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  • In Memoriam: Manny Farber, 1917–2008
  • Robert Sklar (bio)

The film critic Manny Farber, who died in August 2008 at age 91, was a unique voice in American film reviewing, a pugnacious, fiery polemicist whose two most famous essays—“Underground Films” (1957) and “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962)—helped overturn mid-century middlebrow movie culture and pave the way for a broader, more varied film milieu, embracing both popular genres and the avant-garde. Although he gave up film writing just as the trends he helped foster were taking hold, Farber became a cult figure for many later film journalists, such as J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, who admired and emulated his eclectic taste across many different film practices, his familiarity with arts and culture high and low, his flights of metaphor and quirky rhetoric, his disdain for received opinion and established canons, his championing of filmmakers unrecognized by cultural gatekeepers.

“Underground Films,” originally in Commentary magazine, struck readers in its time with a jolt that is now difficult to imagine. It challenged contemporary critical valuations by praising then-neglected male action directors like Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, and William Wellman. “Americans seem to have a special aptitude for allowing History to bury the toughest, most authentic native talents,” he wrote. You could compile a dictionary or at least a thesaurus by collecting Farber’s favored nouns and adjectives, in this and other writings: unpretentious, uncompromising, unscrubbed, hardgrain, hard-bitten, hard-edged, life-worn, lean, shrewd, cutthroat, and on and on. One gets the point: Tough masculinity for Farber was the authentic American idiom.

For Farber, “underground” connoted something different from the meaning the term would acquire a few years later (as in Sheldon Renan’s 1967 paperback anthology An Introduction to the American Underground Film), referring to avant-garde and [End Page 66] independent non-Hollywood filmmakers. It had something to do with the willingness of unpretentious, uncompromising Hollywood filmmakers to work out of sight, as it were, to hide out in the “most neutral, humdrum, monotonous corner of the movie lot,” where they could achieve their hardboiled wonders through a mask of disinterest. It also had to do with Farber’s nostalgia for the fleapit cinemas of his prewar youth, “murky, congested theaters . . . located near bus terminals in big cities,” complimentary screening spaces for his beloved 1930s action works.

These terms were elaborated in “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” which appeared, as later critics such as Manohla Dargis have noted, in a remarkable issue of Film Culture that also contained Andrew Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” and Pauline Kael’s review of Shoot the Piano Player. The notion of “underground” was here expanded through a different set of metaphors, not simply “termite art” but “termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art,” works, that is, that have “no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything.” Like the termite or the tapeworm, such art eats away at its task “without point or aim,” doing its job modestly, working in the moment, achieving without grandiosity and moving on. Opposed to this was the bloated, the self-congratulatory, the sentimental, the message-laden, the laborious, the over-familiar Masterpiece art, “reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago,” that, in Farber’s view, had come to dominate post-war American movies as well as much of the acclaimed European art cinema of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Although he wrote about films for a variety of periodicals for nearly three decades, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, Farber considered his primary vocation to be painting. His film criticism largely came to an end after 1970 when he joined the visual arts faculty at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught a legendary course called “A Hard Look at the Movies.” In 1971 he published his only film book, Negative Space: Manny Farber at the Movies, a selection of his criticism, in a series for which Annette Michelson served as advisory editor. It was issued as a paperback, confusedly, as Movies...

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