Manny Farber (1917-2008), the American film critic*, especially loathed all those canonised authors with a frilly aesthetic and films which make us say, “Oh, what a lovely movie!”. By defending directors who were scorned by the critics (Hawks, Fuller, Siegel), he drew out the contours of what might termed “termite art”, as opposed to “white elephant art”, with a stylistic and moral heaviness, films without bite – and thus without interest – with each centimetre of their reels pretentiously displaying the word “ART”.  

*Manny Farber was also a painter. He painted all-overs of everyday objects seen from above. “The point in both cases [the cinema and painting] is to redistribute the angles of attack, to privilege the details of a work, to wander across the surface, to plug it into the surrounding world, to sum up, to advance horizontally, in every possible direction.” (“Manny Farber, a critic in permanent imbalance”, Le Monde des Livres, 2004)