Hard-Sell Film Criticism

I’m not sure how I missed this: Manny Farber has died at the age of 91. The outpouring of tributes in the last few days (collected at GreenCine Daily) speaks for itself. I have the old edition of Negative Space (titled Movies) on my bookshelf. The second page of pull-quotes features raves from Jonas Mekas, Peter Bogdanovich, Dwight Macdonald and Pauline Kael. He would have to be a genius to reconcile those sensibilities. I first came upon Farber’s writings when I was writing my college thesis on Preston Sturges. Farber’s essay on Sturges, “Preston Sturges: Success in the Movies,” is one of his classics, but I had never heard of the painter-professor-critic at the time. Throughout my writing process, I would return to the essay, which was something of a harrowing experience for me. Every time I would find something Farber articulated that I had just begun to glimpse—no matter how many times I read it, he always beat me to the finish.

Paul Arthur and Manny Farber: we’ve lost two of our best.

~ by maxgoldb on August 20, 2008.