r.i.p. manny farber

glenn kenny, and a whole lot more here, in the center column down a bit.

Any edition—there is also Movies, an ugly but complete reprint of the 1971 edition—is worth celebrating for the same reasons as any collection of “practical criticism” that displays flair and insight over an extended period: Jonathan Gold’s Counter Intelligence, Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guides, The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. (Not to mention the collected film writing of Kael, Andrew Sarris, Renata Adler, Agee, and Ferguson.) But the book’s singularity is not explained by the jar-of-cashews addictiveness common to its genre. None of the books just mentioned is merely a colloquy of freestanding aesthetic judgments; each determines a sensibility, if not a theory. But Farber’s seems uniquely tensed between the particular and the general, between the sense that the object of critical attention is being wrestled with in all its specificity and the impression that one is about to receive some broader enlightenment. This never happens; or, when it does, the illumination is partial, and comes from unexpected angles. More often, pinpoint observations and word-by-word stylistic decisions provoke questions which repeated readings deepen: just what is it for a film to be sustained? [franklin bruno]

some thoughts on Vermeer’s “The Concert”

i wrote this nearly 2 years ago but never posted it somehow

how vermeer used “grail geometry” to compose “The Concert”:

how vermeer used “grail geometry” to compose “The Concert”

a painting in the background (“The Procuress”) infers a sexual
relationship between the 3 musicians.

music and musicians were used to indicate sex and passion in dutch
painting as a rule apparently.

one critic mentions that the featuring of the right hand indicates
“moderation” as a theme, appropriate in the context of that interpretation
of the painting.

but to me – as one critic said — the man is removed from the room by
being placed in the painting-within-the-painting. to him this means the
man is outside the world of women. to me he is outside the painting as the
viewer is outside the painting, seeking to understand it, while also being
a part of it, implicated within. but a ghost, a figure of otherness never
a part of the whole or separate, suspended between the 2. perhaps this is
also a reference to the artist, always outside the scenes he paints. also
note the instrument in deep shadow in the foreground.

the red rectangle behind the man underlines his otherness/danger/sexual
threat.

if vermeer used occult geometry to compose the painting, perhaps this
figures in the sense of being “in the know” or not, depending on whether
you understand the symbolism he’s using. i think it likely that the
geometry was used intentionally, and the strength of the composition is an
important reason why his paintings impress people centuries later.

the intrusion of the red square and the spookiness of the male figure
complement the complex and very formal composition and infuse it with
intimations of the primal creative & destructive energies, sex & death,
the tension between the artist & bourgeois stability, suffocating stasis.

notice how different it feels to look at the calendar now. more removed
because of the presence of interpretation, yet more connected to it
because you’ve been drawn into “the room”…

BTW this painting was stolen and recovered in the 90s.

“all is clouded by desire, Arjuna … it blinds the soul”

g