[Deathwatch] Manny Farber, film critic and artist, 91

[Deathwatch Central]

Manny Farber, 91; iconoclastic film critic and artist
By Elaine Woo
August 21, 2008

Manny Farber, an iconoclastic stylist who achieved prominence in two
careers -- as a painter of abstract canvases and still-lifes and as a
film critic admired for his canny, muscular writing and advocacy of
such directors as Sam Fuller, Howard Hawks and R.W. Fassbinder -- has
died. He was 91.

An emeritus professor of art at UC San Diego, where he taught from 1970
to 1987, Farber died of bone cancer Monday at his home in the north San
Diego County community of Leucadia, a family spokeswoman said.

Although he shifted his energies full time into painting 30 years ago,
Farber remained a hero to a younger generation of film connoisseurs and
critics, who cite the enduring effect of his writings, particularly the
1962 essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art."

A jeremiad on glitzy, pretentious Hollywood productions (he once
famously called "Casablanca" "Casablank"), the essay proclaimed
Farber's preference for actors and directors whose art "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."

Thus he praised John Wayne and Jason Robards as termite actors and, in
other cultural arenas, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald as termite
writers.

Admirers of Farber observed that his own career arcs reflected the
"termite behavior" he extolled.

He was a carpenter who turned scraps of wood into sculptures, a critic
with a highly visual sensibility who regarded movies as spatial
inventions, and an artist who stopped writing about films and instead
conveyed his ideas about them in paintings.

"The painting and the criticism were all part of the same continuum,"
said Peter Rainer, movie critic for the Christian Science Monitor. "He
saw things so powerfully and so individually."

As Farber once explained: "What I'm doing in painting is pretty much
creating movies. I'm lining up objects and lining up paths through the
painting, pretty close to the way a movie director makes a movie."

His work, through all its phases, reflected a bristling intellect, that
of someone who was "less a pedant than a hipster," critic J. Hoberman
wrote in an appreciation this week in the Village Voice. "He had superb
taste and fantastic range."

He was born Emanuel Farber on Feb. 20, 1917, in Douglas, Ariz., a
copper-mining town near the Mexico border where his Russian Jewish
immigrant parents ran a dry goods store. He moved with his family to
Vallejo, Calif., in 1932.

He briefly attended UC Berkeley before transferring to Stanford
University, where he began to study art. After a year, he enrolled at
the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

Hoberman called him a "congenital maverick," a disposition that
appeared in full reign by his college years.

Shirking the Works Project Administration, the Depression-era program
that employed many starving artists, Farber decided to become a
carpenter and spent the next few decades earning a living as a
construction worker in Washington, D.C., and later in New York.

But he continued to create art and in 1942 began writing about it for
the New Republic. He wrote one of the first favorable reviews of
Jackson Pollock.

When the New Republic's legendary film critic, Otis Ferguson, died in
action in World War II, Farber shifted to the movie beat.

It was an exciting time to make the switch, as writers such as Ferguson
and James Agee were changing film criticism in the 1940s.

When Agee left the Nation to write scripts in Hollywood in 1949, Farber
took his place.

In time, Farber's film criticism would be published in other journals,
including Artforum, Time, Commentary and Film Comment.

His work was mentioned in the same breath with that of Agee and
Ferguson and, later, with two other influential critics, Pauline Kael
and Andrew Sarris.

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary