Farber: a critic's critic

For years, James Wolcott has tried to turn me on to the film criticism of Manny Farber. Back in the late '90s, the Vanity Fair columnist and I corresponded (We wrote actual letters to each other and sent them in the mail -- crazy, huh?) quite regularly. He would occasionally hip me to writers he thought I could learn a lot from. And when Farber's 1971 film-criticism compilation "Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies" was reissued in 1998, he told me I should pick up a copy and start reading.

Unfortunately, I must've been too busy doing other things to buy a copy. (Or maybe I was just broke.) In retrospect, I wish I'd taken Wolcott up on his recommendation. Perhaps if I had started reading him early on, I wouldn't have such a hard time soaking in the reviews and essays that make up "Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber" (The Library of America, $40).

Released this month, "Farber," edited by critic/poet Robert Polito, is a mammoth, 824 pages if you count the back-of-the-book essentials (time line, sources and acknowledgments, index, etc). Most of it is all Farber, pieces that span nearly four decades, from the '40s through his final piece in 1977.

Ever since I got a copy, I've been dipping into it now and then, and I've never felt more like a beginner, in every sense of the word. Unlike many critics, Farber, who died last year at 91, wasn't about summarizing movie plots or comfortably spelling out what he loved and hated about a movie. Farber's writing style was both dense and fluid, with erudite, dizzying phrases that can have you re-reading a sentence two or three times to make sure you got what he meant. Farber, who not only wrote art criticism but was an artist himself, viewed movies with a finely tuned eye. He could write about three films in the same piece and flow in and out of deconstructing them, as though they all contained bits and pieces that perfectly complemented each other. For Farber, film had a visual language, and he understood it more than anyone.

Thankfully, I've learned that having difficulty deciphering Farber's words is common. Wolcott found his work befuddling as well. In the '80s, he snagged a copy of "Space," after it was reprinted in paperback and blandly renamed "Movies" (without Farber's permission).

"The first few times I looked at pieces, I found them kind of daunting," said Wolcott, a former film critic. "I couldn't quite get on his wavelength, except for some of the famous pieces. But then the more I read them --like I remember reading a piece on Don Siegel that I just thought was hilarious. I don't even necessarily agree with a lot of it. But he was just so funny and so precise."

When he was the film critic for such magazines as The Nation, The New Republic and Time (per his wishes, his Time reviews aren't included in "Film," becausethey were so worked over by editors he didn't consider them his own), Farber went through the grind of dealing with junk cinema as any contemporary critic would. "The unhappy fact is that movies are worse than ever," he wrote in 1950, showing that critics were bellyaching about the demise of cinema even when guys like the Johns -- Ford and Huston -- were still around.

But when Farber began writing lengthy film pieces for Commentary, Film Comment and Artforum and took on writing about the films he wanted to discuss, his voice was witty, scholarly, unstoppable.

With these pieces, he established what he preferred in his celluloid entertainment and showed that while he wrote like an academic, he wasn't a snob. In his stunning 1957 piece, "Underground Films," he praised the B-movie, film noir works of directors such asHoward Hawks (whose films Farber said "have the swallowed-up intricacy of a good soft-shoe dance"), Raoul Walsh and Anthony Mann, while downplaying the "liberal schmaltz" of "From Here to Eternity" and "The Best Years of Our Lives" that many critics hailed.

Farber, who was perceived as a cult figure in the film-criticism game, eventually dropped out of film writing altogether. Throughout the '70s and '80s, he was content lecturing on film at colleges and museums, while doing exhibitions of his artwork all over the country.

But he got his props before he passed away, especially after the re-release of "Space." He received tributes and honors from the New York Film Critics Circle, the San Francisco International Film Festival and the University of California, San Diego, where he lectured. In 2004, he spoke at a Paris symposium on "L' Espace Negatif," the French adaptation of "Space," which had been released in France a year earlier. He was even the subject of several short films and documentaries, including one directed by Martin Scorsese collaborator Paul Schrader.

Much like Wolcott (and hopefully soon, me), it seemed people ultimately cracked the code of Farber's writing and realized how much distinctive talent the man possessed.

"It's the type of writing you don't need to have seen the movies to really kind of respond to what he's doing," Wolcott says. "Because what you're responding to is just the way his mind works, you know. I mean, he had a great, original mind."

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