Notes on Negative Space
Written: Dec 03 '03 (Updated Nov 07 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brilliant writing
Cons: There's nobody who currently writes like him
The Bottom Line: Farber is the Muhammad Ali of film criticism.
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| WilliamJones's Full Review: Manny Farber - Negative Space: Manny Farber on the... |
Although he no longer writes about movies, Manny Farber, 86, remains a legendary figure—arguably the greatest film critic of all time. Originally published in 1971, Negative Space, his only book, was significantly expanded in 1998 by Da Capo Press (as a trade paperback). It's a collection of essays, some co-written with his wife and frequent collaborator, painter Patricia Patterson, which date back to 1943. Farber's critic career spanned more than three decades and his writing appeared in The New Republic, The Nation (where he succeeded his friend James Agee), The New Leader, Commentary, Artforum and other, marginal men's magazines.
The last article to appear in Negative Space and his final piece of criticism, "Kitchen Without Kitsch" (concerning Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman) appeared in Film Comment in 1977. And that was it for Farber. A lifelong painter (and one-time friend of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock), he turned exclusively to that, although he still taught film courses at UC San Diego well into the 1980s. His influence is difficult to gauge but I suspect it's significant—especially among film critics (where he has a cult following).
As Richard Thompson points out in the book's closing interview, Farber is "a critic's critic whose greatest influence has been on other writers."
Susan Sontag calls him "the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country ever produced." And many others sing his praises.
For anyone interested in writing about movies, Negative Space is an indispensable book. Not something to be read casually, it demands, rather, intense scrutiny. His writing, with its densely-composed sentences and adjective-heavy descriptions, moves like a Howard Hawks movie—fast, with a tendency to zig and zag. Farber can, at times, come off as mean-spirited (calling Cathérine Deneuve in Belle de Jour Cathérine Deadnerve, for instance) but his writing is never less than razor-sharp. "It's primarily about language," Farber tells us, "using the precise word for Oshima's eroticism, having a push-pull relationship with both film experience and writing experience."
No one writes quite like him (on this site, mangiotto comes closest) and for those who are, themselves, interested in writing, it's seductively alluring. William Gibson (Neuromancer) says he was specifically cautioned by a film history professor against "trying to write like Farber"—advice the author didn't heed.
Where to begin? Central to everything in this book is Farber's concept of film space. From his introduction, the three most important types of film space are: "(1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, and (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers." As in paintings, in movies everything comes down to how an artist utilizes space ("the most dramatic stylistic entity").
Of the 52 essays contained in Negative Space, a number cover important, termite-like film artists (Howard Hawks, Val Lewton, Preston Sturges, Don Siegel, Sam Fuller, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, Raoul Walsh, Nicolas Roeg, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). Three, however, can be seen as "influential summing-up pieces." Those being: "Underground Films" (1957), "Hard-Sell Cinema" (1957), and "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962).
Ever wonder who coined the term "underground film"? Farber used this phrase to describe beloved action movies of the 1940's, which were naturally at home in "murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities."
In this brilliant, 5,000-word essay (which Farber admits took years to write), a number of terrific B movie directors and their films are championed above the so-called "A" pictures everyone was talking about at the time. Howard Hawks (Scarface, Only Angels Angels Have Wings, The Big Sleep) is a key figure here "because he shows a maximum speed, inner life, and view, with the least amount of flat foot."
Other notables: Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, Anthony Mann, John Farrow, Zoltan Korda, William Keighley, Phil Karlson, and Robert Aldrich.
These actioneers, Farber tells us, "[prove] themselves more honest and subtle than the water buffaloes of film art: George Stevens, Billy Wilder, Vittorio De Sica, Georges Clouzot."
In "Hard-Sell Cinema," perhaps his most vitriolic piece, Farber notes the fading away of the "long-neglected action directors" and the "explosion of the gimmick." Here he scorns the shrewd businessman-artist. These ultrasmooth, quote-unquote radicals, Farber writes, are mostly exiles from Broadway, who developed a rigid, eclectic movie technique to go with mean-spirited "liberalism" that always pretends it is being wonderfully kind, curious, and civic-minded about people from the Upper Bronx, Lower Manhattan, and Pigott, Arkansas.
Who are we talking about? Writers Serling, Chayefsky, Willingham, Schulberg and Rose. And directors Delbert Mann (Marty, a Best Picture winner), Ritt, Mulligan, Lumet, Frankenheimer and Kazan.
Notice how, with the exception of Delbert Mann, Farber doesn't note their first names. I mean, why dignify them with extra printed space? In a sly sort of way (because Farber's approach is always a coolly detached, film-centered one) he lays them out for filth. And I suspect Mann is the exception merely to avoid confusion with Anthony Mann (Winchester 73, Border Incident, Railroaded). By singling him out, however, Farber subtly draws our attention to the more talented Mann. Touché.
Nearly a decade later, in "The Cold That Came into The Spy" (1966), Farber's mostly positive take on the Richard Burton, Cold War thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, director Martin Ritt does redeem himself (and gets his first name back).
One can only imagine what Farber would make of today's crop of crappy, cinematic hard-sell? When he does speak out in interviews, Farber rarely mentions American films (although I recently read he made the following comment in regards to Kevin Costner's Open Range: Where's the cattle? Seemed like it was all gun-play). Instead, one hears enthusiastic talk of Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh or the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry).
The other famous piece in this book is "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art". Here Farber breaks art (not just film) into two generalized categories. Non-termite or masterpiece art, he writes, is "reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions." White elephant movies "blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion." Termite art, on the other hand, has "no ambitions towards gilt culture" but is, instead, immersed in "a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor":
A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing it its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.
The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.
Examples of termite-art can be found in the producers and directors Farber revered—the Hawks-Walsh-Wellman crowd noted above—but also in the comedy of Laurel and Hardy, or Chuck Jones animated cartoons (in an essay entitled "Short and Happy" from 1943, Farber shows he was one of the earliest critics to seriously consider this under-appreciated art form).
It's tempting to speculate on who would fall into the white elephant category today. Steven Spielberg, certainly, seems a likely candidate (while not mentioned anywhere in Negative Space, Farber has made it known he's not a Spielberg fan). Lucas, of late, definitely. Oliver Stone, probably. And James Cameron's unsinkable Titanic (another Oscar winner) has a lot of white elephant qualities.
That's not to say that all white elephant art is bad. It's not a good-bad, black-white thing. Farber merely says he prefers the latter, that he tends to gravitate, as do I, toward directors working in the termite area.
While I worship at Farber's altar, this does not preclude me from appreciating Michelangelo Antonioni or Francois Truffaut, two directors Farber places in the white elephant camp.
Lastly, I should mention that the expanded Negative Space includes the best review of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver I have ever read. "The Power and The Gory" (1976) is even better than Pauline Kael's excellent New Yorker piece, "Underground Man" (strictly alluding to Dostoyevski with that title or a bit of homage to Farber?).
It doesn't get better than Negative Space.
Recommended:
Yes
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