Word: artful
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...another seminal essay, the 1962 "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," he focused his laser gaze on the new arthouse high priests, Francois Truffaut and Michelangelo Antonioni, finding them - and, by extension, their American admirers - guilty of a new version of Manny's original sin: "filling every pore of a work with darting Style and creative Vivacity." (Oh, the castrating sarcasm of the upper-case S and V.) He defined the first part of his dialectic as "Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago..." What he wanted...
...Doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it." That's not just a critical testament, it's autobiography; Manny was that craftsman. Contributing to left-wing weeklies and film magazines - except for a few months at Time - he had all the anonymity he needed, at least relative to front-line reviewers on the newspapers and newsweeklies. Manny's pieces had no impact on a film's box office take; I don't recall ever seeing his name on a movie ad or a DVD box. Eh, so what? His reviews gave the impression that, although...
...very critical of criticism," he told Leah Ollman in a long Art In America interview in 2004. "The length of sentences and the amount of narcissism involved throws me all the time. People like Proust and Melville please me. They don't waste words." He denounced and avoided the critical cult of personality; "I made it a point never to use the word I in an essay, an article," he told Ollman. Though hardly a hermit, he avoided the community of critics and the proximity of the people he wrote about. "Anonymity and coolness... writing film-centered criticism rather than...
...important to look at the work closely, tunnel into its rhythm and visual texture, then write it up, with special attention to originality of expression and sentence-solving, so that the reader can approach the finished piece with the same concentration, and expectation of rewards, as any work of art. "I believe most of what I wrote," Manny told Ollman with a disconcerting blitheness, "but I'm more interested in the elegance of the word and what it throws...
...Manny's art-view was clear enough. "To put Hitchcock up or down isn't the point," he wrote in the essay "Clutter" in the late '60s; "the point is sticking to the material as it is, rather than drooling over behind-the-camera feats of engineering." Anyway, it was impossible to mistake his authorial personality - or, rather, his restless mind and outsize intelligence. When I knew Manny, his receding hairline gave him a forehead as high as Jeff Morrow the Metalunan's in This Island Earth, and inside this gigantic braincase all manner of creatures crawled, gnawed and sang...