LUX Notes: On film critic and artist Manny Farber

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LUX Notes: On film critic and artist Manny Farber

Editorial
5 Feb 2010

Rat Life and Diet in North America, Joyce Wieland

Inspired by the recent publication of Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (2009), we are dedicating a mini-season to the work of Farber and his collaborator, Patricia Patterson. As an introduction, we've mined this exhaustive new volume of his writing to see what the legendary critic, painter, teacher and carpenter had to say about some of the films in our collection.

George Kuchar

Tambellini's paradise, the Gate, on Second Avenue, starts as an entrance to an old apartment house, moves through a 1920's marble hallway, and engulfs the customer in a black chamber. God help him. The big sensation here is the ancient unreliable floor, which, like the ceiling in this blitzed miniature cathedral, is indescribable. Sometimes, the shredded carpeting, with its patches of masking tape, feels as spongy and sandy as the beach at Waikiki... There is a bombed-out area in the front half, which houses the screen, and a number of wooden constructions that have been started by a nonunion carpenter and then thrown up as a bad job....

Ribald, inexplicable, Hold Me While I'm Naked is a hit-miss funny film because, like the Gate Theater, it seems a mockery of the movie courses now taught in every university. For the Kuchars, Edison has just invented the movie camera, and the industry is getting ready for its infancy. Even the various themes that come back like a belch in Underground film - the big party or orgy, lyricism in the bathroom, the body beautiful or ugly, genre work around the film-maker's home, exotic clutter - are all present in any Kuchar two-reeler.

In a ribald comedy about two marriages gone flat, the cornerstone of humor is anything that can be exaggerated, bushwhacked, so that it is fashionably out of kilter, gruesome. The most toothsome of its actors - a grotesque bratwurst played by Bob Cowan - has such funny factors as straight-cut long hair parted in the middle, skinny legs, a pillow beneath his shirt. His comedy, a sluggish, witless version of a a type of goon comedy kids sometimes use in their play-acting, is built around a bent-kneed walk that suggests his body is a heavy flour sack.

Experimental Films, February 1968

Joyce Wieland

Joyce Wieland's 1933, an even harder haiku-like movie to examine in depth, has the numerals of the title on a blank screen alternated with a street scene of quick walkers, who suggest the least-funny actors in old movies. Wieland repeats the recipe six times and that's it.

Her Rat Life and Diet in North America, which uses the scurrying and furtiveness of rodents to tell a parable about modern day revolutionaries, is marred by pretentious over-reaching. Using chapter-headings ("some of the finest were lost"), inserted new photos of Cuban heroes, the Canadian flag and anthem to make heavy statements about world politics, this Aesop's fable has the merriness and warm domesticity of a Beatrice Potter children's book, and some of the strong images and puerile construction ideas of a Godard.

Films at Canadian Artists '68

Ken Jacobs

Tom, Tom the Piper's Son is a shockingly different reconstruction film in which Ken Jacobs, a combined historian-painter-camera nut, too endlessly reshuffles the parts of a rustic 1905 film about two boys and a piglet being chased around one-sided barns and cottages... By jamming the spectator right up against the substance (a little boy rolls around with a pig in his arms, then rolls into the fireplace and is sucked up the chimney) and looking for the essential-irreducible elements of film, he is in the forbidding serra-snow area where the concepts of all his contemporaries are challenged.

Ten Best Films of '69

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