Manny Farber - Evenings-In take

http://evenings-in.blogspot.com/2005/04/manny-farber-film-critic-as-art-hunk.html

But to whom do tracts championing Hawks or the French New Wave sound radical now? Farber and film began to break apart in the post-60's era, and his late reviews sound puzzled by the advent of movies built by men educated on his precepts, but not his scruples. “Taxi Driver”? Farber's late career piece dedicated to this Scorcese/Shrader celebration of murder is ambivalent, appearing very near the end of "Negative Space," dripping palpable discomfort now as he witnesses his criticism's big influence on these guys, an influence as responsible for the bad parts in the flick as the good. Must have been bracing.

At this point in our Nation's cinematic life, Manny retreated from the critic's battle to inform and confront. He claims, believably, the break came when the public started embracing the mythic in earnest. The grand visions being manufactured by the New Hollywood (the old New Hollywood, of Coppola, Lucas, etc.), turned him off—and just when he thought film would break from the strictly small-time commercial, and give us the vast universe of the personal intelligence! Instead it decided to sell tickets, lots of tickets, and in unlocking this route to the mega-commercial with fake venerations of the commonly mythic, or mythically common, Hollywood lost Manny forever. More interesting to the Farb Man at the end were Herzog and Snow and Chantal Akerman (the names become less and less familiar the further we progress toward the end of his critical career, don't they? Wouldn't most "film fanz" of today shout, "Manny, lighten up! It's a story about a killer kabbie! Lean back and enjoy the ride!"). "

Was the problem that Hollywood started succeeding with brutal machines inspired in some perverse way by his own ideals? Or did he just lose interest, or get old? I think he recognized his interests had veered off into a scorched field of commercially useless art films, and he didn't like the idea of becoming irrelevant, "that old kook, that artist, Farber." It was great to play the prophet for a while, and then an apostle—but when nobody converts, you gotta change jobs fast. Becoming yet another irritating academic championing unseen art must not have appealed, so logically he gave up writing his elaborate criticism/poems for an audience so small and refined. He must have missed the bright lights, big city of the earlier days, and ultimately, he couldn’t stand to surrender all traces of populism. The goose was cooked once he saw "the public" wasn't going to follow him into these formalist art films and their aesthetic determinism. The fun for him must have always come in creating these masterpiece meditations with oodles of high art appeal as mere adornments for mass-media popular entertainments—a Marlowe-like detective, bent on discovering the transcendent art in the transient and commercial.