SEA SPACE was photographed in the South China Sea and revolves around a conversation I had with a fellow crew member. Through the use of formal static images the tale unfolds within the ship's harsh interior. The conversation becomes a confession and the ship becomes the silent witness to a man's realization of his sin and subsequent remorse. Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Honors, SF Museum of Modern Art; Honors, Pacific Cinematheque; Honors, SF Int'l Film Festival.
1972-1973, 16mm and 35mm, b&w/so, 8m, $25
Featuring Robert Hirshfield.
A man sits in front of his TV set; the program that he does not watch is a montage of popular culture images (old movies, commercials, news clips) and original footage. Accompanying the fleeting images is a loosely synchronous narrative on the evolution of man's belief systems. The film is a comment on contemporary culture, relationships between public information and private consciousness and the nature of reality.
Awards: Festival Int'l Cinema de Montreal; Honors, Rotterdam Film Festival; Honors, Ninth Festival Int'l du Cinema, Lyon; Honors, Tampere Film Festival.
1974-1975, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
In THE BELL RANG TO AN EMPTY SKY, Dennis Banks, founder of the American Indian Movement, recalls a remarkable series of historical events that end with the wholesale slaughter of the Cherokee people. Throughout Banks's relentless account, images of the printing and minting of money appear and reappear, emphasizing the greed that transcended the law and went on to take the lives of these original Americans.
"A powerful work." - John Hanhardt, Whitney Museum of American Art
Awards: Bellevue Film Festival; Kenyon Film Festival; Honors, Whitney Museum of American Art; Honors, Conference on Visual Anthropology, Temple University.
1976-1977, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $25
Featuring the Abbey Theatre actor John Molloy.
Marthain is the Irish word for the act of surviving. The film was shot in Ireland and concerns three aspects of survival: political, spiritual and poetic. The film weaves together found footage, interviews and wildly unpredictable monologues into an impressionistic portrait of the Irish psyche, from an Irish American's perspective.
"It's crazily joyous, as if Fellini had suddenly discovered he was Irish and went to celebrate it." - G.P. Skratz, Artweek
Awards: Birmingham Int'l Education Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour.
1977-1979, 16mm, color/so, 40m, $120
Excerpts from television commercials are humorously juxtaposed to a soundtrack of extraordinary facts about man and his environment. This assembling results in exposing the exploitative nature of television advertising.
"Farley pulls the linguistic rug out from under those whose job it has been to shape reality for the mass audience." - Linda Burnham, High Performance
Awards: SF Int'l Video Festival; Media Study, Buffalo.
1981, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $25
Featuring: Stoney Burke, Bob Carroll, Bob Ernst, Whoopi Goldberg, Darryl Henriques, Murray Korngold, John O'Keefe and Michael Peppe.
The film follows a group of anonymous young people on an apparently random journey through a disjointed San Francisco cityscape. As they travel, the group encounters a succession of madmen and eccentrics, portrayed by various West Coast performance artists, whose impassioned monologues and improvisations satirize the institutions of contemporary American society. Surrounded by images of mass media, the performers appear as manifestations of the wise man or holy fool, bizarre individuals at the fringes of society who offer guidance to the group on their Pilgrim's Progress through the streets, subways, cemeteries, and highways of America.
"Farley has most ingeniously fused the performers and their audience into a beautifully crafted piece of filmmaking." - Willard Van Dyke, Santa Fe Winter Film Exposition
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour; Honors, Whitney Museum of American Art; Honors, Florence Film Festival; Honors, Eighth Deauville Festival of American Cinema; Honors, 29th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.
1980-1982, 16mm, color/so, 80m, $135
DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
Featuring: Father Guido Sarducci. Produced in collaboration with Don Novello and George Manupelli.
A priest sits in an overstuffed chair, smoking a cigarette and quietly speaking about the virtues of becoming an artist. "You can stay up late at night ... you can hang around with your friends talking about stuff you know absolutely nothing about ..." The monologue humorously continues integrating popular cliches about the life and working habits of a modern artist.
Awards: Best Public Service Announcement, CLIO; Honors, American Film Institute.
Note: All rental income donated to the San Francisco Art Institute.
1982, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $20
Music: David Byrne
TRIBUTE is an affirmative view of life and death. The images are almost without exception from the 1950s - a ship launching, a woman dancing, a tree falling, a train passing - impersonal subjects that nonetheless are icons and metaphors for our most personal thoughts. Image after image emerge from darkness and hurl us toward remembrances of the purity and conflict that are always part of our collective experience of being alive.
Awards: Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Sydney Int'l Film Festival.
1986, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m, $25
Screenplay by Deborah Rogin, William Farley and Marjorie Berger.
This film centers on one week in the lives of three strong-willed individuals. Mike (Jack Byrne) is a taxi driver and unrequited Irish-American writer in the post-beat tradition. Mike lives with Maria (Theresa Saldana), a beautiful cultured Salvadorian who is carrying his child and expects him to live up to his responsibilities of fatherhood. When Irish literary maverick Padric Reilly (John Molloy) falls into their lives, the three are confronted with the struggle for control of their own dreams - and of each other.
DVD signed by the filmmaker.
1989, 35mm, color/so, 88m, $135 rental
DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
Score by Todd Boekelheide. Music by the Kronos Quartet.
BROKE takes a short but timeless journey into the heart of the most complex obstacle standing in the way of ending homelessness: society's growing numbness to the problem of urban poverty. The soundtrack is weighted with as much importance as the film's images, given that its prime responsibility is to link viewers emotionally with the people who appear on screen. I have attempted to anchor this film in the assumption that people have an innate ability to empathize with the struggles and hardships of the less fortunate, and that emotional understanding is the first step toward addressing homelessness and finding a solution.
1995, 16mm or 35mm, color/so, 10m, $30
Pandit Pran Nath is the last Raga singer in a long line of North Indian vocal masters in the Kirana style of Indian classical music. This documentary follows Pran Nath back to India and traces his journey. Accompanied by his disciple, the American avant-garde composer Terry Riley, the film celebrates the Indian musician's life and work. Produced by Jim Newman.
Signed by the filmmaker.
1985-86, color/so, 28m, DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
Arianna’s Journey: a pilgrimage of faith (2007) is the story of a woman who has the gift of healing, and her travels in pursuit of her spiritual destiny. Arianna lives outside Milan in the small town of Novara, where she was born. Her husband Carlo runs his father’s grocery store.
Since she was 14, Arianna has emanated heat from her hands. Her mother reports that, "sometimes she could even burn you if you touched her." Not accepting any payment for her healing, Arianna works on people from near and far by laying her hands on them: "I interact with the soul, not with the body. The body is suffering when the soul is suffering.” In the most extreme form of this kind of healing, Arianna performs an exorcism on a local woman who is suffering from severe psychological problems. She explains that “Satan is not the rival of God, but he is helping on this earth to highlight human sins [...] though he frightened me at first, I’m not afraid of him now, because I know that evil always brings good."
Since the age of 6 Arianna has believed that she will give birth to the next Christ-consciousness. She says that she has no free will, and acts only upon an inner compass, through which God directs her journey.
These inner directives take her to ancient sacred caves in the Pyrenees; peyote fields in the high Mexican desert; and holy shrines in Israel and Palestine. The film is a meditation on the sublime and the mundane aspects of a modern day pilgrimage of faith..
Signed by the filmmaker.
2007, color/so, 30m, DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
"It's the sort of event that makes you wonder, after sitting through it, how you ever lived without it."
- Michael Feingold, Village Voice
Signed by the filmmaker.
2007, color/so, DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions