Born in Arizona on the Mexican border into a "fiercely competitive" trio of brothers. Saxophone player, fifth-string quarterback, carpenter. And pursuer of perceptions to filigreed end points in painting and criticism and teaching. "The brutal fact is that they're exactly the same thing," he once told an interviewer.

Manny Farber's career is an adventure story, set in motion by the quest to get it right: to convey in words the precise nature of Preston Sturges's all-American cacophony or the peculiar landscape around Del Mar, Calif., to convey in painting the exact sense of a cherry pit or a length of rebar, and on a different level the frustratingly yet thrillingly inconclusive nature of living perception itself. "I try to get myself out of it as much as possible," he once said to me, "so that the object takes on a kind of religious awe." In this case, the word "religious" is strictly evocative, coming as it does from a man who titled one of his paintings, "Thank God I'm Still an Atheist."

Those of us who were lucky enough to know and love him are now broken-hearted, because it seemed like he would go on forever. There was always more to see and hear, to think through and puzzle out. He thought a lot about Nick Ray in the last few months, about the beauty of his early films; about the men he used to work with on construction sites around New York; and about Barack Obama, who excited him to no end. The last time I saw him, a couple weeks before he died, he was sitting before the TV with his beloved wife and essential collaborator Patricia, completely absorbed by Obama. When the subject of conversation shifted to J.M.W. Turner, he thought about him for a while and said, "He had about eight arms." Take a fresh look at "The Battle of Trafalgar" and you'll know exactly what he meant.

Fresh looks will always yield more and more, take you down different pathways and reveal new openings. Contrary to the insistence of popular culture and its never-ending hailstorm of clichés and final judgments-the "culture of winners," as he once called it-there is no such thing as a last word. That's what we learned from Manny Farber.

Featured Works:

A Corner in Wheat (D.W. Griffith, 1909); The Musketeers of Pig Alley (D.W. Griffith, 1912); I Was Born, But..., aka Children of Tokyo (Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo, Yasujiro Ozu, 1932); Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932); Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932); The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939); Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940); His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940); I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943); In the Street (Ed Howard, 1948); On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952); Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini, 1954); One Froggy Evening (Charles M. Jones, 1955); The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958); Muriel (Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour, Alain Resnais, 1963); Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht, Jean-Marie Straub, 1965); Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, Jean-Luc Godard, 1967, pictured); Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967); Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967); The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp (Der Bräutiggam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter, Jean-Marie Straub, 1968); Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971); Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973); Untitled: New Blue (Paul Schrader, 1995); Negative Space (Christopher Petit, 1999)  

Program information:

Manny Farber, 1917-2008