My favorite critic-painter-teacher died on Sunday. Here is Criterion's short round-up:
The great American film critic Manny Farber died on Sunday night, August 17, at the age of 91. “The liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country every produced,” wrote Susan Sontag of the hugely influential Farber, who began writing on film in the early 1940s and was the critic first for
The New Republic and then for
The Nation and
Time. He was an early champion of the works of Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and Samuel Fuller, and famously coined the term “termite art” (as opposed to the insufferable “white elephant art”) to describe work that “goes forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity” (Phillip Lopate said of this statement, “Farber could have been talking about his own writing”!). Farber later turned more to avant-garde cinema. His writings on film were compiled in several collections, including
Negative Space. Farber was also a painter, and his art can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
More on Manny to come.
