Negative Space
With Robert Mitchum, Manny
Farber’s capacity to capture a complex subject–an era, an iconographic gesture or event or detail, a multifaceted stylistic comparison–in one pithy phrase has inspired many of his disciples to swagger their way through arguments with comparable poetic generalizations, and Petit is more adept at this practice than most. Paradoxically, in spite of Farber’s macho ambition to hit descriptive bull’s-eyes with punchy prose during his 35 years as a published critic (1942-’77), his words were probably never excerpted in print ads for any movie. It’s entirely to his credit that his writing, unlike that of every other American film critic, could never be mistaken for or converted into advertising of any kind. In part that’s because it isn’t always obvious whether he’s praising or heaping ridicule and abuse on an actor, director, or film moment.
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Furthermore, Petit’s collaboration with Farber worked out extremely well for both, but my relationship to Farber has been somewhat variable (a subject I explored in my book Placing Movies). And my contact with Petit since the 70s has been minimal, though last year he did send me a 14-minute video he made in 1994 about a mutual friend, writer Rudy Wurlitzer, about whom I was writing an essay.
The Polaroid-like framings in the opening segment of Negative Space function not as a passing conceit but as a central strategy. They frequently allow Petit to chop up his images–his film clips and his videotaped travels and interviews–and to juxtapose two of them on the screen, either simultaneously or serially. Sometimes he uses two separate cropped images from the same shot in Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy. At one point he makes room for a video exploration of The Joyces Felt Humiliated, a 1983 Farber painting inspired by the Rossellini film, following a clip from the film itself and footage of Farber talking about it. At another point he creates a rhyme effect between a sugar dispenser at a roadside diner in Out of the Past and a similar object in Farber’s studio. More generally he uses these images as a means of metaphorical expansion: many of the film scenes cited by Farber (in Psycho, Breathless, Contempt, and Voyage to Italy) involve looking out of windows or through windshields, and Petit often juxtaposes these shots with views through his own car windows or windshield. Similarly, his focus on movie stars like Mitchum or George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman (in Voyage to Italy) is echoed by his focus on Farber and Hickey as performers.
