Reel Crank: On Manny Farber’s Negative Space

Manny Farber is the Raymond Chandler of American film criticism. His adrenaline prose has been pumping since 1942, when he began reviewing for the New Republic. Over the succeeding four decades, he kept his writing lean and mean, florid and furious, absolutely unique. He reviewed for Time, the Nation, the New Leader, Artforum, and a parcel of other publications. In the late 1970s his successful career as a painter increasingly took center stage, and film gradually lost an important, always surprising apologist.

I first learned of Farber’s criticism about twenty years ago, at the height of my enthusiasm for the films of the B-movie producer Val Lewton, who assembled a kind of atelier for writers, directors, cameramen, and actors to churn out low-budget horror movies of extraordinary beauty and, time permitting, intelligence (including The Seventh Victim, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Curse of the Cat People). A friend gave me a copy of the 1971 edition of Farber’s Negative Space, a collection of his reviews that contains a brief obituary consideration of Lewton, written in 1951 for the Nation, and I became an instant convert, as much to the energy of the writing as to the writer’s opinions, which were singularly cantankerous. At the time, I was so thrilled to have encountered someone else’s thinking about Lewton that I didn’t notice just how elegantly parsimonious Farber was in his postmortem critique, which, typically, leads with a vice to identify a virtue. He cut to the core of Lewton’s methodology, observing that the producer “hid much more of his story than any other filmmaker, and forced his crew to create drama almost abstractly with symbolic sounds, textures, and