Manny Farber, at 91; influential film critic who decried pretentiousness

WASHINGTON - Manny Farber, an influential film critic whose essays and reviews punctured what he saw as self-serious art-house favorites - Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni - while celebrating the less-studied work of Laurel and Hardy, Howard Hawks, and John Wayne, has died.

Mr. Farber, 91, who also had a long career as an artist, died of bone cancer Aug. 18 at his home in the San Diego suburb of Leucadia.

Often mentioned with movie critics James Agee and Pauline Kael in terms of impact, Mr. Farber drew many admirers for his fierce opinions and irreverent voice.

Susan Sontag called Mr. Farber "the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced," adding that his "mind and eye change the way you see."

Mr. Farber's credo was best expressed in his essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," published in the journal Film Culture in 1962.

He offered a high-spirited attack on pretentiousness in movies whose style he described as "reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago."

He extolled the value of such marginalized genres as film noir and slapstick comedy, possessed of "no ambition towards gilt culture" and that aspired to leave nothing behind "other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity."

A prolific writer, Mr. Farber was most remembered for his defense of filmmakers, genres, and forms that would otherwise have been dismissed as "pop" or "pulp."

He was the first critic to champion the work of Hawks ("The Big Sleep"), Don Siegel ("Dirty Harry"), and Samuel Fuller ("Fixed Bayonets!"), as well as "Looney Toons" animator Tex Avery, among others.

His advocacy was not reserved for films whose accessibility disqualified them from the highbrow canon.

He is credited with discovering the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder ("The Marriage of Maria Braun"), and he also championed the austere work of such quiet, composed "structuralist" moviemakers as Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, and Ken Jacobs.

Mr. Farber traced his structuralist roots to his training as a carpenter in the 1930s, but they were perhaps most fully expressed in his paintings, which began absorbing most of his time and energy in the mid-1970s.

Much of his later work, done in collaboration with his wife, Patricia Patterson, featured train tracks and rebar, as well as quotidian desk items (paper clips, pushpins, tape).

For a series called "Auteur," he included movie props and handwritten pieces of film dialogue.

Farber taught art at the University of California at San Diego from 1970 to 1987, when he retired.

Emanuel Farber was born in Douglas, Ariz., a town near the Mexican border where his father owned a dry goods store.

His father had studied to be a rabbi and tried to make his store the town's intellectual center. The only competition, Mr. Manny Farber later said, was Stoloroff's dry goods, a block away.

"When the salesman came around with the Harvard Classics, how were they to divide them up between the Stoloroffs and the Farbers?" Mr. Farber told Art in America in 2004.

"They decided to split it, so one family would get from A to whatever the middle letter is, and the other person would get from there to Z. I could never figure out whether we got the best of the bargain."

The literary collection, he added, was the start of his intellectual exploration.

But his childhood also centered on sports - as an athlete and artist.

He said he began making caricatures of sports stars he saw in newspapers, and this exercise later deepened into a serious interest in drawing.

He attended Stanford University, the California School of Fine Arts, and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design in San Francisco before moving to Washington in 1939 with his first wife, Janet Terrace.

After working in carpentry and construction in Washington, Mr. Farber moved to New York in 1942, where he plunged into the city's lively community of artists, writers, and intellectuals. He began writing art and film criticism for the New Republic.

In 1949, Mr. Farber left the magazine and for the next two decades wrote for a variety of publications, including Time, the Nation, the New Leader, Artforum, and the men's magazine Cavalier. He continued to contribute to Film Comment and Francis Ford Coppola's City magazine until the mid-1970s.

His art criticism could be as vivid and playful as his paeans to low-budget "B" movies.

Of Matisse, he wrote that his "line is as much a thing of genius as Cary Grant's dark, nonchalant glitter. With one swift, sure, unbroken flip of the wrist he can do more for the female navel, abdomen, breast, and nipple than anyone since Maidenform."

His film writings were published in "Negative Space" (1971), an expanded edition of which came out in 1998.

Mr. Farber's marriages to Terrace and Marsha Picker ended in divorce.

He leaves his wife; a daughter from his second marriage, Amanda of San Diego; and a grandson.

For his own part, Mr. Farber evinced disarming humility when it came to his work.

"It used to scare me, talking to Pauline [Kael] about movies, because she was so certain," he told Art in America. "Her opinions were so strong the moment she left the movie. Criticism is very important, and difficult. I can't think of a better thing for a person to do."