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

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 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.

yeggs;

soporific

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.

fortissimo

The Man Who Cheated Himself.

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

(“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