Closer and closer readings: Farber on Film

An essential volume on any film-lover's shelf, the new Farber on Film: the Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, $40 US/$50 CAN) was edited by Robert Polito, who authored a terrific Jim Thompson biography some years back called Savage Art. Farber died last year at the age of 91. He hadn’t written about film since the 70s, when he dedicated himself full-time to painting. Yet his perspective retains a colossal vitality. He wasn’t bent on prescience. On the contrary, he was rigorous about seeing movies as they played to their moment in time. (It’s why he was wrong about the protagonist’s motivation in Taxi Driver—Travis Bickle’s gnomic personal obsessions have aged better than Farber’s suggestion that he should have been driven by pure need for celebrity.) But Farber immersed himself in films with an observational prowess that the rest of us are still trying to catch up to.

Taxi Driver

As promised in the subtitle, this doorstop delivers the whole course of Farber’s critical career, nearly 800 pages worth. The book has an exhaustive index and lends itself to random browsing, but there’s something cathartic in reading from cover-to-cover, in watching Farber develop his sensibility through the 40s in regular columns for The New Republic or The Nation before seeing that sensibility come to full fruition in the expansive essays that populated his revered late collection Negative Space. As Polito notes in his superb introduction, “Farber is perhaps the only American critic of modernism to write as a modernist.” From the first sentence Farber is cantankerous and muscular and eager to push the language. From the first he’s broad in vision, weaving the state of wartime US politics and culture, the state of film industry and film art, into his arresting, provocative prose. From the first he thwarts the urge toward quick-fix criticism so that you can’t even tell if he likes something, and who cares when he’s drawing us always closer to really seeing and hearing what the movies are doing, what they can do, what they don’t do, what they should.

Double Indemnity

The title Negative Space is apt: Farber can be pretty damned negative at times—at first blush you might wonder if he actually likes movies—while his roaming senses, trained by painting and photography, not to mention sports, always peruse the whole of the filmic space, digging into corners, probing the cavities, sometimes at the expense of certain elements we often cling to as being essential, like theme. While getting high on his championing of underdog works like Moontide or The Set-Up or anything produced by Val Lewton, my head spun and my jaw dropped when Farber, at times given to contrarianism, laid into Double Indemnity, The Magnificent Ambersons, Laura, My Darling Clementine, The Third Man, Sunset Blvd with such merciless, surgical precision. But Farber's readings feel more alive, more actively wrestling with these films and what they represent—where they fall in the culture—than the vast bulk of comfortably reverential, historically assured writing they’ve generated from hundreds of other writers—myself included. True, Farber’s take on Rashomon feels excessively sharpened by preconceived suspicions about Kurosawa’s flashy technique while basically ignoring the dark tide of uncertainty that undercuts its every scene, just as his dismissal of Billy Wilder’s cynical adoration of tough-talking lowlifes seems the product of Farber’s general repugnance toward Wilder’s employment of gloss. But unlike every other critic who’s ever used that laziest of pejoratives, “arty,” Farber invested the first half of his career in defining precisely what sort of threat studio era “artiness” posed.

High Sierra

While working through Farber’s ongoing reports from the American cinema of the 40s and 50s there were times I wondered if his division of films into the economical/unassuming/action-driven and the pretentious/Oscar-baiting/self-consciously flashy wasn’t too reductive, not to mention highly oriented toward, and more forgiving of, what can’t help but feel like an almost exclusively masculine sensibility. Yet the narrative inherent in Farber on Film, the long and dogged establishing of a perspective, builds in increments, shaping itself through reflection, reassessment, comparison and cultural change, until we arrive at the first definitive statement of Farber’s thesis-in-progress, the 1962 essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.’ “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” White Elephant Art, by contrast, is plagued by “a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film.” Farber zeroes in on something that can manifest as many things for different viewers: spontaneity, abandon, risk, freshness, process-over-product, attentiveness to the full measure of what film can access, openness to accident. It also favours acting that seizes our fascination by being nothing more than, as he writes in ‘The Decline of the Actor,’ “simply curiosity flexing itself,” that prizes the fleeting exhilaration of something as ephemeral as Bogart glancing up at a street sign when he didn’t have to; the way Ida Lupino "works closely and guardedly to the camera, retracting into herself, steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching"; by the presence of Liv Ullman, "one of those rare passive Elegants in acting who can leave the screen to another actor and still score." The Elephant vs. Termite perspective found Farber embracing B-movies, where filmmakers were better able to wriggle free of the front office and quietly produce subversive wonders in the margins of often seemingly negligible material. It found Farber embracing sly supporting performances that could almost function as critiques of the pompous leads surrounding them. From ‘Pish-Tush’: “Movies that have become classics… are never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in the back of the static mannered acting of some great star.” But while Farber’s dichotomy remained in place, what compelled Farber changed radically as the 1960s changed assumptions about what might constitute artiness, termites and elephants. His gradual admiration and rich appreciations for Godard pays off all the more for the insights of his early skepticism. Defenses of Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks became defenses of artists as potentially "arty" as Chantal Ackerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog. He's actually quite friendly to Easy Rider, and to Terrence Malick. And far from cultivating a strictly male perspective, Farber gradually began to co-author essays with his wife Patricia Patterson. Among some of the best late essays are exhaustive assessments of Herzog, Luis Buñuel and Nicolas Roeg.

Farber, with typewriter and white-out

What’s great about Farber on Film is that it emphasizes how good criticism takes nothing for granted. Writing an essay called ‘The Subverters’ in 1966, when film studies departments and popular critics were busy trying to build a canon, “to bring some order and shape to film history,” Farber declared such efforts “doomed to failure because of the subversive nature of the medium: the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of a film.” This persistent unruliness of movies is among the things that make it so seductive to some and infuriating to others. The medium is all about motion, and it refuses to sit still and politely concede to definitive, settled judgments. So Farber moved along with it. His opinions were strong and ruthless—and always open to adjustment. He’s one of the only critics whose reviews the reviewed filmmakers—that all filmmakers—can actually learn from, to say nothing of audiences. I know I’m a better, more fulfilled, more stimulated film watcher for reading him. I only hope it can make me a better film critic, too.

Irreconcilable differences: Rashomon

It gushes off the edges, crashes through the holes where the roof has fallen in, stabs into the puddles and washes across the whole scene in great silvery sheets. The torrential rain at the start of Rashomon (1950) feels nearly apocalyptic, and the grandiose wreck of a city gate where it all takes place does nothing to break up the forbidding gloom. A young priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a middle-aged woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) take shelter there, seated together, not conversing, though through those thick lips encircled by an unkempt beard the woodcutter keeps muttering “I don’t understand…” A third man (Kichijiro Ueda), some guy just trying to get out of the downpour, barges in, starts a fire, gets them talking. He wants to hear a good story, and winds up with four of them, all variations on the same event, none of them matching up. That’s Rashomon, a film so persuasive in its perplexity it’s become an adjective. It won an Oscar, and the Golden Lion at Venice. It introduced Akira Kurosawa to the world—the West especially—and the world watched in fascination despite the film’s refusal to elucidate its central mysteries. It ensured us that our memories are incompatible, but through the movies at least each of them could be true for the time it takes to tell them.

Rashomon has been circulating in a newly restored print. It hits Metro Cinema this coming weekend, a place where Kurosawa’s oeuvre has always found a welcome home over the years and hopefully will for years to come. I’ve seen it more times than almost any other film, and its singular mood never fails to captivate me. An inspired amalgamation of two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (‘Rashomon’ and ‘In a Grove’), the narrative is a sort of labyrinth, a web of flashbacks within flashbacks, unreliable narrators having their individual narratives re-told by other, only slightly more reliable narrators. Yet it’s terribly entertaining, even while confusing the hell out of you.

So the woodcutter journeys deep into a sun-dappled grove. Just how deep we get a strong sense of from the multitude of angles and compositions granted us by Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who seemed to prowl through the trees and shrubs and even pointed the camera straight at the sun, a move which dazzled all his contemporaries anxious to find rules to break. Somewhere in this grove the woodcutter finds a lady’s hat, and then a dead body. There’s a trial, where a judge never seen or heard lets elicits testimonies from those connected to the incident, including the alleged killer, a known bandit (Toshiro Mifune, first seen staring into the clouds like a sick animal), the wife of the dead man (Machiko Kyo), and, in an especially chilling sequence, the dead man himself (Masayuki Mori), speaking through a medium and giving no comforting reports from the afterlife. The bandit meets the couple in the woods, tricks the husband, ties him up, and ravishes the wife. This much is basically clear. But what were the circumstances of the husband’s death? A fight? A killing? A suicide?

The performances are each compelling, varying wildly in tone—Mifune almost hysterical in his braggadocio; Kyo wounded, maybe conniving, sliding seamlessly between femme fatale and helpless victim; Mori stoic, pathetic, and in death harrowingly lonely—but united in their synchronized ambiguity. A fourth variation is given that might resolve the contradictions, but even this becomes suspect. The cry of an abandoned baby eventually brings a close to the string of irresolvable storytelling. Some find the baby’s eleventh-hour intervention sentimental, but it strikes me above all as Kurosawa’s way of imparting that life simply goes on, even when the only thing certain is infinite uncertainty. It finally doesn’t matter to us what really happened in the grove that day, and how justice is finally meted out isn’t even mentioned. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the collective crannies of each of the stories. Everyone has their reasons for telling what they do, so it’s hard to say who to should trust. But if I had to, I’d put my money on the dead man.

Church and state of uncertainty

If, like me, you’ve never seen John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, you may want to avoid learning too much about Doubt, the new film version adapted and directed by Shanley himself. Set strictly within the confines of a Bronx Catholic School in 1964, it’s a dramatic meditation on the dichotomy of ambiguity and faith, or as two characters put it, proof and certainty. There’s pleasure to be had in watching the events unfold blind, learning the facts to be debated only as they arise, piece by carefully doled-out piece.

Having said that, many of you will catch on to where this is heading from the outset, in a scene where each of the central players are present and the conflict, in its way, is spelled right out for us. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives a sermon on the theme of doubt and how it might bring us together rather than leave us in lonely despair. As Flynn gives examples of internal sources of unease, little things “no one knows” about us, Shanley cuts to individuals in the congregation, listening with rapt attention and recognition. It’s as though Flynn’s speaking directly to them, as though he’s somehow looked into their souls and diagnosed their unspoken suffering. But when Flynn offers his last example of secret turmoil—“No one knows I’ve done something wrong”—the camera rests firmly on Flynn himself. The moment is not exactly subtle, but it is elegant.

The evidence against Flynn, in a superbly amiable, layered performance from Hoffman, racks up swiftly. Flynn smiles a lot, and offers physical affection to his kids. He takes an unseemly amount of sugar in his tea, makes unseemly jokes with his fellow priests. He likes his nails kinda long. He keeps little flowers in his Bible. Most importantly, he singles out Donald Miller (Joseph Foster, perfect), the school’s only black student, and an alter boy, for special attention. He becomes, in the words of one character, Donald’s “protector.” When Sister James (Amy Adams) eventually sees something that suggests an “unhealthy” bond being forged between Flynn and Donald, she brings the issue to the attention of Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the fearsome, ultra-stern school principal half-jokingly referred to by Flynn as a dragon. Very quietly and methodically, a campaign’s undertaken to get rid of Father Flynn, preferably following a full confession.

Much has been made about Shanley’s tip-toeing around the truth with regards to what unfolds behind closed doors in Doubt, but in all honestly I think the truth’s pretty damned clear, though more time with Donald, who’s conspicuously absent for much of the movie, might have shifted our reading of the scenario either way. The exact actions Flynn is guilty of are not so important to the story as the disturbing polarities of entitlement and genuine compassion he exudes. Admittedly, my reading probably says as much about my regard for the priesthood as it does Shanley’s intended subtext.

Personally, I’m more than fine with ambiguity—hell, Rashomon’s one of my favourite movies—if it yields something resonant or provocative about the subject being considered, and Doubt is absolutely engaging in this sense, thick with portent, psychological struggle, dynamic characterizations, uncomfortable questions. Yet, if anything, Shanley’s directorial style isn’t ambiguous enough. His is a strained sort of classicism, with ostentatiously skewed angles in moments fraught with paranoia. (A chamber drama about spiritual unease and all-too earthly temptations that relies on tight shots of faces negotiating how much can or cannot be reveled: we are very much in Ingmar Bergman territory here, and there were moments while watching Doubt that I really missed the late master.) Shanley’s approach is an odd mix of conservatism and flamboyance, and feels neither here not here. Still, the dialogues really grab you, the silences chill you, the photography, courtesy of Roger Deakins, is crisp, contained and magnificent. And the actors are most often brilliantly nuanced, even if one in particular, for better of for worse, really stands out from the others.

Streep’s is a fussed-over performance, featuring the broadest accent and most severe facial mask of the ensemble, a pale pinched pout under red-rimmed eyes that peers out from under that black bonnet in a way that renders Aloysius a spinster sucking on some holy lemon that she proudly refuses to reject. Yet I don’t think Streep’s detractors are going to convince anyone who’s actually seen this movie that her performance is anything less than riveting, driving every scene right to its precipice of tension—you can call her affected, but every affectation is loaded with purpose, and nothing is wasted.

The sole moment where Streep genuinely falters would have to be the film’s final one, a brief, sudden emotional thaw pitched to function as the sort of transcendental release perfected by Robert Bresson in Pickpocket (1959), and emulated in numerous movies since, most notably, and most effectively, in American Gigolo (80) and L’Enfant (05). But I think Shanley should probably be the one to ultimately take the heat for this limpid finale. Where he could have left us with a devastating whisper and fade, with another disarming close-up, he’s opted for weepy collapse, rising music and crane shot. Instead of drawing us in he casts out of the emotion, giving us no room to feel anything on our own. He may argue that he’s simply giving the audience the sort of big closing uplift they need, but what can I say? I have my doubts.