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As an aspiring writer, I have had the good luck of having access to the writings of many gifted critics, who have made a huge impact on me. Andrew Sarris, J. Hoberman, Robin Wood, Molly Haskell, Jonathan Rosenbaum -- all of them invaluable. I hate playing favorites, but it really wasn't until I read my first Farber piece that I knew that's what I wanted to do. The essay, to this very day my favorite, was his seminal 1957 "Underground Films," an ode to tough, fuss-free Hollywood action directors, "the toughest, most authentic native talents." The piece, celebrating "hack artists" such as Howard Hawks, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Anthony Mann, had me hooked from the first line. His sentences, filled to the brimming with pugnacious verbs, flew out of the page like pieces of shrapnel: reading Farber often has the exhilarating effect of being reeled in seductively and punched in the stomach at the same time. Inspiringly idiosyncratic, intricately muscular and mercilessly funny, his writing over the course of many decades has done possibly more than anybody else to turn film criticism into an art form of its own. Combative word by combative word, terse sentence by terse sentence, he is as formidable as he is inexhaustible. A carpenter and a painter before picking up a pen in 1942, Farber developed a highly distinctive style he took from publication to publication (The New Republic, The Nation, Film Culture, Artforum and Film Comment, to name a few). From the beginning, he set himself apart from the run-of-the-mill critic. Most reviewers have come to judge cinema according to a set of values so narrow it would have plenty of elbow room on a pin's head -- believability of plots, likability of characters, satisfying conclusion, dot dot dot. Not Farber. To read one of his pieces is to go down a foxhole, burrowing deep into a startlingly fecund and varied mind. A review is not a limited end, but a taking-off point, a launch pad for the most mind- and eye-opening observations on art and life. The last thing he's interested in is in how many stars the movie is getting. Though never as well-known as, say, Roger Ebert (mainly due to his shift in the past decades from writing to his original passion, painting), Farber slashes deeper. His status as a cult demigod among cinephiles has long cemented an image: cranky, eccentric, scalpel-sharp and formalistically obsessed, the unlikely progeny of very '40s humanist critic James Agee and very '60s abstract painter Jackson Pollock. His painterly side displays an extraordinary attention to visuals that marks Farber, along with his wife (and invaluable collaborator) Patricia Patterson, as a unique fusion of image and word. Farber's visual description of a scene -- his sense of celluloid as an ever-shifting canvas -- is so potent that, frequently, I find the actual scene in the movie not being half as exciting. Yet, despite his (deserved) status as the father of modern criticism, Farber's writing could hardly be called "classical." Unlike most reviewers, who gradually introduce movies via plot synopsis, characters, etc., he starts already within the film, zigzagging through it, leaving flurries of furious activity until landing on the acting of a bit player he likes, or a particularly incisive use of screen space. You have to catch up with him. With an exquisite painter's eye and an elastic, shotgun-style prose, Farber is a movie buff's dream critic. Whether thrashing a highly-decorated A-list classic (The Best Year of Our Lives is "a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz") or praising a "termite" performance (on John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "a craggy face filled with bitterness, jealousy, a big body that idles luxuriantly"), he can cram more insight and gusto into one paragraph than any other critic can claim in an entire review. As opposed the (to my mind) overrated, late critic Pauline Kael, who flattered her readers with a snake-charming style that covered her lack of intellectual analysis like a cloak, Farber never panders to audiences. His work is rollicking, a tough, hilarious ride, yet steely in its artistic insights -- he brought endless curiosity and passion to difficult filmmakers somebody like Kael wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Snow, Chantal Akerman). It's interesting to note that, although widely acknowledged as one of the greatest stylists in the field, critics rarely if ever attempt to emulate Farber's writing. There is no Farber School, possibly because his kind of originality can't be taught. Art is innate rather than learned; Manny Farber is an artist who just happens to write movie criticism.
Personal anecdote: I got to briefly meet Farber when he came to receive an award at the San Francisco International
Film Festival. A titan at 86, he was everything I expected him to be, and then some: august yet playful, acerbic yet
generous, patient and encouraging with this drooling fanboy. Just a really lovely gentleman -- talking to him was one of
the most tremendous moments of my professional life.
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