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By Robert Anbian, Release Print, Vol. XVIII No. 9, November 1995 About 25 years ago, Bill Farley sailed into San Francisco Bay on a merchant vessel and promptly jumped ship. In the intervening years, this offspring of Boston Irish shipyard workers has carried on variously and steadily as a sculptor, conceptual artist (he once mailed letters bearing stamps picturing his own head to friends and was busted for the effort), and, especially, as a filmmaker. His many shorts have been idiosyncratic, highly aesthetic, sometimes esoteric, always passionate essays in the human predicament, ranging from 1973's Sea Space to The Bell Rang to an Empty Sky (I 977), an iconographic evocation of American Indian struggles, to Tribute (1986), a musical and collective affirmation of life, to In Between the Notes (shot in video), an exquisite portrait of the last Kirana raga singing master. His most recent is the lyrical, moody ten-minute broke (screening Nov. 2 at the Film Arts Festival). He has made two ambitious features, the anarchic anti-narrative, Citizen (1982), and the more traditional of Men end Angels (1989), neither of which achieved the visibility the filmmaker clearly wanted. Adding to his own dedication, Farley has shown an exceptional knack for notable collaborations with artists of the order of musician/composer David Byrne, theatricalist George Coates, filmmaker Rick Schmidt, writer Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci) and Irish actor John Molloy. In broke, he rounds up the Kronos Quartet to perform a score by Todd Boekelheide. I've long thought of Farley as a steady beacon of artistic commitment on the Bay Area independent media scene, producing the work, challenging himself, inspiring others, clearly following his heart's path. And a man about to make his crossover to a larger audience at any moment. Or not. You gotta understand, this guy is a real artist.
It's a piece that came out of my subconscious .... I did a drawing which was the tracking shot in the film from left to right. It goes by people who are panhandling and shows them with a cup or sign, from their knees to their neck. You don't see who they are. I realized at the time that shot dramatized for me what we do when we walk through the city. It's a recreation of the periphery of our vision. That when we go through the city, we usually use our periphery vision to take these people in. I didn't know if that was a film. It was something. It seems that my method of making films is [to do so] from an idea, an image or something someone says to me, that gets into my mind and I can't shake. Then on an airplane, right out of the blue, the two other images that make up this three-act, ten-minute film, came to me. The second picture was, well, if I was going to recreate the periphery of our vision, ie., our urban dweller's vision, it was reasonable to re resent the p point of view of the person who's begging. It came, to me, one little drawing, a sketch from ground level, looking at feet going by. At the same time, at the same moment, I did another drawing and it was a set of eyes. So these three images came out of my unconscious. There was no rigorous intellectual analysis of the problem of urban poverty. I realized, when I did that little drawing and saw that set of eyes, I said, my God, this is the movie! My idea was that in the third act if we make eye contact, we have recognized that the people who are in trouble on the street, and who are asking for our help, can't be dismissed as bums, derelicts, loafers, hustlers. They are just people who are broke. If we can see them in that kind of simplicity, I think that's an honest recognition of their predicament.
My mother used to say that growing up in the Depression was, in a strange way, the richest part of her life. She said it was because people were connected with each other. I grew up in a very working class family, and during the Depression my family didn't have anything. But when she was a kid, and somebody came to the back door and asked for something to eat, my grandmother and grandfather would always find something. She said there was a connection between people that was palpable. It had nothing to do with institutions or ideology or any kind of organized morality. It was just a very basic natural thing, that if someone was hungry, you should feed them. That's gone. That kind of connection between us has disappeared. And I thought, this is very strange, that has disappeared. Because it's such a basic part of the human condition, the tendency to want to be helpful. So the
other element I'd like to talk about is the sound track. I wanted collectively
to represent how we see these people, as if we were in the privacy of
our car, driving, and in a very, very bad mood. If you're by yourself
and just in a wicked mood, not in the mood to feel compassion towards
anyone, you might look at somebody like that person's a hustler. "Look
at that bum.' And, "what a derelict." All those things you wouldn't
generally say out loud, that you might say to yourself in your weakest
moments. To put that [in the film] as counterpoint to what you were
seeing seemed to address our collective bias towards the problem. In
the third act, as you know, the words are repeated. My point was that
I don't think you can say those words and look those people in the eyes.
I don't think if you look that person in the eye, and say that person
is a beggar. You look at that person's eyes and all you see is sorrow.
I tried to chose the words with the set of eyes that was completely
opposite from what was in their soul.
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