The film blogosphere paid tribute to Manny Farber this week (Phil Nugent contributed our own obit here) and if that name doesn’t ring a bell, Glenn Kenny has some good advice at Some Came Running. “If you've never read Farber, just stop here and get to it. His collected criticism, in a volume called Negative Space, is one of the touchstone texts of film writing—tough-minded, sharp-eyed, idiosyncratic, often wildly funny, and with a bedrock integrity and aesthetic acuity that even best of contemporary film critics are hard-pressed to approach, let alone match. He is most often cited for coining the phrases ‘termite art’ and ‘white-elephant art,’ two opposed categories. What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle. He could appreciate a B war picture in the same sense that the guy on the street could, while fully comprehending its value as a work of modern/contemporary art. I'm away from my study, so I can't grab a copy of Space to quote from it willy-nilly. But I can say this: I doubt that Farber was particularly surprised by Godard's Breathless, because his criticism actively anticipated that film.”
David Edelstein has a personal remembrance at The Projectionist. “Manny could seem inscrutable yet was actually hyperprecise, which is why we kept listening, unpacking his phrases, sure that whatever came out, no matter how gnomic, contained multitudes. His writing was compacted, sometimes overly so (he would be the first to tell you that), but the words always quivered with the drive to pin down some aspect of the infinite. Once I made the mistake of saying I thought a film was ‘about’ something. ‘About…’ he said, softly, and glanced at Patricia. ‘How can we say what a film is “about”? There are so many things…’ ”
Jonathan Rosenbaum has an update of a 1993 essay on his eponymous blog. “When we met on campus, Manny—who bore a certain resemblance to Punch in Punch and Judy—hadn’t realized until then that we’d never met before. Back in 1969, when we were both still living in New York, I’d written him asking to reprint two of his articles, on Preston Sturges and Godard, in an anthology I was editing, for $50 each. After receiving no reply I phoned him and got my first taste of his crusty wrath: “Fifty bucks? Do you know how many years Willy Poster and I worked on that Sturges piece?” Weeks later, just before I was due to move to Paris, I wrote him a sincere fan letter saying that I’d just read the Sturges article for the umpteenth time and couldn’t imagine publishing the book without it—that my budget for fees was paltry but I’d double my offer to $100 for the Sturges. A few days later he phoned, quite friendly, accepting the offer.”
A promising new blog called Parallax View weighs in on the new DVD of Orson Welles’ lost film Don Quixote. “From what I know about Welles and the history of the film, Franco’s version is not even an approximation, never mind a reconstruction. There’s no story here, simply a random succession of events and images and a whole lot of narrative detours. But even as a visual record of Welles’ raw footage it’s a travesty. It’s a given that much of the existing rough cut footage is in rough condition, showing the signs of wear and tear from years of tinkering on moviolas and dragging the reels from country to country. But Franco and company have, if anything, compounded the problems with hazy, blurry copies of the master footage and video noise introduced as a result of the project’s most egregious crimes against Welles: the video manipulation of footage to layer images one on another.”
For this week’s List-o-Mania, we turn to Daily Plastic for the Top Ten Loathsome or Laudable Uses of a Zoom Lens. For example, squeezing tears from an emotional interviewee. “And it starts. Her response to the difficult question. The rising action. His heart races. Her chin puckers. His fingers tug the tiny shaft. Her eyes look left and right. She tells her sad story. He moves in closer, close enough to feed upon the tears of wounded subjects. The interviewer tilts her head to the right and nods to keep the subject talking, and then shifts her notepad to the opposite knee so that, when the time comes, she can reach forward and pat the subject's hand, a comforting attagirl for a job well-done. It's a crucial moment. But the squinting man is in charge. His choice to begin zooming now, to draw the viewer into the miserable world of the subject, will govern the edit, will define the scene. When he stops zooming, the scene is over, but not before. It's his shot to get, and his to lose. He stands astride the very earth.”