VANITY FAIR NOMINATES Manny Farber

Hall of Fame

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ECAUSE as a movie critic and art maven u (he was an early spotter of Jackson Pollock's volcanic force), Manny Farber is the last great survivor of a generation of wordspritzing critics that included James Agee, Otis Ferguson, and Clement Greenberg (who once slugged him at a party), BECAUSE, having staked out the B movie as the Underground Railroad of American energy and rigor, he wrote the jazziest appreciations of action directors like Don Siegel, Howard Hawks, and Samuel Fuller, and composed the definitive tribute to Preston Sturges (co-written with W. S. Poster), BECAUSE he came up with his own alternative to the Oscar, the Emanuel—"a life-size dripcelluloid statue of Kirk Douglas, ranting and disintegrating in the vengeful throes of death." BECAUSE, instead of staying in the ring and repeating himself as the champion of the toughguy genre, he challenged his own aesthetic range, analyzing the alienation effects of art-film directors such as Werner Herzog and R. W. Fassbinder (these later meditations co-written with his wife, Patricia Patterson—they also collaborated on a brilliant critique of Taxi Driver), BECAUSE he has deployed movie imagery in his big, subdivided paintings, which suggest aerial shots of a mind's loose ends deposited on a desk or table. (He has had retrospectives at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art and elsewhere.) BECAUSE, with the reissue of Negative Space, his legendary volume of movie criticism, in an expanded edition from Da Capo Press, Manny Farber's wise-guy humor and impassioned fireworks will reach and provoke a virgin audience of film freaks, BECAUSE he has always gone his own way.

JAMES WOLCOTT