April 2020 Sight&Sound | 91BOOKSMore so, really, because it’s the early years
that really sing here. As Kobal traces DeMille’s
movie career from the troubled production of his
directorial debut The Squaw Man (1914), he’s telling
an origin story for Hollywood itself. The Squaw
Man is celebrated as the first feature film shot there
- an accidental milestone that came about when
the crew were disappointed by the scenery in their
preferred location of Flagstaff, Arizona, and decided
to get back on the train until the end of the line.
The film also marked the beginning of DeMille’s
collaboration with producers Adolph Zukor and
Jesse Lasky – the founders of Famous Players-
Lasky, which later became Paramount Pictures - and more to the point it was a hit. Kobal then
takes the reader film by film through DeMille’s
career, threading in his political interventions
and a little of his complex private life.
First, there’s his rapid rise to acclaim as one
of the most sophisticated directors in the US
business, with early melodramas such as The
Cheat leading the way to his racier sex comedies
at the turn of the 1920s, including a run of movies
with Gloria Swanson. During the making of Joan
the Woman (1916), DeMille’s epic conglomeration
of the martyrdom of the Maid of Orleans and
the battlefields of World War I, Kobal pinpoints
the moment when the director’s “love for the
spectacular took possession of him. The artist had
found his genre.” It’s this passion for scale that led
to DeMille’s most famous work, the blockbusters
often loved by audiences although mocked by
critics – typified by his biblical films, beginning
with The Ten Commandments in 1923. It must be
remembered, though, that DeMille could include
an anachronistic and lavishly produced ‘vision’
even in a contemporary adult drama, and he
frequently did – see the fantasy sequence in 1919’s
Male and Female in which Swanson is transported
back to ancient Babylon to cavort with a lion.
This is a portrait of a genius, mildly
misunderstood, with an enviably long career,
and whose lasting impact on the business he
loved is all too well symbolised by the vestiges
of his set for the original The Ten Commandments,
which lay submerged under the California sand
for decades before being rediscovered. His fever
for cinematic splendour seeps through the fabric
of the industry. As costume designer Edith Head
is quoted as saying after working on the 1956
remake of that film, he was “a perfectionist on
the encyclopedic detail demanded by his plunges
into history”. The director required bibliographic
references for each element of his grand designs,
as his archive of books and images attest.
More idiosyncratically, he also liked to let his
leading ladies pick out their costume jewellery,
so they would wear it like they owned it.
The book is very sharp on the creatives who
DeMille gathered around him too, notably
production designers such as Wilfred Buckland
and Mitchell Leisen (later a director), his editor
Anne Bauchens, secretary Gladys Rosson and
his brilliant screenwriter Jeanie Macpherson,
with whom he was also romantically entangled.
Any book about DeMille should surely have
a cast of thousands, so there’s room enough
for them and their contributions.
MANNY FARBER
Paintings and Writings
Ed. Michael Almereyda, Jonathan Lethem
and Robert Polito, Hat & Beard Press, 272pp,
ISBN 9781732056107
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
“Americans,” Manny Farber
once wrote, “seem to have a
special aptitude for allowing
History to bury the toughest,
most authentic native
talents” – but it should be
noted, too, that we’re mad
about exhuming them after
the fact. Farber, the critic, teacher and painter, was
already receiving overdue attention for his work
in the last line before his death in 2008, and that he
now belongs as much to the world of gallery art as
to film culture is testified to by the exhibition and
accompanying catalogue for ‘One Day at a Time:
Manny Farber and Termite Art’, organised in 2018
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles
by curator Helen Molesworth, who had watched
Farber’s high-wire-act lectures 30 years previously
at the University of California, San Diego.
Paintings and Writings, an amply illustrated
new volume from Hat & Beard Press, collects
colour reproductions of Farber’s paintings,
principally the table-top, bird’s-eye-view still lives
of cluttered, allusive odds and ends – flowers,
candy wrappers, graffiti’d puns, toy train-tracks,
photographs – that he began turning out not long
after arriving in San Diego in 1970, and would
work variations on until the end of his life. These
are accompanied by a plethora of texts both by
and about Farber. The list of contributors, as befits
the subject’s growing prestige, is distinguished,
the contributions not uniformly so. As Farber
has been canonised, it has become increasingly
difficult to say anything new about him, and a
few well-worn points are trotted out time and
again: the element of meandering topographical
exploration at work in both the criticism and
the painting, the secondary importance given
to value judgements in the criticism, the degree
to which pan and praise tend to shade into one
another. As painter and writer Robert Storrobserves, Farber “has become a cult figure, and
cult figures are nearly impossible to write about
since everything specific that is said about them
is subsumed by the glow of their exceptionalism”.
Farber put the problem another way in a 1977
joint interview he gave to Film Comment with
collaborator and wife Patricia Patterson: “I never
got rid of a fault in my writing that comes from
sportswriting: you always build up a star.”
There is much in Paintings and Writings to
humanise its star subject – for example, the
magazine editor Robert Walsh’s observations on
the tonic effect of Farber’s meeting and partnering
with Patterson in 1967, and the degree to which
the relationship nourished one another’s work.
Director Olivier Assayas offers acute insight into
the connections between Farber’s cinephilia and
auteur paintings, scratching into the substrata
of “the residual condensation of memory”.
Praiseworthy, too, are contributions from two
of the book’s editors: Robert Polito’s brief critical
biography, which explores the sibling rivalry
of the brilliant Farber brothers of Douglas,
Arizona; and Michael Almereyda’s recollection
of a long, often fraught relationship with Farber,
in which a key role is played by a negative 1982
review of a Farber New York showing, written
by Storr in the magazine Art in America.
For the Farber aficionado, however, the most
exciting written material in Paintings and Writings
is by Farber himself: ephemera relating to his
pedagogical career, lecture notes and quizzes that
suggest Farber was every bit as much a one-off in
the classroom as he was behind a typewriter or
in front of a canvas. (From one test: “List seven
ways in which the Laurel and Hardy Christmas
tree comedy parallels the characterisation and
technique in [Fassbinder’s] Katzelmacher.”) Still
more illuminating are eight pieces of Farber’s
art criticism originally published in The New
Republic and The Nation in the 40s and early
50s, when he was wrestling – figuratively and
quite literally, according to Almereyda – with
the art critic Clement Greenberg and abstract
expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.
Comparing Farber and Greenberg’s responses
to the same shows and books in the 1940s in his
study The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed
American Film Culture (2016), David Bordwell
notes that Farber consistently “outstrips
Greenberg” in “exactitude”, an observation borne
out in the sharp-eyed pieces here, sprinkled with
those vintage Farberisms that, once read, are
impossible to forget. On Goya’s Los Caprichos
series of prints: “The consistent purity of Goya’s
hatred through his later works is an amazing fact
in itself.” On the American comic-strip artist: “A
funeral-faced craftsman who draws with his hat
on and usually looks like an ex-saxophone-
playing Republican.” ‘Virility’ is employed as a
term of praise, one of those chest-thumping,
macho affects that time and Patterson’s influence
would soften. Personal recollections here return to
both Farber’s irascibility and to the lush garden of
the Farber-Patterson home in Leucadia, California,
whose harvest provided the subjects for his flora-
strewn late paintings, radiant with pleasure, not
Manny Farber least that of living to see things clearly.Reviewed by Nick Pi
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