Reading the early pieces collected for the first time in Farber on Film-the reviews from the 40s and early 50s that first appeared in The New Republic and The Nation-you get a fresh and noisy sense not just of the movies of the period but of the period itself. In a just-published review of Farber on Film, Howard Hampton likens the tone of his writing very aptly to John Ashbery’s supremely clamorous poem “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.” His writing has often been compared to jazz but a certain strain of poetry might be an even more appropriate analogy for its most free-form moments. Mark: “the father and mother and the sweetheart.go around with a pleased-as-Punch look, as though they were eating each other and finding they were all made of delicious candy.” For free invention in this form there has not been his like. One way to evoke him would be simply to string together a succession of such phrases, like comparing Orson Welles in The Third Man to “a nearly satiated baby at the breast” or describing the protagonist of Rossellini’s Open City as “so strained, shrunken and starved he reminds you of a wet string” or writing of the home front drama The Eve of St. But on trying the experiment, I have to amend that: it’s impossible to find even one sentence that could have been written by anyone else. I was going to begin by saying that it would be hard to find two consecutive sentences in the film writings of Manny Farber that do not immediately signal his unmistakable presence.
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