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LEARNING FROM MANNY FARBER

by
in Filmmaking
on Aug 19, 2008


In Summer, 2005, the filmmaker Barbara Schock wrote a spirited piece for Filmmaker about studying film with critic and artist Manny Farber, who died on Tuesday. Mirroring Farber’s rapid-fire thinking, Schock makes you feel like you’re in his classroom as she writes about the man, his syllabus, and his teaching style.

We’ve posted it in our Web Exclusives.

Here’s the intro:

The phenomenal painter, teacher and film critic Manny Farber called his film class “A Hard Look at the Movies.” It was the first upper-division college class I took. I’d transferred from a small college in the Midwest to the University of California at San Diego, and I’d never seen a foreign film, unless you count the Sergio Leone westerns. We watched the following films in a 10-week period, and it turned the way I looked at movies upside down: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de…, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God, Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Werner Schroeter’s The Death of Maria Malibran, Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou and Les Carabiniers, John Boorman’s Point Blank, Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, Joseph Losey’s Accident, Robert Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang, Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle, Nagisa Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Burglar, Jean Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les Enfants terribles and several Buster Keaton films.

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