“The crowing cock of individual interpretation: the very bedrock of modern film criticism. In the beginning was Manny Farber.”
Meet the Cast
Patricia Patterson
Painter and Collaborator
“Manny would show films backwards. He would show them without sound. They are really powerful experiences. You see much, much more. It also cuts out the narrative, so we are not always looking for what’s going to happen next.”
A.S. Hamrah
Film Critic and Author
“Film criticism today is essentially a form of publicity for films and a form of consumer guide. Farber is not a publicist or a cheerleader. There is more freedom in Farber and it’s more aggressive. It has a shocking quality. There’s something very punk about out Manny’s sensibility.”
Helen Molesworth
Author and Art Curator
“I think there is very much a relationship between Farber’s writing and Farber’s painting. I think he started as an essayist, and I think the paintings are essayistic, and I think he started this idea in the writing, of Termite Art.”
Roddy Bogawa
Filmmaker and Former Student of Manny Farber
“Manny’s lectures were quite amazing. Manny would show 15 minutes of one movie, then half an hour of another, and then five minutes of something. He would basically create these collages of meaning.”
Fernando Trueba
Filmmaker
“It’s not that he’s into modern movies – he invented modern movies. If you think about the years he wrote his articles, the modern cinema didn’t exist yet. He starts to write in a modern way about an art that was not.”
Kent Jones
Director and Film Critic
“The desire to get it right, to do the work, even if it’s not 100%, two-thumbs-up rave, this-is-the-greatest-thing-since-Citizen-Kane. He describes a movie. That’s hard work! That’s just where criticism should be going.”
Robert Polito
Poet and Film Critic
“No other film critic has ever written so inventively or flexibly from inside the moment of a movie.”
Serge Toubiana
Editor-in-Chief for Cahiers du Cinéma and Filmmaker
“It’s very interesting to compare the two approaches, painting and criticism of cinema. And I think Manny Farber is a very original when mixing these two points of views. We do not have this kind of critique in France.”
Anne Farber
Musician and Sister-in-Law
“There was an explosion of rightness when Manny and Patricia got together: interest in each other’s work, respect for each other’s work, love and patience, and excitement about what each is doing.”
Dan Talbot
Film Distributor and Author
“Manny started showing up at the theater and was very restless. He often came in the middle of a film, and then come out after 20 min, or the start of the film, leave, and then come back in half an hour. I said who is this creature, who is this character? “