There is a shade of all these things at stake in Farber’s contribution. Impressionism works at the deepest level of his texts. Or, to put it differently – since his writing so thoroughly undermines aesthetic constructs of surface and depth – this impressionism works the entire structure, texture and patterning of his poetic prose. Thus his penchant for scattershot evocations of diverse detail drawn from right across a film, mixed in with various sorts of jokes, parodies, associative flights of fancy and hard pellets of new thought suddenly launched off the page experimentally, mid-sentence. Most of Farber’s writing predates the technologically-aided era of ‘close textual analysis’ (that ‘getting it down to the frames’ which he castigates), and it held itself warily aloof from the tidier form-and-content schools of auteur and genre criticism that were developing in film journals during the busiest period of his work. Farber’s writing is – or studiously mimics the form of – a swirl of sensations, memories, impressions and thoughts.

7. Bill Krohn, ‘My Budd by Manny Farber’.

Farber once suggested that ‘modern moviegoers are trying to possess the film or at least give it a form or a momentousness which it doesn’t have’ (p. 236). This passage appeals to me as providing one possible key to Farber’s art of criticism. For if Farber wishes neither to possess a film nor give it undue momentousness, what does he seek instead?

Points and Tracks (Detailing and Steering)

All the most perceptive commentaries on Farber’s writing grapple with a description of his unique style, like this one from Bill Krohn: ‘all-inclusive while refusing to be systematic’. (7) In Farber, an extreme economy of words and sentences is matched to an equally extreme sense of waywardness in the overall shape of the argument. The strategies of extension and continuation – the cramming in of as much specific detail as possible from the film at hand between sentences, between the parts of sentences – lead to the entire transformation of that nominally documentary notation into a specific way of seeing the work in question. Farber calls his writing topographical (‘It’s all that I think criticism is about’, p. 357): a traversing of ground, a making sense of territory, involving an interplay between – as Farber said of Raoul Walsh’s films – ‘detailing and steering’ (p. 123).

Trying to figure out the structure, the internal logic, of a typical Farber essay is a treat: great leaps forward and snaky movements back; niggardly dwelling at a pit-stop of detail between swift, synoptic sweeps; repetition-compulsion and sudden endings that launch the reader over an abyss. His 1969 piece on Howard Hawks (pp. 25-31) wades right in with a vivid paragraph apiece on Scarface (1932), His Girl Friday (1940), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Red River (1948). Then a paragraph on character names takes us to something resembling a thesis, or at least an assertion promising further elaboration: ‘Howard Hawks is a bravado specialist who always makes pictures about a Group. Fast dialogue, quirky costumes, the way a telephone is answered, everything is held together by his weird Mother Hen instinct’.

So Farber is on the track of not so much what Hawks films are about (the fixation of most Hawks criticism) but how they work as sensibility or texture. But the substance of this thesis will never be entirely, clearly, cleanly spelt out. Instead, Farber keeps working back over his list of titles, digging into their particular qualities. Meanwhile, other assertions or speculations float to the surface: ‘It is interesting how many plots are interwoven into a scene’; ‘not many moviemakers have gone so deeply into personality-revealing motion’. Finally, Farber seems to come to rest on an idea that has steadily percolated throughout the piece: Hawks’ ‘poetic sense of action’, and what this might disclose about a certain slice of Hollywood filmmaking.

This essay jerks to a halt from time to time for some detailed exposition. Parenthetical asides grow to gargantuan proportions, helped along by the author’s machine-gun-stutter use of multiple colons: ‘(some airline: the planes take off right next to the kitchen, and some kitchen: a plane crashes, the wreck is cleared and the pilot buried in the time it takes them to cook a steak; and the chief control is a crazy mascot who lives with a pet donkey and serves as a lookout atop a buzzard-and-blizzard-infested mountain as sharp as a shark’s tooth)’. On each occasion that Farber hits the film that occasioned this particular riff – Only Angels Have Wings – he has another shot at encapsulating it, each time cheekily contracting the title a bit further: ‘Only Angels Have Wings, a rather charming, maudlin Camp item’; ‘Only Angels, a White Cargo melodrama that is often intricately silly’; ‘the devil-may-care silliness of his Angels picture’. Finally the title disappears altogether as Farber irritatedly alludes to ‘the dopy inner-tubes who so seriously act characters getting the mail through for seven straight days in Hawks’s corny semicatastrophe’.

8. Meaghan Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), p. 121.

Farber has a thing for putting a movie in a nutshell – only each time the sum-up is quite different, emphasising different facets or contexts (mood, genre, historical moment, emotional pitch). And this constant reprisal of the nutshell mode of address also brings with it a margin of self-contradiction, a sense of varied evaluations dependent on the precise angle of vision: hence, Only Angels Have Wings can be both ‘rather charming’ and also ‘pretty silly’, can have bold and beautiful elements alongside dopy, unswallowable ones. This methodological regard for what Farber called the ‘transitory, multisuggestive complication of a movie image’ (p. 9) may pose a special problem for a contemporary culture that wants sound bytes of unambiguous and unvaried opinion from its consumer-guide critics – a culture that overrides what Meaghan Morris inventoried as ‘nuance, qualification, or the civilised right to contradict oneself’ within a film review. (8) This is a right which Farber turned into the opportunity for happy hour, every hour.

One likely reason that Farber has never been swallowed up by the sausage machine of academic cinema study is because it’s hard to ‘theorise’ what he does beyond the two, stark ideas that he puts up front in his sole book. The first idea is space. This is a loose, elastic concept for Farber, soaking up notions of pictorial space from art history, mise en scène in the time-honoured theatrical sense, and editing. Even trying to inventory the parts of the concept like this is pretty useless: Farber is a writer who works with the gestalt of a film, with a whole, material impression of its look, sound and mood. Spatial strategies become a kind of shorthand or microcosm for him; an entire film can be grasped for what it truly is in the way actors are made to move, the way a street or a room is angled and dressed, the manner is which an action is presented to the viewer. Space is a physical entity, but it is also (as he makes clear) psychological, or as we would say today, imaginary; and negative space is ‘the command of experience which an artist can set resonating within a film’ (p. 9).

9. Olivier Assayas et al, ‘Manny Farber: Cinema’s Painter-Critic’, Framework, no. 40 (April 1999), p. 45.

For instance, Farber said of Gregg Toland’s deep focus innovations in Citizen Kane (1941): ‘The spectator was faced with an image that exaggerated the importance of the figures it showed to a point where the deep space between them seemed to have been negated. The chief visual effect was the microscopically viewed countenance, one into which you could read almost anything’ (pp. 80-1). He complained of Elia Kazan’s work in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), how he ‘hammers his point home with continual sinister lights, dancing shadows, gaseous oozings’ (p. 76). By contrast, modernist directors such as Jean-Luc Godard or Chantal Akerman later become valuable to him because of the open, supple, multiple, endlessly varied spaces created within the formal parameters of their experimental-narrative films. The obsession with space remained constant for Farber. His final published piece to date, co-written with Patricia Patterson, begins by distinguishing two dominant types of structure in ‘70s cinema: dispersal (Jacques Rivette, Robert Altman, Michael Snow) and shallow-boxed space (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet). In a 1982 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, he states that ‘a story must (...) develop by moving into a more complex space’, rather than by ‘perpetually reiterating the same space’. (9)

If the interest in space corresponds to the modernist and abstract side of Farber’s critical art, then perhaps the more famous of his two driving ideas – termite art versus white elephant art – corresponds to the tenaciously realist side. It is tempting to gloss this distinction in broad terms: termite films are basically intimate, intractable, personal works as opposed to the bloated, impersonal (today we might say corporate) industry blockbusters or the safe, middle-of-the-road acclaim-winners. Or: termite art is risky and free where white elephant art is over-coded and deadeningly formulaic. One could explore the distinction (as a number of critics have done) on a narrative and non-narrative axis: while white elephant films tend to be relentlessly obsessed with centralised ‘narrative drive’ (these days more than ever), termite films are looser, more given to digression and the minimalistic study of a given situation, more interested in expandable ‘descriptive worlds’ than exhaustible plots. But for Farber, I suspect, the real key is the realism.

Farber is a more thorough-going realist, in a deep sense, than either André Bazin or Siegfried Kracauer, who developed theories of film from the concept. But Farber did not locate realism in documentary forms or hybrids like neo-realism; he sought it in the selection and presentation of fictional events, situations, details, and especially in the performance of gesture. So, in this grand division, white elephant films are those glossy, sleek works where gestures are always contrived, unreal, unbelievable; whereas termite films contain a naturalness, directness, or truth. This difference is condensed, strikingly, in how Farber uses the motif of walking in his essay ‘Hard-Sell Cinema’: whereas in Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939) ‘one pounds along with a broken gun on walks and fights that are (...) not walks so much as anatomical probings of densely detailed backgrounds’ (p. 123), in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) the ‘story is unfolded by savage emotionalizing and trouble-injecting dialogue while two people are in between the events of life (i.e., walking from the cloakroom of the 21 Club to the table of the big-shot columnist)’ (p. 116). Walking is one of those indices of the humble, banal everyday – like working or drinking a cup of coffee or picking up a telephone – which matter a lot to Farber. This is termite art precisely because its makers have burrowed inside their material sufficiently deeply, gone past and through the obvious, formulaic hooks of plot, genre and market pitch.

Perhaps all this talk of space, termites and elephants is another way of saying that, to a very large extent for Farber, meaning resides in style – because style is sensibility, both a decision about what a filmmaker wants to show and what attitudes he or she loads upon it in the act of showing. This is why the traditional form-content equation of surface and depth holds no sway in this particular critical practice. For Farber, the surface is all, or certainly betrays all. And although Farber is very alive to the quirks and layers that individual filmmakers bring to their craft, for the most part his writing goes against the grain of auteurism as a totalising principle: a stylistic sensibility is, finally, not personal but social; it sums up the complex, felt viewpoint of a class or a political attitude or a specific time and place in history. In the 1970s and ‘80s, this idea became paramount for Farber: one will never understand or re-animate what situations, gestures and objects mean in a movie if one cannot understand the gestalt of its ‘social text’, the web of desires, envies, frustrations and power-plays embedded in its liveliest, microcosmic moments.

Could a holistic manifesto for the future study of film aesthetics be cooked up from the various overlooked matters forcibly and repeatedly raised by Farber? The prospect sounds tantalising, but – however useful as a reminder or a corrective these pointers might be – there is something in Farber’s work which resists such an attempt at systematisation. A clue to why this should be so comes in the final paragraph of the introduction to Negative Space (quoted at the head of this essay), where Farber forthrightly explains why it was necessary to invent the white elephant-termite art distinction: ‘all the directors I like (...) are in the termite range, and no one speaks about them for the qualities I like’ (p. 11).

10. William D. Routt, ‘L’Évidence’, Continuum, Vol 5 No 2 (1992), p. 51.

11. Raymond Bellour, ‘Thinking, Recounting: The Cinema of Gilles Deleuze’, Discourse, Vol 20 No 3 (Fall 1998), p. 70.

This casual declaration is both disarming and profound. It bears a resemblance to the fanatical film writings of the Surrealists. Farber expressed a kinship with surrealist spectatorship occasionally, particularly when entranced by the ‘weirdness’ of films he otherwise disliked. But more important is the shared attitude: the idea that a critic’s vocation is not really to strive to be holistic, comprehensive or even objective, but rather to invent concepts to account for those special things that one ‘likes’ – and that are being ignored or overlooked by everyone else in the vicinity. This composite Farberian-surrealist stance also recalls William Routt’s heretical proposition that ‘virtually all critical evaluations stem from (...) intuitive reactions – reactions legitimised with rational argument only after the fact’. (10)

Trouble With Impressionists

Isn’t there a degraded form of the Farberian legacy all around us in the media and film culture these days? I would like to believe that Farber is inimitable for so many reasons intrinsic to his work – chiefly, as Raymond Bellour said in a beautiful homage to Gilles Deleuze, because ‘one is attracted and held, even on the conceptual plane, by the demanding complicity of a singularity much more than by the distant truth of an affirmation’ (11) – but I fear that the opposite may be the case.

In magazines devoted to an amalgam of movies, pop culture and lifestyle, a kind of pugilistic, hip fluency prevails among several generations of hard-nosed film fans. Their capsule reviews – or sound bytes if they’re working for the audio-visual media – have become the norm of cinema comment that pretends to be all at once contemporary, populist and knowing. Suddenly, those special, idiosyncratic things that Manny Farber liked are being recycled as sure-fire, razor-sharp, quick-as-a-wink evaluative tools. The tendency of reviewers to assume they can instantly separate what ‘works’ in a movie from what doesn’t – explicitly opposed by Farber – now comes supplemented by a value system that sounds suspiciously like the termite-elephant distinction.

We see evidence everywhere today of cinephiles attempting to propagate Farber’s taste for incidental moments, highly local and specific true-to-life bits of the real at the termite heart of hopelessly junky, pulpy plots. Logically, it is elephantine, ‘upper-case vision’ that must be abhorred or at least approached with dire suspicion by these acolytes: all the strained, preachy, pompous elements in a movie, the overarching themes, vaulting artistic ambitions and mythologising social posturings. But the rigid application of this distinction usually ends up exposing the utterly arbitrary nature of the judgements offered. In such a quagmire, film criticism has come to resemble, more than anything, rock journalism in its NME or Rolling Stone idioms, with its wildly fickle but assertively pronounced discoveries of pure magic and savage dross in every second CD track – and it is no accident, I feel, that some of Farber’s most prolific devotees are cross-over music-film commentators (from the best, like Greil Marcus and Ian Penman, downwards).

One reason why Farber’s work has become so influential upon a certain strain of film writing today is simply because it offers a powerful test of authenticity. Now, authenticity – like taste, sensibility and connoisseurship – is something that no one ever bothers to theorise. But what could possibly be more central to a career in cinema at any level – even to the inner autobiography of every film fan – than a test of authenticity: an emotional sense, an instantly deeply felt conviction that some films are true (in whatever sense, dramatic, comic, aesthetic, socio-political) and that others are just dead phony?

But the big question here is: what authenticity tests are any of us willing to submit to, which could we possibly settle on between us? I would have to say that, in this context, Farber’s emphasis on termite realism marks a limit to the usefulness of his work. His authenticity test is severe, and maybe too much so. He displays a low tolerance for any sort of artifice or contrivance, exaggeration or ‘mythifying’ in the movies. His working assumption or disposition that most Hollywood films are at the outset crass, dull, stupid, contrived, mere trashy pulp – at least before the termites go to work – becomes a mantra. And this is, finally, a kind of intransigence, even a madness – as irrational as anything in the annals of criticism and theory. Simply too many movies, liked by too many people for too many good reasons, get left out of this equation. Why should we box ourselves into Farber’s taste-system? And why adopt Farber’s method or attitude slavishly, as a model rather than as a singular art?

12. After his retirement from writing and teaching, Farber acknowledged his enthusiasms for Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1991) and the work of Abbas Kiarostami. See Kent Jones’ profile of Farber in Film Comment (March-April 2000).

Farber’s influence has worked best for critics who have been able to follow those filmmaker-termites who work in netherworlds of secret emotion and knotty, difficult, mobile forms – and develop those ‘new spaces’ of style and sensibility which Farber longs to see evolve. This positive side of the Farber legacy keeps alive the often mysterious and surprising connecting lines between the twin rhizomes of popular and experimental cinema – Brian De Palma beside Martin Arnold, Frank Borzage beside Alexander Sokurov, Stan Brakhage beside Martin Scorsese – while the negative side of the legacy closes down, sulkily and defensively, on consumerist, pop cinema as a be-all and end-all, a total horizon of vision and expectation. That is indeed a betrayal of Farber’s contribution, if we reduce the span of his writing to a celebration of tough guys with guns in old B noir films, of Sam Fuller and Don Siegel, meanwhile ignoring the way he tenaciously kept track with what was innovating, challenging or just plain puzzling in the cinema of his present day, from Andy Warhol to Hans-Jurgen Syberberg. (12) Sadly, many ill-informed obituaries have regurgitated just this misapprehension.

Speaking of music and Warhol, what was it that ex-Velvets Lou Reed and John Cale said about impressionism in their 1990 tribute album Songs for Drella?: ‘The trouble with an impressionist, he looks at a log/And he doesn’t know who he is, standing, staring at this log’. Farber, by defiantly ordering his work around the credo of speaking about the qualities he liked in films, found his own way of knowing who he was as he stood and stared at the screen. For the rest of us who today write or speak in his shadow, the job turns out to be quite a bit trickier.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Framework, no. 40 (April 1999).

		© Adrian Martin and Rouge August 2008. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.