The Screengrab

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.

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NEW YORK: Though it's not clear just how widespread this information was among the average moviegoers of the day, in retrospect it's only become clearer and clearer that Jean-Luc Godard owned the 1960s. None of the gazillions of filmmakers who tried to copy or emulate him at the time found a way to do it without looking ridiculous, and Godard himself has spent the last forty-odd years wondering why nobody believes him when he insists that his later work is much better. Deal with it: Godard's sixties movies, which began with the 1959 Breathless and ended with the 1968 Weekend, which ends with the words "End of Cinema" and which was followed by, of course, more movies, amount to an enduring alternate history of their period, one caught on the fly, and seemingly composed and moods and signals snatched from the air. They are completely of their moment and haven't really dated, and they pointed in a direction that no one has really been able to follow, Godard included. Starting today and continuing through June 5, Film Forum has the whole kicking, biting, flirting package, including the first of Godard's post-Godardian films, the 1969 Le Gai Savoir, and Sympathy for the Devil, which really doesn't belong in this company but has to be included in any comprehensive salute to Godard and the 1960s, 'cause it's got Rolling Stones in it.

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In 1973, after Francois Truffaut's movie about moviemaking Day for Night opened in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard sent him a letter. Fifteen years earlier, Truffaut and Godard had been friends and comrades, self-educated film nuts and critics who were beginning to make good on their shared dream of becoming filmmakers. Truffaut's The 400 Blows premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, and was such a success that Godard was able to get funding for his own debut feature, Breathless, by having Truffaut agree to pretend that he had written the script. (Breathless originated with a news story about a young car thief turned killer that Truffaut had considered filming himself before making The 400 Blows.) The two had achieved fame as the twin giants of the French New Wave, but they had gradually drifted apart, both in their aesthetic aims and their personal relationship. In his letter, Godard accused Truffaut of having made a dishonest movie but also brought the happy news that he had a way for Truffaut to repent: he offered to allow Truffaut to use some of his ill-gotten proceeds to fund a movie by Godard that would tell the truth about film sets, with a political-minded focus on the people who do the grunt work. The sensitive, gentle-natured Truffaut freaked out; he sent Godard a lengthy reply in which he discharged years' worth of pent-up resentments and declared that Godard's radicalism, which Godard wore as a badge of honor even as it limited his access to the large audiences that turned out for Truffaut's movies, was actually practiced in bad faith: "Between your interest in the masses and your own narcissism there's no room for anyone or anything else."

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