Painter of pictures: The Farber equation is never simple - Manny Farber

One evening a bunch of us had driven down to a mall outside San Diego to see a movie; it was Moonlighting, an English-language film by Jerzy Skolimowski, the one where Jeremy Irons plays a Polish construction contractor renovating a brownstone in London. So we all went out to dinner after the movie. Jean-Pierre Gorin was there, and he and Manny didn't like the film. They began to pick it apart. For Manny, with his background as a carpenter, Skolimowski's use of the extended rebuilding and renovating of a house was all wrong, completely off on the processes of making and working, and off in its facile statement about the political situation in Poland. Manny's daughter, Amanda, was part of the group, with her then boyfriend. It became kind of a generational thing. The two of them chimed in aggressively, "Why are you guys always so negative? Why are you ripping apart this film? Can't you ever like anything?" and so on. Things continued to get heated and finally Manny raised his voice and said "I care. I care that Skolimowski made a bad film." He said, "I care that he didn't get it right. "

KENT JONES

IN THEIR PIECE on Raoul Walsh, Manny and Patricia were saying that he deserved to be reseen through a modern looking glass but that it was important to understand that Walsh was fundamentally a product of the studio system. You can't turn him into a modern auteurist fantasy figure absolved of all those studio constraints. Manny always places every element of every film very carefully.

By the same token, what Manny's also saying is that if you're looking at a movie, don't just write that this shot relates back to this or that film from the past. Say how it relates to other contemporary objects from literature, from music, from painting. A film speaks from its own time, like all works of art. Manny's criticism is about trying to find a way of looking at the moment the film was generated and then at the moment it's being examined and how they overlap and how they oppose one another. That's an incredibly important idea, and I haven't read many critics who've actually followed it.

STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

WHEN YOU START TO READ one of Manny Farber's pieces, you have no clear sense of where he's going to take you. He jumps right into the surface of a movie, and you're looking around to see where he is going to pop up next, to see what he is going to come up with. He comes up with dazzling arguments and delightful turns of phrase. It's constantly surprising.

I think that sense of surprise is matched by few critics. The other critic who shares that quality is Farber's friend and colleague Pauline Kael, but he is even more freewheeling and wild in the way he makes connections. That's probably why his work feels so fresh, even today.

KENT JONES

WHEN YOU'RE READING Jean-Luc Godard's film criticism and he's talking about, say, a camera movement in a Sam Fuller movie, you're thinking, well, it's not a surprise that this guy would go on to become a director and, in fact, use camera movements exactly like that. What Manny did, by contrast, was to actually describe the movie. So if you're reading his pieces from the '60s, like "Cartooned Hip Acting" or "The Decline of the Actor," he's describing the changes that were seeping into the way movies were being made and the way things were being visualized--the differences in acting, the way that the actor was used in film in the '30s and '40s as opposed to the '60s, when, as he says of Antonioni, or of the John Huston movie Freud, the actors are reduced to patches of light hacked out of the overall darkness of the frame.