Negative Space: Manny Farber On The Movies [Paperback]

Manny Farber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Manny Farber's early film criticism appeared in the New Republic, the Nation, and theNew Leader; his essays with Patricia Patterson were published by Artforum, City, and Film Comment. A lifelong painter, Farber has exhibited his work nationally since 1958 and has had retrospectives at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum, Brandeis University's Rose Museum, and museums in the San Diego area. He and Patterson live in Leucadia, California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 412 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; Expanded edition (March 21, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306808293
• ISBN-13: 978-0306808296
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #994,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A disappointment, June 8, 2010

By 

R. J. C. Roeber (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Negative Space: Manny Farber On The Movies (Paperback)

I opened the book with high expectations: Farber has a reputation. I suspect this is, ipso facto, because he swims against the tide of received opinion - which goes down well in radical circles.
Some, very few, of his reviews were brilliant, mind-stretching. "Underground Films" was the best of these and justly famous. But, as I read on, I grew tired of the anti-intellectualism, the reflex dismissal of the currently-admired greats of art cinema and the elevation of the skillful journeyman storyteller. It is all very much in the tradition of American populist iconoclasm and, to my taste, tiresomely reductive.
His taste in the visual arts and music, which he uses to illustrate his points on films, is distinctly fallible. His use of language is often startling, occasionally apt but even more often random. Like a drive-by shooting he leaves a lot of collateral damage.
I'm sure he provides a material for excitable analysis in fetid film course seminars but, for the rest of us amateurs, I wouldn't recommend the book except for very selective reading. Start - and maybe finish - with "Underground".
JR

12 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Manny is likeable, but not really a good writer, July 8, 2003

By 

Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Negative Space: Manny Farber On The Movies (Paperback)

A cult book. Not being in on the cult, let me say that Farber had pretty good taste in movies, liking hard-boiled masculine shoot-em-ups in the Forties. And he is, apparently, a very good painter, still having one man shows today in his late eighties. Still, he was a hideously disorganized writer. Reviews seem to start and end at random points in his chain of thoughts. There are some good phrases, but I'd be hard pressed to recount many coherent ideas from his book. It's not that he's lacking good ideas -- in fact, he has too many. He's just not very good at putting them into a comprehensible form. If you are a fanatic for either forties tough guy directors or late sixties artsy directors, you'll no doubt benefit from grinding through the book, but for the general reader, it's a struggle.

I'm hardly surprised that he gave up reviewing over 25 years ago for painting. Writing just doesn't seem to be his strong suit.

5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Combative and Original, October 22, 2003

By 

"gloveinphilly" (New york, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Negative Space: Manny Farber On The Movies (Paperback)

This compilation of essays on film and art, written from the 1950s through the '70s, still stands out as amazingly sharp, combative, and original. Take Farber's legendary "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962); replace the notion of "great painting" with "relational aesthetics," and you see that artists like Allan Sekula follow the termite path while the Hirschhorns and Gillicks of the world are our own white elephants.