Review

By Robert L. Pincus, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER for The San Diego Union-Tribune,October 4, 2009

When Manny Farber, local painter extraordinaire, died in 2008, he hadn’t done any writing on films for some 31 years. But the tributes for Farber the film critic came forth at a rate that surprised even his wife, Patricia Patterson, a highly accomplished artist and a collaborator on the later film writings.

“He was one of those critics who opened other critics’ eyes,” said film critic John Powers in a tribute on “Fresh Air,” the WHYY show that airs nationally on NPR stations. And the highly regarded film historian David Thomson said, in his obituary for The Guardian in England, “Manny was the first person in English who wrestled with words to arouse the feelings produced by imagery on screen.”

Patterson, who lives in Leucadia, was astonished by the amount of tributes, particularly on blogs.

“I had no idea of how much of a following his writings had, how pervasive his influence was — and is,” she said. “A lot of young writers said what an impact his prose had on them.”

One of Farber’s longtime admirers was Robert Polito, a poet and biographer who now heads the writing program at The New School in New York. Shortly after they met in 1998, Polito told them he’d like to assemble a collection of Farber’s writings that weren’t already in print.

There was one problem: Farber hadn’t held onto them. But Polito wasn’t at all discouraged.

“I spent a lot of time looking at microfiche,” he recalls. And it didn’t hurt that he had the help of graduate students.

Now, his project has come to fruition, though it grew along the way. The end result: “Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber.” The publisher is the prestigious nonprofit Library of America, whose primary focus is on handsome editions of American writers from its beginning to the present.