Manny Farber, major film critic and painter, has passed away at the age of 91.
See Ken Tucker’s August 18 post on the EW blog, "Remembering Manny Farber," which begins with these paragraphs:
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Manny Farber, who died last night at the age of 91, was one of the 20th Century’s greatest critics, as well as a powerful painter in his own right. Notice I didn’t just say "film critic" — Farber wrote primarily about the movies, but his collection of film criticism, Negative Space, is essential to understanding all modern non-academic criticism. Farber established a tone, cleared a patch of cultural landscape, and filled it with more ideas, opinions, and attitude than a thousand reviewers and bloggers — not just in movies but in music, television, book, and art criticism too — will ever muster.
With the exception of Pauline Kael, Farber was probably the movie critic other movie critics most often quoted, particularly his hugely influential 1962 essay "White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art," which came as close to anything he wrote to boiling down his critical creed. In that piece, Farber positioned himself ferociously against what he called the "self-aggrandizing masterwork" that "treat[s] every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity." In opposition to this he championed "termite art," which “goes always forward eating its own boundaries… leav[ing] nothing in its path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." At a time when crap nostalgia is routinely praised with unthinking effusiveness, it’s harder now to appreciate how daring and emboldening it was to read Farber’s championing of supposedly such minor work as the then-ignored Westerns of director Budd Boetticher and the face-slamming camerawork of director Sam Fuller.
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For the rest of Ken’s report, click here.
Also just a click away are Ted Burke’s "Like It Or Not" appreciation of Manny and the Movie City Indie‘s feelings on Farber’s demise.
Here is one of Manny Farber’s remarkable paintings:
