Word: essays
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...famous 1957 essay, "Underground Films," Manny argued that "the true masters of the male action film - such soldier-cowboy-gangster directors as Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, William Wellman, William Keighley, the early, pre-Stagecoach John Ford, Anthony Mann" - deserved a higher place in the cinema canon than the big-theme directors who won Oscars and the praise of mainstream reviewers. He praised Hawks especially "because he shows a maximum speed, inner life, and view, with the least amount of flat foot." Manny's celebration of action directors took a while to kick in - it had to be doubled or seconded...
...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...
...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 self-centered criticism," was one of the seven "Critical Precepts" that he and Patricia Patterson - Manny's intimate...
...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...
...furtive documentary shot in Harlem by Agee, Janice Loeb and Helen Levitt: "Every Hollywood Hitchcock-type director should study this picture if he wants to see really stealthy, queer-looking, odd-acting, foreboding people." Six years later, considering the posthumous collection Agee on Film, Manny was less generous. The essay, "Nearer My Agee to Thee," alternates salutes and bitch-slaps so rapidly it seems simultaneously a military tribute and a Three Stooges routine. But that's par for a Farber piece. As Polito notes, he "sustains strings of divergent, perhaps irreconcilable adjectives such that praise can seem inseparable from censure...