The Utopia of Film:
Chapter 30
For Manny Farber (1917-2008)
Every Tuesday in October 2008
On August 17, US painter and critic Manny Farber died in San Diego at the age of 91. For many cinephiles, Farber was the greatest film critic in the English language. His sensibility for the particular potentials of cinema, his idiosyncratic and inventive language which often recalled jazz improvisation, and his evaluation of American genre film made him an extremely influential figure without his ever having worked within mainstream media. Farber was the first to hail the “Termite Art” of action directors such as Howard Hawks, Sam Fuller, Anthony Mann or Raoul Walsh, while at the same time excoriating the “White Elephants” that stood tall at the Academy Awards. He wrote about B-movie producers and the pleasures of 7-minute animated films, at the same time appreciating the avant-garde and the modernist works of Godard, Akerman, Fassbinder and Straub/Huillet.
In the framework of the cycle The Utopia of Film, the Film Museum will show a small selection of works by filmmakers who Manny Farber engaged with in his essays, including films by Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Chuck Jones, Helen Levitt, Don Siegel, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Snow.
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