Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber: A Library of America Special Publication

The conditions of a minimal underground classic—that the shape of a film be discernible in any single frame; that a single-camera strategy be the basis for the movie’s metaphysic and any situation within the film; that the repetitions of the camera, which is always obviously present, creates a spirituality; and that the field of examination be more

When this movie’s going right, it makes the spectator aware not only of repetitiousness but of the actual duration of a commonplace act.

The movie is thoroughly a product of Seventies sensibility: the integrity of things as they already stand, the presentation of a text as a concrete object, and out-front admission of the means of production.

soporific

fortissimo

(“cliche is in a sense the purest art of intelligibility: it tempts us with the possibility of enclosing life with beautifully inalterable formulas, of obscuring the arbitrary nature of imagination with an appearance of necessity” is a Leo Bersani quote which appears twice in Rainer’s Film

swivet

Why is all the attention going toward the De Niro charm as a displaced country boy who is out of his depth, unless the authors are obsessed by Industry staples?

The point isn’t that people don’t have many sides to their character, but that the filmmakers, going for hot and heavy scores, bend the material for spiking effects.