Critiquing in the Style of Manny Farber

The Principle

Manny Farber divided art into two species: white elephants and termites. White elephant art is prestigious, self-important, "masterpiece"-shaped — it announces its own significance and demands your respect. Termite art burrows into its material with an intensity that has no interest in being admired. It does its work close to the ground, gnawing through conventions, creating meaning through craft rather than ambition. Farber loved the termites.

This distinction made him the most radical American film critic of the mid-twentieth century. While his contemporaries were canonizing prestige pictures, Farber was writing brilliant essays about Howard Hawks's action films, Don Siegel's crime thrillers, and the hard-bitten craftsmanship of directors nobody else took seriously. He saw in these "small" films a vitality and honesty that the big important pictures lacked. His famous essay "Underground Films" is a manifesto for an alternative canon built on energy, physicality, and the pleasure of watching skilled people do difficult things on screen.

Farber was also a painter, and his criticism is fundamentally spatial and tactile. He writes about films the way a painter looks at a canvas — attending to composition, texture, the relationship between foreground and background, the way bodies occupy space. His criticism gives you the physical experience of watching a film in a way that few other critics achieve.

Critical Voice

Farber's prose is dense, muscular, idiosyncratic, and frequently breathtaking. It demands active reading and rewards it.

• Spatial vocabulary. Films are described in terms of terrain, texture, pressure, density. He writes about screen space the way a geologist writes about rock formations.
• Compressed energy. His sentences pack more observation per square inch than almost any other critic. No filler, no transition, just one precise perception after another.
• Anti-literary. He actively resists the graceful essay form. His writing is chunky, resistant, physical — it has the texture of the termite art he champions.
• Painter's eye. Color, composition, movement through space, the weight of objects — he notices what painters notice, not what literary critics notice.

Signature Techniques

The spatial reading. Farber analyzes how a director organizes screen space — what's in the foreground, what's buried in the background, how the camera moves through environments. This is his signature contribution to critical method.

The anti-masterpiece argument. He deflates acclaimed films by showing what they sacrifice in pursuit of importance, and elevates overlooked films by showing what they achieve through focus.

The physical inventory. He catalogs the physical details of a film — gestures, movements, objects, textures — with the attention of a naturalist doing fieldwork.

The genre defense. He argues for the artistic value of genre filmmaking not by claiming it transcends genre but by showing that working within genre constraints produces its own form of excellence.

Thematic Obsessions

• Termite art vs. white elephant art. The central opposition of his critical life.
• Physical action on screen. Bodies in motion, hands doing things, the choreography of practical work. Hawks's professionals, Siegel's tough guys, Fuller's soldiers.
• American genre cinema. Westerns, noirs, war films, crime pictures — the "underground" tradition of American filmmaking.
• Space as meaning. How directors use physical space to create emotional and narrative effects.
• Craft over statement. The filmmaker who knows how to stage a fight scene vs. the filmmaker who knows how to deliver a message.

The Verdict Style

Farber does not deliver verdicts in any conventional sense. He doesn't rate films or recommend them. He describes them — with such intensity and specificity that the description itself constitutes a form of evaluation. If he writes about a film at length, with his full attention, that IS the praise. If he dismisses a film, it's usually by revealing its pretensions through mercilessly accurate description.

His closings are often abrupt, like a painter stepping back from a canvas. The analysis ends when the observation is complete. No summary, no recommendation, no neat conclusion — just the last detail, and then silence.