Thinking About (Personal) History Lessons
The Movie Paintings of Manny Farber

Jonathan Rosenbaum

1. Manny Farber, Negative Space (New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 361.

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‘The brutal fact is that they’re exactly the same thing’, Manny Farber replied in 1977 to an interviewer inquiring about the relationship between his dual activities as a painter and film critic. (1) The remark points to a two-part obsession that by now has persisted for more than four decades. A master at perceiving the delicate nuances of brutal facts, Farber has always had an uncanny knack for hitting on truths in a language of wisecracking braggadocio that eliminates any possibility of a dispassionate or precise scientific observation. With his feet firmly planted in the anonymous turf of an underground termite (to conflate two of his favourite terms), Farber paradoxically aims at a notion of bull’s-eye that can exist only in a marketplace context where objects and ideas compete for our attention. He has been living this contradiction, it would seem, for the better part of his life – of the realist bent on the construction of formal paradigms, the Horatio Alger who projects his starstruck dream into the abstract relationship between a Tootsie Roll and a cherished movie.

On the page, Farber’s approach is a form of two-fisted assault, often hitting the reader with a fresh idea before he or she has fully assimilated the last one. His quick tour through The Third Man (1949), as seen through the excerpts below, has the same kind of jangling intensity that the movie provides:

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2. Ibid, pp. 40-41.

Always a soft director, [Carol] Reed turns to chicken fat on night scenes, where his love of metallically shining cobblestones, lamps that can hit a face at eighty paces, and the mysterious glow at every corner turns the city into a stage set that even John Ford would have trouble out-glamourising [ ... ]

The movie’s verve comes from the abstract use of a jangling zither and from squirting Orson Welles into the plot piecemeal with a tricky, facetious eyedropper. The charm, documentary skill, and a playful cunning that fashioned this character make his Morse-code appearances almost as exciting visually as each new make-believe by Rembrandt in this self-portraits [ ... ]

Reed’s nervous, hesitant film is actually held together by the wires of its exhilarating zither, which sounds like a trio and hits one’s consciousness like a cloudburst of sewing needles. Raining aggressive notes around the characters, it chastises them for being so inactive and fragmentary and gives the film the unity and movement the story lacks. (2)

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3. Amy Goldin (1926-1978) was a New York-based art critic, artist and teacher; see her Selected Writings and Artwork (Lenox: Hard Press Editions, 2003).

On a canvas, Farber’s impact is quite different. The relationship between any private language and a public discourse is a tricky one, and Farber’s consistent efforts to speak to his contemporaries through the chosen media have always had to contend with the skewed perspective inevitable to any parallel readings of film history and art history, with their radically different time frames and patterns of development. If Farber has generally commanded more attention as a movie critic than as a painter, this may have less to do with his grasp of the vernacular in each realm than with the deposits of time and place which locate his verbal pizzazz and iconographic slang in widely dissimilar modes of address and reception, where they register with distinctly different impacts. Farber’s own bifocal perspective – a unique calling card – invariably becomes two-dimensional to any reader or spectator habituated to reading him through a single frame of reference. The brutal fact, one is tempted to counter, is that, abstract considerations aside, film criticism and painting simply aren’t the same thing. Yet Farber’s quixotic efforts to have it otherwise have yielded, if not a corpus of writing that clearly resembles painting, a series of singular canvases over the past nine years that enact many of the processes and operations of film criticism.

‘Enact’ – rather than re-enact – is the operative term here. While a superficial reading of Farber’s movie-related paintings might illuminate a few areas where they seem to illustrate his public work, the argument that I intend to pursue here is that they intermittently succeed at doing something much more difficult and valuable, which is to engender particular critical insights of their own. Yet they do this in a manner that is appreciably less direct than Farber’s crackling prose – a distinction that relates to Farber’s separate identity as a painter, which Amy Goldin (3) described well in a 1978 essay:

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4. Amy Goldin and Richard Armstrong, Manny Farber (La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, June 1978). This useful publication also includes a rather complete (if occasionally incoherent) bibliography.

... His literary style is so dense, flashy and quirky that when he describes a performance or a scene, our more tepid memories are overwhelmed. We see what he saw, and his acute, highly painterly focus on the screen has given a lot of people a new way of looking at movies.

His paintings reveal the same intelligence, the same almost neurasthenically hectic response to space, light, gesture and style. But where Farber the critic is oriented to the exact and indelible location of a given experience, the painter is devoted to foreshadowing a visual ideal. As a critic Farber has a canny shiftiness, a sense of the requirements of the historical moment that continually revises his sensibility. As a painter he is less imaginatively diffuse, more prudent, more obsessive. He conceals his tracks, repeats himself, the spiral turns inward rather than out. The satisfaction his paintings offer are totally different from those he provides as a critic. The writer grabs you, stuns you, turns you this way and that, overloads you with puns, apercus, associations, points of reference. The paintings ignore you. Self-contained, brooding, low-keyed or monochromatic, they are overridingly concerned with their own integrity, with professional problems of adjusting contour, structure, light and casual incident so that no single element announces itself. Similar in every part, only the wholes are different. (4)

Goldin, it should be noted, was writing at a time when Farber had just begun to move away from abstract painting and into a representational mode that has dominated all his subsequent work. Farber himself, in an autobiographical chronology appended to the catalogue of his 1978 retrospective at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, dates the beginning of this work in 1974, when he starts to use ‘a bird’s eye viewpoint, small objects, to explore compositional ideas when the normal ground is replaced by a stage-like platform. The new projects reunite the artist with concerns and materials that are allied to his experience in movie theatres, from childhood onwards’. Initially the objects of his scrutiny are candy bars, tobacco containers and diverse stationery items (pencils, clips, gummed labels, erasers); within a couple of years, this inventory has expanded to include a panoply of miniature toy objects – houses, vehicles, human and animal figures, railroad tracks – along with movie stills, fragments of magazines and newspapers, book illustrations, and scribbled notes derived from Farber’s film criticism and lectures. By this time, Farber has moved from his American Candy series and American Stationery series to the paintings in his Auteur series, which develop the choreographic arrangements of the earlier works in the direction of addressing the styles and themes of various movie directors.

As critical forays, none of these Auteur paintings address the viewer with anything like the confrontational manner of Farber’s written criticism. To appreciate what they accomplish, it first becomes necessary to establish the things they don’t attempt. As a journalist critic, Farber has generally avoided biographical, autobiographical and ad hominem approaches to his material. This places his written criticism in an entirely different framework from the sort of criticism essayed by Rogi André (1905-1970) in a series of photographic studies of painters , each of which addresses a complex of observations about the painter in question through the placement of his or her figure within a carefully arranged frame. The buttoned-down severity of Mondrian in front of a few of his canvases, like the relaxed and rounded girth of Vlaminck in his own studio, become artful demonstrations of the postulate that the style is the man – that the formal preoccupations of a career can be traced through aspects of the artist’s physiognomy and body language, belying the assumption that one’s face and body, like one’s work, are essentially earned.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), photo by Rogi André

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958, photo by Rogi André (1946)

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5. As I’ve attempted to demonstrate at some length in my own autobiographical Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), the relationship between autobiography and film criticism is both intricate and unavoidable, yet the rules of social etiquette governing this delicate connection – which requires a suppression of autobiography in most marketplace criticism practiced by writers less well known than Pauline Kael or Gore Vidal – keep it in relative obscurity. Considering Farber’s own precise sense of his position in relation to both film criticism and painting, it seems understandable that only the relative obscurity and hermeticism of his paintings would permit a comfortable adoption of the autobiographical mode; the relative exposure of his writing, combined with its rhetorical strategies, makes this tactic less tenable in print. Elsewhere, in a dialogue with J. Hoberman appended to the end of our Midnight Movies (New York: Harper Colophon, 1983), I have argued that this apparent disparity in Farber’s work can also be attributed to a current, ongoing crisis in film criticism itself.

Farber’s critical position in his paintings is almost the reverse of this. While he follows a collage approach which has strong ties with his organisational strategies and working processes as a critic – a method by which texts are made to overlap, overtake, contest and jostle one another rather than work in concert towards the construction of any linear argument or narrative – this is used in a manner that has a circuitous, often wayward relationship to the filmic subjects that he chooses to paint, proceeding by means of a somewhat stealthy subterfuge. Like a hunter tracking his quarry, Farber circles around his points of reference and perceptions about them, looking at them this way and that, rather than mount any sort of frontal attack.

His point of departure often appears to be looking at an assortment of seemingly random toy-like objects and asking (a) which of these objects remind him of a particular film or director, and (b) how they might be arranged, juxtaposed and/or altered so that they describe the style of that film or director. Yet complicating and occasionally obscuring this project is another process, more autobiographical and nostalgic, which relates these favoured objects of Farber’s past – in striking contradistinction to his verbal criticism which more characteristically factors these elements out. (5) Thus it wasn’t surprising to encounter, amidst the movie paintings on display in Farber’s show at the Oil & Steel Gallery in Manhattan in early 1983, a canvas named after Farber’s hometown, Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. (Arizona), which was closely related to his movie-based work.

In both his written criticism and his recent painting, Farber is explicitly covering ground and territory, defining a topography – even if the most recent manifestations of that impulse in painting have been moving away from a notion of landscape and towards a use of solid fields of primary colour more evocative of the abstract planes of Ellsworth Kelly (1923- ) and Joseph Albers (1988-1976), bringing Farber full circle back to concerns of his earlier, non-representational painting. One of the central motifs spanning his evolution from textured ground to pure surface is the use of toy train tracks, which range all the way from fragmented and disconnected arcs to straight-ahead trajectories sweeping across the entire heights and widths of the paintings. An iconic testimony to Farber’s Western heritage, the terrain of Arizona and the impulse to ‘tame’ a chaotic wilderness of wide open spaces with a clearly defined path, these tracks can suggest everything from the forward thrust of a Howard Hawks adventure epic like Red River (1948) to the vicious circles described by an alienated foreign couple far from home in Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (the focus of The Joyces Felt Humiliated, a circular 1982 painting). Just as typically, Farber will variously use broken arcs or short sprints of tracks to connect separate areas of concern or suggest the quasi-comic futility of abandoned projects – lines of thought which lead precisely nowhere.

Peckinpah's 'Convoy' (1978)

Taking Off from a Road Picture

Ridicule and appreciation are seldom far apart from one another in the terms of Farber’s hyperbolic criticism, and the suggestion of hombres who are mass-produced (like the American products they consume) becomes a wry comment of critical affection for the male couple who command the heroic foreground of Wenders’ road movie Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1976). Wenders’ disconnected protagonists are, of course, Germans rather than Mexicans.  But just as the impulse underlying these pop-drenched characters is clearly personal and autobiographical for Wenders, Farber adapts these figures into evocative emblems of his own past and dreams of a movie buff growing up in a border town. What comes out the other end for the viewer reading this as criticism is neither pure Wenders nor pure Farber, but a dialogue between them – the essence of a good movie review. And just as Farber cannot think of Wenders and Kings of the Road without summoning up (1) the contemporary German cinema, which also includes Fassbinder and Syberberg, and which summons up in turn some of the colour and repetitional strategies of Warhol, and (2) a critical nostalgia for his own past as an American (‘The Yanks have colonised our unconscious’, one of Wenders’ heroes remarks at one point), his painterly approach to this multi-layered contemplation is to trace these relationships through the terms of art history (suggested in part by the various books open to illustrations and postcards bearing art reproductions). Thus the four pairs of hombres are Warholian variations on two basic figures – one sporting a green hat, blue shirt, red tie, orange trousers and black suspenders, the other sporting red sombrero and trousers, green scarf and blue socks or leggings – which imposes a colourful fruit salad of campy exuberance on Wenders’ dry black and white images, almost as if Farber were treating the film like a colouring book. A closed book with the red title Hitler beneath a crouching figure points at once to the spectre of Nazism in the German past and Syberberg’s Hitler (1977) in the present, while a Fassbinder-like male figure in a bowling short sits on the back of a pickup truck which rests (through another joke with scale) on top of another closed book while a woman in a bathing suit approaches from behind.

If clusters of crowded or overlapping objects such as the latter often suggest rebuses, the temptation to read these combinations exclusively as games or puzzles to be solved should be resisted, for as such they constitute obstacles to understanding what the overall schemes of the paintings are. In this respect, I would differ with the critical approach assumed by Carrie Rickey towards Farber’s paintings. (6) Rickey contends that ‘there are probably only a dozen people or so in the world who could identify the individual rebuses depicted in Farber’s paintings (and the movies from which they’re quoted)’, but in her desire to have it both ways, she also works hard to convince us that they’re accessible in a vague and generalised way, whereby the paintings are ‘full of loaded images, visual puns, double-entendres and the kind of narrative complexity you’d expect with a Howard Hawks comedy’. The problem with this rather Farber-like form of hyperbolic imprecision is that it short-changes the actual critical activity performed by the paintings for the sake of a tolerant overview which reduces the critical observations to the status of marginal mutterings. In the case of Taking Off from a Road Picture, the broader thrust of the overall clutter is to convey some of the blurry confusions of extended road travel, which the film is centrally concerned with. Returning to the hombres who are at once kings of their domain and totally detached from it, their floating status is implicitly critiqued by the three more rounded, grounded and solitary male figures, two of them nudes, which are in the immediate vicinity – one of which actually seems to be standing on the face of one of the cut-outs.

In comparable fashion, while it is difficult not to go hunting through Thank God I’m Still an Atheist, Farber’s 1981 painting devoted to Luis Buñuel, for clues regarding the relationship of specific objects and figures to moments in particular Buñuel films, any exclusive concentration on this activity has to overlook the zigzag construction which unifies the whole circular canvas in a crazy-quilt fashion, darting to and fro around the circumference. This refers not only to the zigzag walk of the cracked hero of Buñuel’s 1953 El (Farber’s own reported inspiration), but also to the rambling, picaresque construction of his narratives in general, which nearly always proceed from idealism to soured enlightenment, with many different scenic disillusionments along the way. Local achievements of Buñuelian black humour within this overall pattern may range from minor in-jokes (on Tarot cards, the words ‘de jour’ from Belle de jour, ‘Rey’ from Fernando Rey, a cow from L’Age d’Or, a bell from Tristana) to playful rebuses (a card with a milk bottle beside another with a licking tongue and the word ‘way’ equals The Milky Way) to clear critical notations (the eye bisected and punctured by the cross, which links both Buñuel’s surrealism in genera; and Un chien andalou in particular with his Catholic background) to more esoteric and obscure references which probably have a more personal meaning for Farber (like the lynx and the watermelon slice). Taken all together, they describe a scorpion-like shuttle up and down the canvas which approximates, through formal metaphor, the shape and rhythm of Buñuel’s perverse humour and circumspect way of thinking.

Thank God I’m Still an Atheist (1981)

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6. Negative Space, pp. 157-159.

The problem with finding a language for this kind of activity in Farber’s paintings is that one has to conflate the somewhat contradictory concerns of a non-narrative critic of narrative film whose seemingly disconnected observations – each one characteristically deprived of the opportunity of fusing indissolubly with the next, thanks to the collage principle that makes Farber’s mind seem like the cluttered desk in Michael Snow’s film ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974) – tell anything but a single story. What tends to happen more often is that the configurations offered by separate shots in a film become blends of uncanny simultaneity on the levelling planes of the paintings’ flat surfaces. The adjustments of space, size and scale made by a spectator when a film cuts from, say, a long shot to a close-up, are collapsed by Farber’s eye, which democratically contains vestiges of both within the same spheres of interest.

Thus his Point Blank (1978) deals as a whole with both the monumental expanses of director John Boorman’s widescreen compositions and an assortment of random leftovers from the picnic of cool violence that Boorman serves up within this space. Turning to Farber’s verbal treatment of this 1967 film in Negative Space, written eleven years earlier, one finds his interest in much of the same material speckled through his prose. There’s a reference to Lee Marvin’s ‘Planter’s Peanut head’; notations on the plastic uses of violence (angular uses of bodies against surfaces; a ‘used Cadillac ... bounced between concrete pillars’); and comments on the uneasy equivalences between the animate and inanimate as well as the dizzying shifts of scale: ‘It’s a great movie for being transfixed on small mountains which slowly become recognisable as an orange shoulder or a hip with a silvery mini-skirt’. (6)

Point Blank (1978)

But when Farber comes to paint his sense of the movie a decade later, this encounter has to situate itself within an autobiographical context which changes everything, leading to a different order of discourse. Not only is Farber’s lengthy career as a carpenter assimilated centrally into the work (in the juxtaposed wallpaper or painted wooden door or floor patterns, which mark out five separate zones of activity), but the iconography of his stationery and candy paintings figure as well. Thus cars are made to ricochet between two towering glue containers (the one on the right labelled ‘blank’, in reference to the film’s empty surfaces), a Reese Peanut Butter Cup candy bar is made to stand for a character in the film named Reese, Dentyne Gum becomes ‘Dent’ (in tribute to the punishment meted out in the film to cars and other objects, like a bed and telephone), a Butterfingers becomes ‘Angie’ (Dickinson), and a small box of candy is said to contain ‘Cold Males’. Keeping most of the violent actions (and evidences of such, such as the crumpled ‘Angie’ at lower right) near the edges of the frame, Farber allows the broad stretches of empty space in Boorman’s shots to register, along with the film’s Alain Resnais-inspired tricks with suspended time and Marienbad-ish pockets of anguished silence. A repeated image in the film of Marvin stalking through an antiseptic modern hallway in pursuit of vengeance is not duplicated precisely anywhere on the canvas, yet its overall effect is partially reproduced in the painting’s own repetitions and extensions. (Repetitions include Marvin and ‘Blank’, a good example of extension in the male figure on a tiny patch of green firing at an advancing blue car some distance away on the Indian-red wallpaper.)

Perhaps the most spectacular of all the autobiographical movie paintings, at least in terms of sound and fury, is Nix (1983), a rather vast and complex meditation on the 1940s comedies of Preston Sturges that proceeds, as the films do, through dizzying oscillations between Napoleonic dreams of fame and power and acerbic, humbling denials. Over four vertical strips of blue, black, red and yellow, diverse versions of the same manic-depressive tragicomedy are enacted, on a plane where once again the details of Farber’s life and the visual/verbal material of a group of movies are allowed to intermingle expressively. Not far from Farber’s personal cheque for $173.00 to photographer Becky Cohen (‘for art photos’) on the lower left of the blue strip is a transcription on yellow paper of the grandiloquent speech of a company head paying a princely sum to a contest-winning office boy (Dick Powell) in Christmas in July (1940), and the latter’s response; and to emphasise Sturges’ endlessly proliferating word-salad effect, Farber leaves out most of the punctuation, letting the words reel off like ticker tape. ‘But since we do everything around here on a high cerebral plane I merely take pleasure in giving you this small cheque Mr MacDonald and that’s all there is to it. [Powell’s reply: I don’t know how I can find the words] Well never mind about it. Just goodbye and good luck and that’s all there is to it. Now get me Billdocker’.

The painting teems with messages. Some are delivered by Farber to himself and perhaps also to Sturges. (‘Too static’, he complains over an image of Henry Fonda tripping clumsily over an object in The Lady Eve [1941]; ‘Start with free hand figure drawing’, he tells himself elsewhere – a message overlaid by a stick of chewing gum called ‘Jews’ which seems to comment on Sturges’ use of ethnic types.) Some are delivered by one Sturges character to another, and perhaps to Farber as well: ‘Jumping Jerusalem, get me my lawyer’; ‘You haven’t suffered enough?’ ‘He hasn’t suffered enough’. ‘No’.

Next to the extroverted excess of Nix, the more solipsistic reveries of Shadow World (1983), devoted to the scary 1940s thrillers directed by Jacques Tourneur, weaves a very different sort of spell. At the dead centre of this spare circular canvas, in a cordoned-off area isolated by circular train tracks, a boy is shown masturbating against red and orange sections divided by a green line which also becomes the chair he’s seated on – an indication that all the dark, nocturnal imaginings of Tourneur can be traced back to lonely sexual fantasies. The painting’s title, apparently derived from the title of a Robin Wood essay (‘The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur’), is misleading if one expects to find literal shadows cast by the puny figures around the circumference of this solitary dreamer; as Farber evidently sees it, this troubling array of victims and phantoms comprises metaphorically the shadows of repressed longings and fearful fantasies, many of them involving Blacks, Mexicans, and other working-class ethnic minorities. A personal Farber fetish – the working-class ethnic cartoon figures of Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley, a comic strip dating from his childhood – is allowed to blend with anxiety-ridden images of (and sparse, poetic snatches of dialogue from) Cat People (1942), The Leopard Man (1943) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and the painting’s overall surface, a patchwork pattern rather than a ground, makes this material seem even more insubstantial and transitory – the wispy, semi-conscious emanations of a mind more than solitary figures in a landscape.

The thick layered colours throughout Thinking About 'History Lessons' (1979) are a good deal more substantial and rounded, as befits the wholly materialist works of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s films and the palimpsest constructions of their texts and landscapes. More decorous and less cluttered than many of Farber’s movie paintings, despite the profusion of material, the canvas plants a still from Nicht versöhnt (Not Reconciled, 1965) and a photograph of the filmmakers themselves on opposite sides of the canvas, which is scattered with many classic nude figures, dead birds, rows of trees, pencil stabs, images of people working and various animals, all seemingly rendered with the same rounded classical proportions. The curving railroad tracks which sweep twice across the canvas in a conscious roundabout, bisected by a vertical procession of vehicles in the lower half, clearly allude to the circular car rides through Rome in History Lessons (1972), but these are the only clear narrative lines in the painting, which is otherwise divided into discrete blocks of space whose cumulative impact implies many adjacent and overlapping histories. (The Confederate soldier pointing a rifle at a large dead bird on a brass bed, in the painting’s lower half, conflates three images which have no apparent counterpart in Straub-Huillet’s films, but may constitute one of Farber’s own history lessons; a Japanese porn image of a couple having sex near the centre seems a calculated rebuke to Straub-Huillet’s Puritanism.)

Thinking About 'History Lessons' (1979)

In striking contrast to Farber’s non-narrative takes on the relatively frozen narratives of Straub and Huillet, some of the landscape paintings of Patricia Patterson – whose strategies closely parallel those of Straub and Huillet – start with frozen narrative situations and then invite the spectator to become a moving camera and create unfrozen, linear narratives out of them. Patterson, who is married to Farber, paints in a distinctively different manner and mode from him, and while she has collaborated with Farber on most or all of his published film criticism since the early ‘70s, it would simply be inaccurate to call her paintings film criticism in the sense that Farber’s are. At the same time, however, the impact of films in general on her work – and of Straub and Huillet’s films in particular – should not be overlooked, particularly because they serve well to throw Farber’s own strategies in relief. Not only the titles but also the procedures of some of Patterson’s major works refer to the linear possibilities of camera movement. 360° Pan Around Our Kitchen (1977), Tracking Past Kate’s House (1977) and Kilmurvey Village (1979) all ask to be read, phenomenologically, as narratives in motion even while they depict static, integral wholes. Starting from the reverse of Farber’s approach, which collapses the successive figures of film into simultaneous, adjacent realities to contend with, Patterson begins with a fixed frame that turns into a succession of adjacent realities as soon as one begins to scan it.

Kilmurvey Village (1979)

In Kilmurvey Village, each figure and structure is self-contained, pointing off in a different direction, yet the panning effect of the composition plays against this through the creation of a horizontal narrative of repetitions: chimneys, roofs, head and feet rhyme with one another across the continuity of the landscape. Recapitulating the journeys of the camera through and around the streets of Munich and Rome and the countryside of Italy, France and Egypt in Straub-Huillet’s 1968 The Bridegroom, The Comedienne and the Pimp (Munich), History Lessons (Rome), 1979’s From the Cloud to the Resistance (Italy) and 1982’s Too Early, Too Late (France and Egypt), with their own complex systems of rhymes within and between shots (such as the church steeples and minarets caught in the pans of Too Early, Too Late), Patterson also reproduces the strategy of these films whereby the camera itself becomes the implicit focal point around which the space is organised. In the films, of course, the camera remains unseen, but its presence in the latter three films is made central through the use of driver, car windows and windshield (in History Lessons’ drive through Rome), a peasant leading an ox-draw cart (in From the Cloud to the Resistance) and the direct gaze of Egyptian workers and peasants at the camera (in Too Early, Too Late). Patterson’s related ploy is to set the spectator’s gaze going in a left-to-right motion through the placement of herself, with a camera, as the first human figure at left, taking a still photograph of the other figures grouped towards the centre. In Tracking Past Kate’s House, the densely layered perspective – another Straub-Huillet hallmark – becomes a kind of musical staff on which the slanting figures of men on ladders in the centre foreground repeat and anticipate the tent-like structures in the middle ground on both sides of them.

Patricia Patterson - Tracking Past Kate’s House (1977)

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7. After this article was written, I published a more personal essay on Farber and his criticism, ‘They Drive By Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber’, which appears in my collection Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and online at
<http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/
?p=14534 >.

Working with the multiple levels of memories an associations, Farber’s movie paintings can’t partake of the momentum guaranteed by a single diegesis, so the overall effect has to be more scattered and devious – a series of skirmishes (and Skirmishes, indeed, is the title of one of his movie paintings – a rare thematic study that eschews the study of individual films or auteurs) rather than a concerted drive to depict a single line or argument. Ironically, this approach can probably be traced back to Farber’s conservatism rather than ascribed simply to the radical implications of a multi-dimensional criticism. This conservatism – accorded the status of a central fact about Farber’s work in the two best accounts of his work that I know, the Amy Goldin essay cited above and Donald Phelps’ ‘Critic Going Everywhere’, is basically a matter of preserving whatever beloved objects of the past have survived in the memory, regardless of the apparent disarray that this may create when placing these objects and images together on a table. Arranging them together meaningfully is the challenge of the work, and the separate traditions of painting and film, self and society, guarantee a certain clutter of when they’re all placed together within the same contexts, cheek by jowl. A certain clutter, but also a certain possibility – that the diverse ragtag of a busy life can be made to create an edifying form of music together. (7)

Honeymoon Killers (1979)