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Manny Farber, one of the most important critics in movie history, championed the American action film—the bravado of Howard Hawks, the art brut styling of Samuel Fuller, the crafty, sordid entertainments of Don Siegel—at a time when other critics dismissed the genre. His witty, incisive criticism later worked exacting language into an exploration of the feelings and strategies that went into low-budget and radical films as diverse as Michael Snow's Wavelength, Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Expanded with an in-depth interview and seven essays written with his wife, artist Patricia Patterson, Negative Space gathers Farber's most influential writings, making this an indispensable collection for all lovers of film.
""Termite Art," in Farber's definition, is art born of observing and acknowledging the transitory nature of daily life. It is also a key antidote to the widespread problem of "White Elephant" art--big, swaggering "masterpiece art" self-consciously striving for greatness. In this book, artists, historians, and critics dive deep into art that forgoes such ambition in order to attend to the pleasures and problems of the everyday. The book is anchored by an essay by editor Helen Molesworth and features four contemporary commissioned artists' projects that exemplify "Termite Art," an interview with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, and a carefully selected collection of historical essays by and about Farber that functions as a reader on the subject"--
Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a unique figure among American movie critics. Champion of what he called "termite art" (focused, often eccentric virtuosity as opposed to "white elephant" monumentality), master of a one-of-a-kind prose style whose jazz-like phrasing and incandescent twists and turns made every review an adventure, he has long been revered by his peers. Susan Sontag called him "the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country ever produced"; for Peter Bogdanovich, he was "razor-sharp in his perceptions" and "never less than brilliant as a writer." Farber was an early discoverer of many filmmakers later acclaimed as American masters: Val Lewton, Preston Sturges, Samuel Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann. A prodigiously gifted painter himself, he brought to his writing an artist's eye for what was on the screen. Alert to any filmmaker, no matter how marginal or unsung, who was "doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it," he was uncompromising in his contempt for pretension and trendiness, for, as he put it, directors who "pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance." The excitement of his criticism, however, has less to do with his particular likes and dislikes than with the quality of attention he paid to each film as it unfolds, to the "chains of rapport and intimate knowledge" in its moment-to-moment reality. To transcribe that knowledge he created a prose that, in Robert Polito's words, allows for "oddities, muddles, crises, contradictions, dead ends, multiple alternatives, and divergent vistas." The result is critical essays that are themselves works of art. Farber on Film brings together this extraordinary body of work in its entirety for the first time, from his early and previously uncollected weekly reviews for The New Republic and The Nation to his brilliant later essays (some written in collaboration with his wife Patricia Patterson) on Godard, Fassbinder, Herzog, Scorsese, Altman, and others. Featuring an introduction by editor Robert Polito that examines in detail the stages of Farber's career and his enduring significance as writer and thinker, Farber on Film is a landmark volume that will be a classic in American criticism. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of America's most revered and widely read film critics, more famous than many of the movies they wrote about. But their remarkable contributions to the burgeoning American film criticism of the 1960s and beyond were deeply influenced by four earlier critics: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Film scholar and critic David Bordwell restores to a wider audience the work of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler, critics he calls the 'Rhapsodes' for the passionate and deliberately offbeat nature of their vernacular prose.
An illustrated examination of Glenn Ligon's iconic Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988)—a quotation, an appropriated text turned into an artifact. The iconic work Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988) by the important contemporary American artist Glenn Ligon is a quotation, an appropriated text turned into an artifact. The National Gallery of Art in Washington presents the work as a “representation—a signifier—of the actual signs carried by 1,300 striking African American sanitation workers in Memphis, made famous by Ernest Withers' 1968 photographs.” In this illustrated study of the work, Gregg Bordowitz takes the National Gallery's presentation as his starting point, considering the museum's juxtaposition of Untitled (I Am a Man) and the ca. 1935 sculpture, Schoolteacher, by William Edmondson, and the relation of the two terms, “markers” and “signs.” After closely examining the canvas itself, its textures, brushwork, and structure, Bordowitz presents a theoretical framework that draws on the work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and his theory of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. He makes a case for Thirdness as a function, operation, or law of meaning-making, not limited by the gender, age, ethnicity, race, class, or personal history of the viewer. Bordowitz goes on to examine Ligon's work in terms of the representation of self, race, and gender, focusing on three series: Profile Series (1990–91), Narratives, and Runaways (both 1993). He cites such historical figures as Sojourner Truth and her famous 1851 speech, “Ain't I a Woman?” as well as influences ranging from Bo Diddley's 1955 song, “I'm a Man” to the cultural theories of Stuart Hall.
A director reveals the original inspirations for his films, their history, his methods of work, and the problems of visual creativity
Entertainment Weekly's controversial critic of more than two decades looks back at a life told through the films he loved and loathed. Owen Gleiberman has spent his life watching movies-first at the drive-in, where his parents took him to see wildly inappropriate adult fare like Rosemary's Baby when he was a wide-eyed 9 year old, then as a possessed cinemaniac who became a film critic right out of college. In Movie Freak, his enthrallingly candid, funny, and eye-opening memoir, Gleiberman captures what it's like to live life through the movies, existing in thrall to a virtual reality that becomes, over time, more real than reality itself. Gleiberman paints a bittersweet portrait of his complicated and ultimately doomed friendship with Pauline Kael, the legendary New Yorker film critic who was his mentor and muse. He also offers an unprecedented inside look at what the experience of being a critic is really all about, detailing his stint at The Boston Phoenix and then, starting in 1990, at EW, where he becomes a voice of obsession battling-to a fault-to cling to his independence. Gleiberman explores the movies that shaped him, from the films that first made him want to be a critic (Nashville and Carrie), to what he hails as the sublime dark trilogy of the 1980s (Blue Velvet, Sid and Nancy, and Manhunter), to the scruffy humanity of Dazed and Confused, to the brilliant madness of Natural Born Killers, to the transcendence of Breaking the Waves, to the pop rapture of Moulin Rouge! He explores his partnership with Lisa Schwarzbaum and his friendships and encounters with such figures as Oliver Stone, Russell Crowe, Richard Linklater, and Ben Affleck. He also writes with confessional intimacy about his romantic relationships and how they echoed the behavior of his bullying, philandering father. And he talks about what film criticism is becoming in the digital age: a cacophony of voices threatened by an insidious new kind of groupthink. Ultimately, Movie Freak is about the primal pleasure of film and the enigmatic dynamic between critic and screen. For Gleiberman, the moving image has a talismanic power, but it also represents a kind of sweet sickness, a magnificent obsession that both consumes and propels him.
"Once or twice a generation a film critic comes along who expands or even redefines how we talk about the medium. Jonathan Rosenbaum is one of these figures."—Alan Williams, author of Republic of Images
From the author of "Romantic Comedy ("brilliant, meticulous, a monumental work of scholarship" --Margo Jefferson, "New York Times), a fresh, illuminating look at the films of the 1950s. Harvey begins by mapping the progression from 1940s film noir to the living-room melodramas of the 1950s. He shows us the femme fatale of the 1940s (Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Bennett) becoming blander and blonder (Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds) and younger and more traditionally sexy (Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly) in the 1950s. And he shows us how women were finally replaced as objects of desire by the new boy-men--Clift, Brando, Dean, and other rebels without causes. Harvey discusses the films of Hitchcock ("Vertigo), Ophuls ("The Reckless Moment), Siodmak ("Christmas Holiday), and Welles ("Touch of Evil, perhaps the single greatest influence on the "post-classical" movies). He writes about the quintessential 1950s directors: Nicholas Ray, who made movies in the old Hollywood tradition "(In a Lonely Place, "Johnny Guitar), and Douglas Sirk, who portrayed suburbia as an emotional deathtrap ("Imitation of Life, "Magnificent Obsession). And he discusses the "serious" directors, such as Stanley Kramer and Elia Kazan, whose films exhibited powerful new realism. Comprehensive, insightful, written with intelligence, humor, and affection, Movie Love in the Fifties is a masterful work of American film, and cultural, history.