HARD FACTS

IN 1978, THE BRITISH CRITIC RAYMOND DURGNAT JOINED THE FACULTY OF THE University of California at San Diego, where one of his new colleagues was the legendary painter and film writer Manny Farber. The following year, on October 27, he heard Farber give a talk at the Museum of Modern Art as part of a series of lectures by American film critics. Farber had finished his last major pieces—including four long essays for this magazine, co-written with his wife Patricia Patterson, on such subjects as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Taxi Driver, and Chantal Akerman—two years before. He was revered for his indelible style: a dense weave of description that focused intensely on a movie’s spatial arrangements and the ways in which actors moved, slouched, or breathed within a frame. In the valedictory essays he wrote with Patterson, whose influence on Farber is hard to overstate, it was as if that style had ripened as much as it could.

Then he came to MoMA. “Briefly,” Durgnat recalled, “Farber proposed looking at movies for the richness of their concrete details of the world, for the kind of physical-experiential weave through which painters work,” and for their way of “catching the texture and spirit of a longgone time for living, for living another set of human possibilities, in a way which criticizes and makes strange one’s own.”

Talking about a film, Farber had decided, meant describing its place within a social ecosystem—“a kind of idea of criticism as environment, territory.” It meant giving a sense of the mood and atmosphere of a given movie’s period and tracing the feedback loops films develop with the times and places from which they come. During his MoMA lecture, of which the following excerpts are the first ever published, he showed slides of images and clips of movies from the 1930s and 1970s, including Jean Renoir’s Toni, Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle, and Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers.

Like his writing, Farber’s talk exemplifies his resolve to look at a movie whole, taking account of its seemingly incidental details rather than its louder, more attention-grabbing motifs and themes. Criticism, he thought, had grown too precious about the film as an artistic statement, too inclined to burden every object on screen—Fassbinder’s jukeboxes, Nicolas Roeg’s lizards—with symbolic weight, and too quick to haggle over a director’s “signature” at the expense of the historically inflected weight