Farber Figure

Walter Reade pays tribute to a termite critic.

Most people who cover film focus on the big picture; it was the little things, however, that got Manny Farber fired up. A former carpenter, a formidable painter and the hyperventilating writer responsible for the phrase termite art, Farber had a knack for pinpointing singular moments: the way Humphrey Bogart crossed a back-lot street or the configurative pleasures of pug-faced character actors crowded into a corner. But it was the geometry within the frame that truly sent Farber into orbit. In the intro of his essay collection, Negative Space, Farber declared, “Space is the most dramatic stylistic entity…from Intolerance to Weekend.” His work didn’t ignore a movie’s narrative arc so much as upgrade other elements to the forefront, namely the psychology of visual organization and the snail tracks such things left on the terrain of a viewer’s memory.

Those wishing to bask in the Griffith-to-Godard connections will have their chance with “Manny Farber, 1917–2008,” Walter Reade’s tribute to the pioneering critic. Both of the aforementioned directors get their due, with the former’s stunning “A Corner in Wheat” (1909) and the latter’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her… (1967) included in the idiosyncratic lineup. Farber’s liking for both meat-and-potatoes genre flicks and fiber-rich high art is on full display, exemplifying a taste for works that “played both brows against the middle.” Yet the eclecticism of his preferences and the infectiously jazzy slanguage Farber used to describe them were never a hipster’s pose. “The barriers that normally separate Howard Hawks and Michael Snow simply didn’t exist for him,” says Kent Jones, the associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who curated the retrospective. “So when Manny talks about the human form in Scarface or how he describes Wavelength as ‘If a room could describe itself, this is what it would look like,’ it’s all of a piece. The style and the thinking are completely interconnected.”

A close friend of Farber’s, Jones relied on the late critic’s lecture notes from his classes at the University of California at San Diego to program the series, which enabled him to include selections that became important to the writer after he’d retired from publishing in 1977. Thus, movies that Farber had pored over in print, like The Roaring Twenties (1939), bump up against later obsessions like Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954), in which George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman play out a marriage’s death throes in front of modernist landscapes. If any one entry could be considered semirepresentative of Farber’s sui generis sensibility, this psychodrama would be a prime candidate; the way the film locates the profound in the peripheral is something Farber proudly championed right to the end.

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