Above: Farber's painting A Dandy's Gesture (1977). Farber’s 1969 Howard Hawks essay––as hinted earlier––lodges a wry double self‑portrait: as he summons his own birthplace for a joke about small‑town
You don’t necessarily think of Manny Farber as your Baedeker to the shadings and luridities of mainstay American movie acting, as a dab hand of the concise plot summary that uncoils into deft film
Above: Manny Farber, Heiner Muller, and Jean-Luc Godard in California in the 1970s. Photo by Wim Wenders. The Farber equation is never simple. That sentence is a variation on a Samuel Beckett line
Other Roads, Other Tracks Criticism is very important, and difficult. I can’t think of a better thing for a person to do. —Manny Farber “One of the most important facts about criticism is obvious