Manny Farber, Howard Hawks, and Me

Jean-Pierre Gorin

• Texas Union Theater, Friday, September, 9:00PM

Legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber turned 85 this year, and has a major career retrospective of his paintings opening this Fall (traveling to Austin in 2004). Widely considered the most important film critic the US has produced, he is also known as a complicated and difficult figure on the American critical landscape. Paul Schrader has called him "the bedrock of modern film criticism," and critics and authors from Susan Sontag to William Gibson have claimed him as an influence.

Filmmaker and critic Jean-Pierre Gorin and Farber have been friends and colleagues for almost 30 years, functioning in Farber's words as "twin brains." On the eve of the Farber retrospective, Gorin, whose live film criticism lectures have become legendary among people who have seen them, will conduct a free-ranging exploration of Farber's work and influence. This program will include a screening of Gorin's film Routine Pleasures, which discusses his relationship with Farber, as well as scenes from some of the films that influenced it such as Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings and Ceiling Zero or William Wellman's Other Men's Women.

One of the most intelligent and original minds in cinema today, Gorin formed the Dziga Vertov group with Jean-Luc Godard in 1969 and produced a body of work that transformed the meaning of political cinema, including Wind from the East (1969), Letter to Jane (1972), and Tout va Bien (1972). Based in Southern California since 1975, he has produced a trilogy of essay films about the region: Poto and Cabengo (1978), Routine Pleasures (1986), and My Crasy Life (1992). For the past ten years he has been working on a series of projects "focused on the possibility of rethinking film narrative based on musical structural lines," which include Letter to Peter (1992), a feature-length video built around Peter Sellars' staging of Messaien's Saint Francois de Assise.

Routine Pleasures

• 16mm | color and b&w | 79 minutes | 1986
• Director:Jean-Pierre Gorin
• Writers: Jean-Pierre Gorin and Patrick Amos
• Cinematography: Babette Mangolte

Dedicated to Chuck Jones and Gustave Flaubert, this film is an autobiographical essay that takes on scale and memory, work and anonymity inside a remake of Howard Hawk's Only Angels Have Wings starring a group of retired train engineers and a discussion of the filmmaker's relationship with friend and mentor Manny Farber. "I wasn't French anymore and I wasn't quite American either," Gorin says as he struggles to reconcile his Marxist past with his relation to Hollywood and the landscape of Southern California.