Contents Nº 4

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Nº 4 MANNY FARBER: SYSTEMS OF MOVEMENT

Editorial
Gonzalo de Lucas

FILMS UNDER DISCUSSION. INTERVIEW

ABSTRACT

In this conversation, Jean Pierre Gorin and Kent Jones evoke and comment on the working methods and some of the main ideas of Manny Farber’s work, in contrast with the usual methods of film criticism: Farber’s writing accepts its own contradiction, staying away from categorization and aggressive classification, avoiding to depart form the synopsis. Farber searched for the DNA of his time in the movies, he conceived the cinematographic work as action, the images as plural, to focus most of his observations on the body of the actor, the set or the musicality of the film.

Jean-Pierre Gorin & Kent Jones

DOCUMENTS. 4 ARTICLES BY FARBER

The Gimp
Manny Farber

Ozu's Films
Manny Farber

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Manny Farber & Patricia Patterson

Nearer My Agee to Thee (1965)
Manny Farber

DOCUMENTS. INTRODUCTIONS TO MANNY FARBER

Introduction to 'White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art and Other Writings on Film'
José Luis Guarner

Termite Makes Right. The Subterranean Criticism of Manny Farber
Jim Hoberman

Preface to 'Negative Space'
Robert Walsh

Other Roads, Other Tracks
Robert Polito

The Filmic Space According to Farber
Patrice Rollet

ARTICLES

Hybrid: Our Lives Together

ABSTRACT

This article examines Manny Farber’s career path and the stylistic changes stimulated by the arrival of Patricia Patterson in his life, with the opening of a sensibility revealed in different stages of his work. The essay reflects on the influences their relationship had on Farber’s methodologies, techniques, and the overall aesthetics of his critical and pictorial work.

Robert Walsh

The Dramaturgy of Presence

ABSTRACT

Based on The decline of the actor (1957) and other writings of Manny Farber, the filmmaker Albert Serra reflects on different models of interpretation and his own method of filming actors in this paper. Confronting the mechanic purity of Keaton or Laurel and Hardy, to the progressive intellectualization of Chaplin, Serra points out that an actor should offer no significance, but be the emotion that derives out of the dramaturgy of its presence, as results form films by Warhol, Carmelo Bene o Jean Marie Straub. In accordance with Farber, he comments that the actor cannot be “alive” as a character and simultaneously preserve the style of the film. He himself is the style. He makes the symbiosis with the decor, the rhythm, the color. This is why the actor should avoid the emergence of psychology. Thus, Serra explains that his decision to shoot in digital obeys to the fact that it is a more simple format to serve the actors as a performer, and that his method comes down to the principle that the technique should always be prepared to capture the actor’s inspiration, and that this can arise in the most unforeseen moment or circumstance. Whatever the form of this wait might be, it produces a tension, and out of something as simple as this, the most refined staging emerges, because it is latent.

Albert Serra

The Kind Liar. Some Issues Around Film Criticism Based on the Case Farber/Agee/Schefer

ABSTRACT

Based on a text by Farber titled “Nearer my Agee to Thee”, this article reflects about the paradoxical ethics of film criticism, where bad faith and enthusiasm would be the fundamental values. Through the seemingly contradictory considerations of Farber around Agee, this paper proposes that enthusiasm, the pompous style and even the radicalism of taste, might be essential conditions for criticism to be able to share an experience and a subjectivity, being the former an expression of the cinematic image and the world. Making a linkage between these ideas, and others formulated by Jean-Louise Schefer in his introspective essays about the relationship of the spectator with cinema and memory, the author claims for the idea that, in some cases, there is no better way to be fair to a movie, than taking distance from it.

Murielle Joudet

The Termites of Farber: The Image on the Limits of the Craft

ABSTRACT

Based on some statements of Manny Farber about the actors, the storytelling, the industrial cinematographic production, and especially his reflections on the Termite Art concept, this paper studies the necessity of the contemporary filmmaker to appropriate the technological paraphernalia of industrial filmmaking, to favour a free and intimate creation with cinema medium. Thus, through Diary (1973-1983) by David Perlov and De Grote Vakantie (2000) by Johan van der Keuken, the figure of the filmmaker-artisan, and the notion of film essay are questioned, approaching as well, the particular relation between the filmmaker and the camera.

Carolina Sourdis

Popcorn and Godard: The Film Criticism of Manny Farber

ABSTRACT

This paper alludes the context of the publications in which Manny Farber collaborated, mostly through the forties and the fifties, in order to outline the singularity of his approach to film criticism. Particularly, this paper addressees the diversity of styles and filmmakers he was interested in, without establishing hierarchies between the different cinematographic fields. Thus, through the relation of Farber’s quotes on Sturges, Antonioni, Fassbinder, Godard or Snow, it is shown how he was able to encompass a broad spectrum of films, from the popular to the avant-garde.

Andrew Dickos