Preface to Negative Space1

DOCUMENTS · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. II · No. 4. · 2014 · 48-51 Preface to Negative Space1 Robert Walsh Forty years ago, prompted by the release career then approaching three decades, it was of Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957), Jean-Luc necessary to unearth back issues of The Nation, Godard famously declared: ‘There was theater The New Republic, The New Leader, Commentary, (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), Artforum, and more marginal periodicals to study dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth Farber’s reviews and extended essays. Negative there is cinema.’ You can still hear the dramatic Space, first published in 1971 and significantly pause ... ‘And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.’ expanded here, offered most readers their first chance to ascertain the full scope and evolution Film criticism, of course, is Manny Farber. of his writing. From the beginning of his professional life, as For many years, and much to his irritation, a fledgling art and film critic atThe New Republic Farber has been typecast as the champion of in 1942, Manny Farber’s prose was unflaggingly B movies and ‘the male action film.’ He was humorous, swift, relentlessly declarative, and certainly among the first to call attention to the everywhere intricately constructed. He possessed achievements of directors as different as Howard an unerring eye and ear for identifying and Hawks, Raoul Walsh (no relation), William exposing clichés, anything remotely corny, and the Wellman, Samuel Fuller, and Anthony Mann dead on arrival. What his mainstream colleagues at a time when they were virtually ignored, and held fast to-plot maneuvers, psychology with a in the late 1950s and early 1960s his notoriety capital P, character ‘development’ -he virtually was enhanced-or, as it turned out, calcified— ignored, as though he considered these elements with influential summing-up pieces such as channel markers, not the anchors they had been Underground Films, Hard-Sell Cinema, and White taken for. Yet the briefest look at his work reveals Elephant Art vs. Termite Art. But, as Negative Space an astute appreciator of actors, one who paid shows, Farber covered a much more sprawling subtle attention to body language, physiognomy, domain than he is usually given credit for, while and other presentations of self. displaying ever greater critical ambitions. Farber had a coterie reputation, particularly In contrast to his temperament, which in the postwar world of New York intellectuals, inches along by layered reiteration, Farber’s pieces as a keen observer, a brilliant and original hooked and seduced readers from the opening stylist, and an exacting but generous critic (as phrase and drew them along, sometimes flagging well as a pioneering painter). But until this a quick detour before sweeping them off again selection of fugitive articles was culled from a in other unexpected directions, though usually 1. This preface was originally published in: FARBER, Expanded Edition. New York. Da Capo Press. Deep thanks to Manny (1998). Negative Space. Manny Farber on the Movies. Robert Walsh for permission to reproduce this article. 48 ROBERT WALSH arriving at an energizing envoi. He could easily of scarred, sophisticated cynicism they are really skate from a quick sociological overview to talking about what Ida Lupino, Ward Bond, or spatial analysis to a punning aside on a room’s even Stepin Fetchit provided in unmistakable familiar bric-a-brac within the winding course scene-stealing moments’. of a single sentence. He probably be-came best known for his articulation and defense of ‘termite It was this feeling for impurities that art’—a phrase he applied to any unpretentious made Farber an uncanny dowser when it came movie that bur-rowed with no object in mind to spotting an individual’s stamp on a film, but ‘eating its own boundaries’—as opposed to wherever it could be discerned, and something of self-conscious ‘white elephant art,’ artificially a seer about the relations between a film and its laden with symbolism and ‘significance.’ He historical moment. would often praise ‘the anonymous artist, who is seemingly afraid of the polishing, hypocrisy, Farber has also been considered a bragging, fake educating that goes on in serious ‘curmudgeon,’ but his alleged ‘crankiness’ is art,’ singling out ‘the least serious undergrounder, something more: an immediate responsiveness, a which attains most of its crisp, angular character desire for precision, and an invitation to dialogue. from the modesty of a director working skillfully Though he can seem ‘opinionated,’ ‘intensely far within the earthworks of the story.’ personal,’ ‘eccentric’—all the things he’s blurbed to be—strictly speaking, the first person is virtually In fact, Farber was so persuasive an advocate absent from his prose. Anything but private, his on behalf of films whose directors’ names he critical voice is suffused with personality and employed as shorthand for complex webs of ‘attitude,’ but not exactly that of the man himself. creative relationships that he has sometimes As his sophisticated painter’s eye began to take been mistaken for an auteurist fundamentalist greater precedence over his gift for ridicule both who worshipped an unanointed few. Negative caustic and sly, his work became more and more Space also leaves no doubt that this assessment dense without, however, sacrificing its suppleness of his sensibility and aesthetic was misleadingly or speed—just one result of his inveterate habit narrow. For Farber was always, if increasingly, of repeated viewings and reconsiderations of a aware of films as collaborative and mongrelized given film, his attempt to go beyond his private in all their parts. In his essay The Subverters, he reactions to accommodate plural perspectives, wrote: ‘One day somebody is going to make a and the fact that he is admittedly ‘unable to write film that is the equivalent of a Pollock painting, anything at all without extraordinary amounts of a movie that can be truly pigeonholed for effect, rewriting.’ These factors helped forge a criticism certified a one-person operation. Until this that took its author’s initial responses to a film miracle occurs, the massive attempt in 1960s only as a launching pad; the published work was criticism to bring some order and shape to the re-sult of rigorous self-criticism and endless film history—creating a Louvre of great films mulling, a trial by fire. and detailing the one genius responsible for each film—is doomed to failure because of the Within this crucible Farber fashioned a style subversive nature of the medium: the flash-bomb whose prodigious vocabulary, flexible syntax, vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects and racing pulse were exquisitely at-tuned to the across the grain of a film. One of the joys of phenomenologies of artistic process (especially moviegoing is worrying over the fact that what is the momentary fluxes of filmmaking). No critic, referred to as Hawks might be Jules Furthman, not even Godard, has had a more developed that behind the Godard film is the looming understanding of a movie as mobile composition, shape of Raoul Coutard, and that, when people a wheeling mandala of sounds and images talk about Bogart’s “peculiarly American” brand in dialogue with one another and with their Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. II · No. 4 · Autumn 2014 49 PREFACE TO NEGATIVE SPACE viewers. Perhaps because of his relationships critics, and artists, testing his perceptions against with contentious friends in the literary and art theirs, interrogating and incorporating their worlds—from James Agee to Jackson Pollock, languages and techniques, and using them to Walker Evans to Clement Greenberg—as well as triangulate his positions. This may be one reason making his living for many years as a carpenter, why, whatever his obsessions, he seems never to he came to examine each movie as an open set of have become stuck on the films of one country, overlapping fields, which encouraged a style that genre, or era but continued searching. reveled in Borgesian catalogues of telling detail and led him to give heightened prominence to Where he wound up—light-years from the varieties of film space. By the 1970s he had where he began—no one could have predicted, come to see space as ‘the most dramatic stylistic though he had consistently zeroed in on mavericks entity—from Giotto to Noland, from Intolerance and radicals. As far back as 1957 he had written (David Wark Griffith, 1916) to Weekend (Jean- that ‘the sharpest work of the last thirty years Luc Godard, 1967).’ is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising, roundabout Always ‘process-mad’—his phrase—Farber artists,’ so the 1960s and 1970s were an extremely seems to have trained himself to experience, as fertile era for him, a period of film he was better though microscopically and in slow motion, prepared for than most of his peers. He rose to contradictions within a film overall, deficiencies the challenges of Godard, Snow, Scorsese, and in its script, friction in its performances, in a the New German Cinema (and whatever else he sequence, even in a single abbreviated shot, encountered at various film festivals and through and grasped how entirely and precisely time- the Pacific Film Archive) by redefining the laden, imbued with its historical present, a goals and strategies of his criticism and defining movie, especially a good one, tends to be. This ‘continuation’ in practice. growing sense prompted him over the years to move further into what Donald Phelps called In 1966 Patricia Patterson, an artist and ‘extension’ and what Farber later designated teacher in her own right whom Farber married ten as ‘continuation.’ (A prescient and all too brief years later, began collaborating informally with article by Phelps, reprinted in his 1969 collection, him.

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