(to William Gibson)
Your memory has transformed Manny Farber's words and concepts over time — injecting your own value into them.

Farber wrote about there being two kinds of cinematic art — (I'm working from memory, too, so I hope I'm accurate) — "white elephant art" and "termite art". In your remembrance, the value is created at the intersections/interstices of the termite tunnels. But that is your own.

Farber, who who made his living for many years as a blue collar construction worker on Long Island housing projects while he also wrote film criticism and made art, respected the value "injected" into genre pot-boilers and film noir pieces by all the craftsmen (art directors, costume designers, production designeres, sound cutters, dialog directors) working within the studio system at the time. CASABLANCA was a piece of termite art, for example, produced as entertainment, but with value injected by all these "termites", while WILD STRAWBERRIES was white elephant art - meant to be Big Art, official art.

Farber's recognition was that the underlying artistic DNA, can subvert, transform and elevate the whole. Yours is that the DNA, or perhaps more acccurately texture of the way things connect and "infect" each other, is more interesting than the whole.

You are closer to Hitchcock's idea that a premise and a film is (his term) just a "McGuffin", an excuse for creating experiences and recognitions for the viewer (but also for the writer / director.) The real story of a movie -- and not just Hitchcock -- is almost always hidden beneath the official story, and works best when it never surfaces.

Farber's idea is of his time, true but dimensionally flat. Yours is, in a new world that extends in all directions, something deeper, different, uncontrollably rich.

How you have transformed Farber's recognitions in your dynamic memory is itself a description of how value is created/added and wisdom is hatched by iteration over time -- in our minds and over the net.

Not Farber, but Gibson.