Syncopated Eye

Farber on Film

The Complete Film
Writings of Manny Farber
edited by Robert Polito
Library of America, 1,000 pp., $40

Of the great mid-century film critics, Manny Farber (1917-2008) remains one of the most challenging and best loved. An all-purpose critic as comfortable writing about paintings and jazz music as film and television, Farber’s dense criticism and staccato bursts of oddly juxtaposed adjectives imbued his words with a sort of lyricism. When people argue that criticism is an art form, they are referring to the writings of men like Manny Farber.

It helped, too, that he was an actual artist, a painter whose work is celebrated in museums with the same reverence cinephiles regard his criticism. Indeed, one of his reasons for giving up writing about film in 1977, at the relatively youthful age of 60, was that he “no longer wanted to be viewed as the film critic who also paints.” Farber treated the written form like he treated canvases, and like the ’20s jazz masters treated music: juxtaposing disparate words in a way both cluttered and syncopated. There’s a distinctive rhythm to his writing. Consider his 1971 take on Touch of Evil:

Basically it’s a movie about terrorizing, an evil-smelling good movie in which the wildly Baroque terror and menace is another world from Hawks-Walsh: an aggressive-dynamic-robust-excessive-silly universe with Welles’s career-long theme (the corruption of the not-so-innocent Everyman through wealth and power) and his inevitable efforts with space—to make it prismatic and a quagmire at the same time.