A one-of-a-kind eccentric voice whose tastes and opinions left an unexpectedly long shadow across the battlefield of late-twentieth-century movie criticism and geek argument, Manny Farber has died at the age of 91. In such essays as "The Gimp", "Underground Movies", "Cartooned Hip Acting" and the landmark "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art"--originally published in such out-of-the-way venues as Film Culture, City Lights, and Artforum--Farber gleefully pissed on middlebrow attempts to uplift the movies to the level of self-serious kitsch, saving his highest praise for those directors, ranging from Samuel Fuller and Don Siegel to Chuck Jones and Jean-Luc Godard, who "seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything." Farber's embrace of wise-cracking, tough-guy language and a scorn for the self-conscious "pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing masterpiece" (so that the "assemblage becomes a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into mannerism by the padding lechery, faking required to combine today; esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art") that almost borders on nihilism should not be mistaken for philistine thuggery. Farber himself was a painter, often turning out canvasses inspired by his favorite films by Fassbinder and Sam Peckinpah. As a critic, he used words the way the best Abstract Expressionists used color and brushstrokes, boiling his opinions into a steady stream of hard little bullets of impressions and laying them out in a field of poeticized yet slangy language that could at first appear chaotic and off-the-cuff yet, upon close examination, revealed themselves to be the carefully shaped product of a lifetime's thinking about what mattered in the arts. Because Farber was so funny, and his writing so electric, nobody ever needed much convincing that they ought to give his writing that kind of close study.
The "White Elephant" essay, a full-throated expression of artistic preference, begins with a dissertation on Cezanne before veering off into a celebration of those "termite artists" of the movies, such as Laurel and Hardy and the Howard Hawks of The Big Sleep, whose work does not stand before the audience preening its beauty and solemnity of purpose but rather "goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." Farber's own path of eager, industrious, unkempt activity as a writer can be found in his single collection, Negative Space, which was originally published in 1971; a paperback version was issued under the title Movies, and in 1998 Da Capo brought out a new paperback edition which included a preface by Raoul Walsh (who certainly owed him one) as well as the scarce handful of movie essays that Farber had turned out since the mid-70s, all of them listing his wife Patricia Patterson, as co-author.
