`On Detour' sketches broad truths of Farber's life
Robert L. Pincus . The San Diego Union - Tribune . San Diego, Calif.: Jan 25, 2004. pg. F.9
Copyright SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE PUBLISHING COMPANY Jan 25, 2004
The title of "On Detour With Manny Farber," a new documentary on the great painter from Leucadia, is in the spirit of the artist's work. His pictures take the viewer in many directions, visually and thematically. The digressive style of the film, which premieres Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KPBS, mirrors that of his paintings.
It's Farber himself who recommends this approach, at the outset, in his characteristically forthright way. Locally based co- directors Robert Greaves and Paul Alexander Juutilainen -- each with well-received documentary films to his credit -- were clearly open to the painter's advice.
Some of Farber's self-deprecating humor comes across in this recommendation.
"I'm not sure a lot of this work is any damn good," he says, "but at least you'll be telling them (the viewers) about something they don't know about."
This from a man who has accomplished more as a painter and critic than most people manage in either medium. Since 1998, when Farber's writings -- a few co-authored with his wife, Patricia Patterson -- were republished in an expanded edition, his reputation as a film critic has grown. (He stopped publishing new criticism in the 1970s.) Even in earlier decades, such peers as Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag spoke of his work with piled-on superlatives.
The film arrives just after his major retrospective closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, on Jan. 6. The show moves on to Austin and New York, but it is a shame that "On Detour" couldn't have aired while the exhibition was on view in La Jolla so inspired television viewers could then venture to the museum.
Compressing a many-faceted 86 years into a half-hour format isn't a realizable ambition. The filmmakers clearly know this.
They touch on the details of Farber's life quickly: the years in New York when he rose to prominence as a film critic for the New Republic, the Nation and Time and became part of the circle of artists that included Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell; the move to California, in 1970, to take a teaching position at UCSD; and the retirement from teaching in 1987 to devote himself to painting. "On Detour" is a sketch at best, and it's a sketch with some nicely rendered details and some fuzzy ones.
The best parts of the film are the footage of Farber working in the studio, and the vignettes of him talking about his paintings and the memories or ideas these images evoke. Fittingly, it's the small moments in the film that work best. For if there is a central premise to his thinking and work, it's to distrust grandiose ideas and art -- what he calls "white elephant art." Its favored opposite is "termite art," works that succeed by burrowing into a subject and exploring it through circuitous paths.
One wonderful vignette in "On Detour" reveals the intensity of Farber's commitment to and passion for his craft. He demonstrates how the softness of a brush stroke doesn't do what he wants. The rougher application with a palette knife or stick does.
"I like my paintings to be ferocious around the edges and inside," he explains.
When the camera returns to the paintings, we see what he means. They are lush with seductive color and rife with fruit, vegetables and objects. But the forms bristle with energy.
Another terrific couple of minutes occurs while Farber is looking at the obliquely autobiographical "Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz." (1979), the town where he was also raised. He recalls how everybody in his family talked about movies, and there was a kind of competition to see who could be more witty than the last. It's almost inevitable he would become a movie critic, Farber implies.
The film generally bogs down in the sequences that gather the artist and Patterson with three colleagues at Quint Contemporary Art, his longtime local gallery, to look at key works installed for the occasion. All of the invited guests -- notable art historians Sheldon Nodelman and Sally Yard as well as the accomplished filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin -- know Farber's work intimately. All have chronicled it eloquently. But on camera, there is too much silence and too little said.
The notion of having Farber read from his writings doesn't work either. In fact, Greaves and Juutilainen, to their credit, let the artist say as much. "I can't do this anymore," he declares at one point, and puts down the book.
By contrast, it's in the flow of conversation that Farber's thinking about movies comes to life. While talking about Howard Hawks' "His Girl Friday" (1940), he points out that it's not the story that keeps his attention, but the visual and aural details. He excitedly describes a scene in which Rosalind Russell moves through the newsroom and the camera parallels her movements precisely. It's as if he's describing a painting. The emphasis on the visual qualities of movies is one of the things that make his writing distinctive.
A good sampling of stellar paintings makes appearances. At the end of the film we see Farber and Patterson simply looking at a picture, "Cezanne Avait Ecrit" (1986). It's profuse with details: flowers in vases, fruit, pads of paper and meticulously painted facsimiles of notes he's scribbled about this or that. It's the sort of picture you could scrutinize for hours with pleasure.
And that's the point: These paintings are about the joy of looking. He's left criticism behind because there was greater joy, for him, in painting and living the life of a painter. "On Detour" conveys that broad, simple truth of Farber's life as well as the joyful approach to life that he and Patterson -- also a highly accomplished artist -- have created for themselves in Leucadia. In this sense, Juutilainen and Greaves have served Farber and his vision well.
"On Detour With Manny Farber"
9 p.m. Tuesday on KPBS, Channel 15 (cable 11)
Robert L. Pincus: (619) 293-1831; robert.pincus@uniontrib.com
