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.
Negative Space: Manny Farber On The Movies
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Book Description
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.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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
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
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I did not know enough background to really appreciate this book. I have been going to movies for over 50 years and i am an artist with a BFA and an MFA and it was still a difficult book for me. The title said to me that he would discuss spatial things about the movies. But he talks about many things and not spatial things.
13 of 24 people found the following review helpful
By Steve Sailer
Format: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
Format: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.
12 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Farber found the best metaphor for his inclinations as well as his work: the termite, who burrows, chews, and undermines. Just as Thelonious Monk's solos softly undermine the themes on which they are constructed, so the bits of outrageous reality peeping into the Walsh films Farber so much admires undermine the fictional world Walsh has so carelessly constructed, and the critiques Farber savagely launches at film festivals and white elephant movies undermine their subjects by his relentless burrowing.
0 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By J. Blenio
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I got my purchase before christmas. Loved the personal note that was inside. Thanks for the info. :)
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 62
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- The Lady Eve by Preston Sturges on page 100, page 176, and page 180
- Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder on page 62, page 72, and page 87
- The Third Man by Graham Greene on page 38, page 39, and page 41
- "Citizen Kane" Book (Screen and Cinema) by Orson Welles on page 78, page 81, and page 144
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