Negative Space (Chris Petit, 2000) (Patreon)

This is one of a number of Channel 4-sponsored essay films by Petit, perhaps best known for his Wendersesque anti-road movie Radio On (1979). I'd been meaning to catch up with it for awhile, and wasn't disappointed by it in terms of content. I only wish it had been a little longer, since it features two of the most compelling aesthetic theorists the U.S. has produced. As the title suggests, Negative Space is mostly an introduction to Manny Farber, who by this time wasn't making all that many public appearances and had turned his attention entirely to painting. Serving as back-up, art critic Dave Hickey is on hand to partly contextualize Farber, but mostly explore his own tangents.

Petit spends a lot of time comparing the flat desert landscapes of the Western U.S. with shots and clips from some of Farber's favorite films. Using a double-screen technique that is framed to resemble dueling Polaroids, Petit considers moments from Out of the Past, The Big Sleep, Psycho, Wavelength, Voyage to Italy, and The Merchant of Four Seasons. At times Farber is speaking about the physical presence and bodily comportment of certain stars (Robert Mitchum, Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders), but mostly he offers gnomic half-statements about the pleasures of well-organized cinematic space. And of course, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" gets a brief discussion, allowing Farber to coin the succulent adjective "termitic."

Hickey talks about Las Vegas, as a particular zone of frenetic speed and also as a tragicomic future ruin, a dusty pile of dead neon and faux-Roman columns to be discovered after humanity has finally cashed in its last chip. But most interesting is Hickey's explication of a particular mode of American cool, the thing about Hawks, Tourneur, Nicholas Ray and others that so seduced the Nouvelle Vague. It's an anti-reflective mode of action, a rugged self-confidence and lack of ironic distance. It's one of the sharpest descriptions of Americanism (in art, as well as daily life) I've ever heard. 

But it mostly struck me as a set of tropes that could very easily be enfolded into a lunkheaded defense of American exceptionalism. Of course, art always has at least relative autonomy, and typically stands on its own merits until it's  pressed into service by some ideological program or other. After all, we know that the State Department promoted Abstract Expressionism during the Cold War, and we also know that it's ridiculous that they did so.