A special round-up this afternoon, featuring bloggy memories of Manny Farber:
- “What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle,” writes Glenn Kenny. “I doubt that Farber was particularly surprised by Godard’s Breathless, because his criticism actively anticipated that film.”
- “To prove my size, and yours, here’s some of his enormity.” Ryland Walker Knight offers images of two of Farber’s paintings.
- “He remains our best,” says Ray Pride. “A curmudgeon, but a painstaking one who concedes that his effects are like the layering and smearing and reworking of layers of paint, that he is ‘unable to write anything at all without extraordinary amounts of rewriting.’”
Brandon Harris sent me a note about his stylish short film, Happiness is No Fun, which purports to be “a short blaxploitation tinged remake of Godard’s seminal Breathless.” It’s not as jokey or spoofy as that logline might lead you to believe–which might lead to some initial disappointments. On the whole, I thought it’s refusal to go to the genre+genre=joke route was refreshing, if at times it gets a little didactic and speechy in its insertion of racial politics. Watch it above, and check out Brandon’s blog here.
