Make Space for This

"Negative space, the command of experience which an artist can set resonating within a film, is a sense of terrain created partly by the audience's imaginationand partly by camera-actors-director." 

In Negative Space (Hillstone Publishing, 1971), Manny Farber tackles the basic nature of the movies, and the role of the critic and the power he wields.

Farber pays homage to the true masters of the male action film such as Howard Hawks (whom he hails as a bravado specialist, a genius, a poet), Raoul Walsh, and Anthony Mann- and John Ford pre-Stagecoach. He approves of the witty economy and the free-wheeling dialogue in the movies of Preston Sturges, and the lyricism and the wackiness in Samuel Fuller’s. He counts Jean-Luc Godard, George Kuchar, Satyajit Ray and Andy Warhol among the smart people in films.

(But what do we make of it when he writes that of the French wizards Godard-Malle- Truffaut, it is the former who has so consistently made him feel like a stupid ass?)

Farber also salutes the underappreciated lesser directors of movies about cowboys, gangsters and soldiers: William Wellman, Keighley, Robert Aldrich, Zoltan Korda, John Farrow, and Phil Karlson. He believes Michael Snow is incapable of a callow, clumsy, schmaltzy move; and he thinks his Wavelength couldn’t be more taut or intelligent.

He contends that what separates them is their ability to handle drab material. A great director finds ways to work within the confines of a particular genre, and yet makes it his own.

Additionally, he cites the obsessive themes running through the movies of Sam Peckinpah and Orson Welles.

Here in Negative Space, Farber looks for earthiness, humanism and shape in the movies. While doing so, he displays his amazing powers of description and classification. For example, here’s what he has to say about a few actors:

On Belmondo: outlandishly coy and unfinished

On Bardot: coarse, spunky shrewdness

On Palance: fiercely elegant, better silent

 

As for acting itself, it can be distorted, emotionalized, stylized, or understated.

Here you will see how a star like Joan Crawford can have more authenticity, even though she may have less real skills. Or how a thespian like Liv Ullmann can let another actor take over the screen, yet still leave a mark.

Among the movies he reviews in this book, Farber finds Detective Story to be way more engaging than melodramas such as A Place in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire, which are equally lurid. He also proposes Sam Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets as the best war film since Bataan.

 

Naturally, one of the biggest pleasures in reading books like this is how certain personalities and movies fail upon assessment of the writer, like when he takes a shot at Catherine Deneuve.

For Farber, Frank Capra is a preacher and John Huston, Message Mad. He says Don Siegel has been wrongly deified by auteurists and Luis Bunuel, a man of fits and starts.

He bemoans “the success of efficient, hard-working mediocrities” in such fields as jazz, painting, the novel (Bellow! Cheever! Salinger!) and film (Delbert Mann, Kazan, Chayefsky).

Farber also takes jabs at the less talented De Sicas and Zinnemanns, and “the water buffaloes of film art: Stevens, Wilder, Clouzot.”

He points out the flaws of Huston and De Mille, and the defects of Antonioni, Richardson and Truffaut, even as he acknowledges that they are important directors.

He takes a stab at Psycho for its suppositions, and the movie’s advocates for heralding off-the-camera tricks rather than taking the movie for what is up on the screen.

Negative Space also covers the New York Film Festival in the late ‘60s, and explores the myths you can find in a film festival. He expounds on the particulars that make watching Eric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud a pleasure, and the levels that Bresson’s Mouchette moves on. He hails Faces as a real break-through in movie acting.

Farber discusses such movie trends and techniques as the Flat Man, the lead who does not have a past or a discernible future. Another is the Gimp, a string that is jerked by the film-maker when the movie has become safe, a shock tactic to make the movie artful. He charges A Place in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire particularly guilty.

Furthermore, he sings the praises of the bit player, who may not have range, but who has the power to stir those brief moments that energize a movie to life.

This is one book that bears re-reading.