Negative Space: Manny Farber On The Movies (Paperback)

~ (Author) "The saddest thing in current films is watching the long-neglected action directors fade away as the less talented De Sicas and Zinnemanns continue to fascinate..." (more)
Key Phrases: white elephant art, termite art, underground films, New York, The Far Country, Howard Hawks (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

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: 424 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: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #803,721 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 18 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)

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.

4 of 10 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 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.

11 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars extraordinary, January 2, 1999

By	Yuval Taylor (Chicago) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.