By Kathy G.
Via James Wolcott comes the sad news that Manny Farber has died. He was 91.
Though Farber was also a painter, he's probably best known for being among the handful of essential film critics. Original and highly influential, he was among the first to champion the work of important but hitherto overlooked Hollywood filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Val Lewton, Raoul Walsh, and William Wellman, among others. Yet he wrote equally masterfully about arthouse and experimental filmmakers such as Godard, Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman, and Andy Warhol.
Few critics have ever written more vividly or insightfully about the pleasures of the B movie. Indeed, Farber had a strong aesthetic preference for fast, cheaply made, unpretentious genre fare over Hollywood's more bloated, expensive, and "serious" productions. In what is probably his most famous essay, his manifesto, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," he usefully contrasted two different kinds of films. On the one hand, there is "white elephant art:"
Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. Three sins of white elephant art are (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.
White elephant filmmakers, he says, "blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion." They "pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance."
White elephant art's opposite number is termite art. Termite art films such as Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, or the films of Laurel and Hardy
seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything. 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 in 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.
Farber ends this essay by citing the great Kurosawa film Ikiru as a work that
sums up much of what a termite art aims at: buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.
I'll close by quoting an excerpt from Farber's essay on Raoul Walsh. It concerns a film which was one of his favorites and is one of mine, too: the delightful precode comedy, Me and My Gal. Farber was a true American original, and one of his great contributions was in helping us rediscover, and more fully appreciate, termite gems such as this film:
In 1931, he directed his best film, Me and My Gal, an unpredictable jauntiness built around a dubious theme: "Life is sunny, if you don't stir it up." A suspended moment of grace for Walsh and [Spencer] Tracy, when newness and budding maturity were clicking for them, Tracy banters back and forth over a beanery cash register with a Harlow-ish sass machine (Joan Bennett). "Haven't I seen you someplace?" Packing flaunty and insolent earthiness into a challenging act, Miss Bennett's waitress answers: "Maybe, I've been someplace." This did-I-hear-right crack, early vaudeville style, is fleshed out with typical Walsh-engineered acting: mock documentary -- full bodies in space -- that sifts into material that is innocent, anachronistic, quietly amoral. Despite the inevitable expectoration, truculent drunk, talentless slapstick, this primitive oh-you-kid effervescence is inspiring for its balmy innocent actors: J. Farrell MacDonald, as an Irish father whose leering-winking face, in screen-filling close-ups, comes off as blunt Godard put-on commentating; Bennett, the least lockjawed and haughty version, as a slinky, don't push me around toughie, chewing gum ("You're a pretty tough Beezock; why don't you park that gum?"); the youngest, most buoyant Tracy usually freeloading off someone's table, combining outrageous swagger with a self-mocking he enjoys to the hilt. His favorite move: he pushes out his cheek with his tongue, does a pleasantly sociable leer, mouths an automatic sarcasm: "Let me see if you have a hat fit for a detective," that hardly parts his lips.
Farber's analysis of the film continues, but for that you'll need to pick up a copy of the indispensable collection in which it appears, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. It's one of those books which should be a part of any film lover's library.
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