This is the year that print film criticism went on life support, online film critics drafted sober eulogies and the rest of the world yawned distractedly while poised over the plug. Into the ill-attended open grave my colleague Lauren Wissot just tossed a meditation on film culture titled, “The Movie-Going Public.”
I dig it because it dares to take filmgoers as seriously as it does cinema itself. Further, it manages, mostly by way of example, to pee all over the very notion of a professional film critic. I use don’t use the term “pee” lightly but with great care, thinking of readers like Anonymous, who responded to Lauren’s post with, “You’re not an elitist. But you are crass, vulgar and unprofessional… Manny Farber is rolling in his grave.” I want Anonymous, if he or she is reading this, to imagine Mr. Farber howling in pain from the beyond at my using such a crude bathroom word as “pee” in reference to the profession he devoted his life to. But another dead 20th Century critic is probably grinning in his grave. James Agee: “I suspect I am, far more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving pictures, considerably experienced from childhood on in watching them and thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally without experience or even much second-hand knowledge of how they are made. It is my business to conduct one end of a conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating,
or illuminating.” (Props to Ryland Walker Knight.) …Read more
This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel’s You Must Remember This––which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall––is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I’ve seen this year.
“You must remember this,” is, of course, a lyric from “As Time Goes By,” the signature song from Warner Brothers’ Casablanca. From the opening montage of a tour through the WB backlot, set to a soundtrack of memorable lines from maybe a dozen and a half classic productions from that studio, Schickel’s film is devoted to anecdotal recall of Warner Brothers’ various signatures, from experts and witnesses who are dishy and not uncritical, but still often as sentimemtal as the song that Rick commands Sam to play again. From silent doggie star Rin Tin Tin (who, snarked writer and eventual head of production Daryl Zanuck, had the biggest brain on the lot) to the Busby Berkeley musicals that not so subtly told the viewer that “Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are gonna get laid, and we’re all part of it,” to the social issue films of the 30s which carried “a vision of the world that was darker, more cynical, and more problematic than any other studio’s,” Schickel finds a surprisingly rich balance between behind-the-scenes trivia and multi-layered criticism. Access to talking heads including Molly Haskell, Neal Gabler, Jeaninne Basinger and former WB contract player Ronald Reagan certainly helps with the gravitas.
Also surprising was the slightly salty candor that ran through Schickel’s Special Medallion acceptance chat, which both the honoree and the audience seemed to find too brief. Still, Schickel managed to get out som zingers involving Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, the youth of America and John McCain. Some highlights after the jump.
Ever since the great humanistic film critic Manny Farber died last week at the ripe old age of 91, writer/director (and former film critic and Kael acolyte) Paul Schrader, who so eloquently has been making the tribute rounds to Farber, has been on my mind. I’ve always been a fan of Schrader’s writing – as much for his fearless risk taking as for his Travis Bickle triumphs. American Gigolo, his very-1980 follow-up to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in which Richard Gere’s rent boy to rich older women Julian Kaye falls for Lauren Hutton’s senator’s wife Michelle Stratton while simultaneously finding himself a suspect in the murder of a “rough trick,” is typical Schrader, forever probing overlapping lurid worlds with the attention of an obsessive pathologist. Even with mediocre acting, earnest dialogue sometimes bordering on the heavy-handed, and predictable hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold asides, American Gigolo is still a fine slice of celluloid cheese, containing camerawork both sleek and fluid and that sexy sing-along anthem (“Call Me”!) complete with Debbie Harry’s French coos. Incidentally, I’ve always been a fan of male prostitutes as well. So why is it that I’ve never been a fan of this flick?
Mike Everleth passes on a philosophical Jonas Mekas quote on the purpose of critics/criticism: “If the critic has any function at all, it is to look for something good and beautiful around him, something that can help man to grow from inside; to try to bring it to the attention of others, explain it, interpret it — and not to clutch at some little pieces of dirt, or mistakes, or imperfections.”
David Edelstein jumps into the Remembering Manny Farber fray, with a personal anecdote. “Once I made the mistake of saying I thought a film was ‘about’ something. ‘About…’ he said, softly, and glanced at Patricia. ‘How can we say what a film is ‘about’? There are so many things…’”
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.’”
Film critic and artist Manny Farber died last night at the age of 91. As can be expected, David Hudson has already begun a prodigious link round-up at GreenCine, so I just want to point to a few online resources for those looking to bone-up on Farber’s work, or maybe even check it out for the first time.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Mike Everleth
A special round-up this afternoon, featuring bloggy memories of Manny Farber:
