Word: film
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...thought - I think it's legitimate." He was briefly at Berkeley, then transferred to Stanford, where he took a drawing class. In his early 20s he went to Washington, D.C., where Leslie had a practice. There Manny took up the carpenter's trade. (When he visited us at Film Comment in the 70s, our office was in the American Bible Building; he remarked that he had worked on the building's construction.) Carpentry may have influenced his later collages and their element of compartmentalizing in squares. It also supplemented Manny's work as a critic - though, he professed to Ollman...
...Otis Ferguson, one of the earliest film critics to create a coherent and eloquent body of work, was reviewing for the New Republic. "When Ferguson went off to the Coast Guard at the beginning of the war and was destroyed by a Nazi bomb, I immediately wrote a letter to the editor saying that I could do the job very well." He recommended himself for the film job over art criticism because, "doing movies, I would be in print every week. Doing painting I would be in once a month. I was getting $40 or $50 an article and that...
...Over the decades he wrote for Commentary, Commonweal, The New Leader, Film Culture, Artforum - his most sustained affiliation, from 1966 to 1971 - and, just before that, for Cavalier. It's a mystery what the consumers of that second-tier girlie mag thought of Manny's column. He certainly wasn't trying to ingratiate himself with them; his prose was as gnarly as ever. Sample lead sentence: "What is interesting about the Cultural Exposition [Explosion?] is that while the public has become cognizant of the geniuses in each art form, the works themselves have been losing their identity as painting...
...favorably reviewed In the Street, a 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...
...thought his work for the magazine was beneath his standard; Negative Space includes no Time reviews. I had guessed that the gig was painful, that editors rewrote his copy into Time-speak, with its backward-running sentences, space-saving but eye-irritating ampersands ("now & then"), capitalized job designations and film references shoved in as nicknames - "Director Elia (Gentleman's Agreement) Kazan" - often with the job title crushed into a compound cuteism ("Cinemactor Sessue Hayakawa," "Cinemogul Darryl F. Zanuck"). I assumed that, when Manny left the place, he felt well...