Routine Pleasures

“Routine Pleasures is an essay film in which Manny Farber’s work plays an essential role and my closer-than-close relationship to him is abundantly evoked. It is not a documentary on Manny (he never appears in it). It is a meditation on method and work, the American landscape, the male imaginary, the high and low of American culture, the materialist nature of artistic imagination, friendship, the endless obsessive pursuit of details. . . . In short, if asked what it is about, I find myself forced to say simply that it is a film about about” (Jean-Pierre Gorin). Writing for Senses of Cinema, Erik Ulman made note of “Babette Mangolte’s excellent cinematography, marvellously nuanced both in black and white and in color.”