Manny Farber

As an artist and a critic, he was the enemy of the ornate. Manny Farber, who died at 91 near San Diego, championed the beauty of small things in his collage work and the cramped brilliance of little men in tight spots in the B movies he loved--films that, through his writing, he helped raise from forgotten to fashionable. Son of a store owner in the mining town of Douglas, Ariz., he played football at Berkeley, then went East and upended movie criticism. Writing for the New Republic, the Nation, Time, Cavalier and a host of art and film journals, Farber elevated the reps of blue collar directors while snipering critics' darlings like Hitchcock and Welles. (Citizen Kane was "exciting but hammy.") He sold these advanced ideas through the startling sprung rhythm of his prose, packing an essay's worth of insights into a parenthetical aside, leaving the alert reader exhausted and grateful.

He once said that though he might be thought of as one of the 10 best film critics ever, "what I'd really like is to be considered one of the 100 best American artists." Yet he didn't demean the writing to which he brought so much passion and pain. "Criticism is very important, and difficult," he said in a 2004 interview. "I can't think of a better thing for a person to do." Surely no one did it better than Manny Farber.