Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber
*Starred Review* With serious film criticism probably in an inexorable decline due to vanishing venues for publication and the dumbing-down of the moviegoing audience, these writings by the late Farber (1917–2008) constitute a pointed reminder of what will be lost. Farber is best known for championing the B movies of such maverick filmmakers as producer Val Lewton and director Sam Fuller, most notably in a signature 1962 essay in which he excoriated moribund white elephant art and praised the termite art made by eager, eccentric artists, art that goes always forward eating its own boundaries. This long-overdue volume amasses all of Farber’s cinematic writings, from weekly reviews for the New Republic and the Nation in the 1940s and ’50s to wider-ranging essays of the ’60s and ’70s for such specialized publications as Artforum. Throughout, Farber’s iconoclastic viewpoints—he panned The Magnificent Ambersons and Casablanca—and virtuosic prose provide limitless rewards for readers who can negotiate his unexpected intellectual and stylistic turns. The insight and imagination Farber brings to his subjects, whether a Bugs Bunny cartoon or, in his last published film writing, the uncompromising French masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, is an exemplar for criticism of any sort. --Gordon Flagg