Manny Farber in Tehran

This is a piece I originally wrote for the newsletter of The Library of America, and reportedly published last winter, though they have not sent me a copy yet. The reason was my posting of Manny Farber articles, long before they decide to publish his film writings (Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber). When somebody from The Library contacted me and was curious, or somehow amazed, about how I did those Farber posts on my blog, then it was my turn to become surprised by this fact that not long before starting to work on publishing the book, she has not been acquainted with the name in New York City! Well, in that case I must say if there is passion, it doesn’t matter that you are in New York or Mashhad, because it just calls you by your name.

In my early teens (early 1990s) there was only two film journal in Iran, one a yellow magazine and mostly about Iranian commercial films and the other, Film Monthly a more serious publication with a certain approach toward Iranian art films and western cinema. When I get interested in their magazine, I went back to their previous issues from 1980s (they had started publishing Film shortly after the revolution) and there was numerous translations of famous journalistic argument between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael (from 1960s of course). I think first time I heard Manny Farber’s name there, but I’m not so sure. Anyway, I knew the man’s name, but there was no sampling of his writings. I had only a brief survey of his critical approaches and his ideas about how a movie should be! It’s funny that auteur theory became a very popular in the 1980s Iran because simply in the 1970s everyone was too busy with the revolution to notice these things! And Film Monthly did a great job in bringing up some names and among them Farber.

His name was somewhere in the back of my mind till not long after my first encounter with Film Monthly I became a contributor at the age of 19 (in 2000). I believe I was one of the few people who started to explore American movies in a more Academic manner and not in the nostalgic love-letter kind of writings that was very common among the critics who had lost their magic lanterns during revolution (in those days screening foreign films became obsolete and all cine clubs were closed down).

There was a small library of foreign language book (mainly English) in Film Monthly office that became my Mecca. Whenever I was in Tehran (I’m living in northeast of Iran) I’ve spent a great deal of time in that library. All materials were from pre-revolution nevertheless there was lot of thing to read: all the past issues of Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Cahier du Cinema, Sight and Sound, etc. And by the way there was a ragged copy of For Now#9 edited by Donald Phelps from late 1960s and there comes my real introduction to the world of Farber. And when from last May I began to post Farber’s writing on my blog I used the very same source.

My Budd

At the time of Farber’s passing I wrote a long piece (“a critic in the shadow”) about him in Film Monthly and I used it as a pretext to attack the disastrous state of film criticism in Iran. I focused on Farber’s stubbornness, his complicated mind, abstruse language and that kind of professional dignity that every critic needs. I emphasized on the way he praises American films of the golden age and the way he talks about them to remind to my colleagues how a great treasure is hidden in the past. In addition, underscoring Farber’s retirement from criticism was a basis for this argument that every critic needs a break. Talking about my colleagues, the speed of work doesn’t give a chance to make a balance between experiences of life and art. Long pauses make us to reconstruct our thoughts and ideas about the medium that we are dealing with, the medium that is changing every day. This part was my reaction to film critics of my generation which are practically everywhere, they are in daily newspaper, journals, radio, TV and web. Too busy with being around in all events just for the sake of being in. As I observe, even there is no time for watching films that used to be a critics main task! The response to that Farber piece was enormous and despite the obscurity of his name among film goers and film readers, most people were very excited about the passages of Farber work that I had translated for the occasion.

Howard Hawks II

In Iran there are uncountable film journals (when last winter an American friend was visiting Iran he was amazed by the variety of these magazine – a daily newspaper dedicated to cinema, like variety, “Film and Psychology”, “Film and social studies”, an special publication for film scripts that prints a classic and a contemporary screenplay each month, a kind of Iranian version of “cinematographer” and many more) And these journals are filled with Farsi translated reviews from American film critics (Roger Ebert, James Berardinelli, J. Hoberman, Peter Travis, Michael Wilmington and Jonathan Rosenbaum). One can verify the influence of these critics (especially those with a more popular taste like Ebert) on Iranian younger film reviewers. In this case my return to Farber was an attempt to evoke that lost seriousness and depth that was evident even in Farber’s short reviews.

--E. K.