The Art & Times of William Farley : 02 of 07
By Robert Anbian, Release Print, Vol. XVIII No. 9, November 1995
You used actual street people?Yes, I worked a lot on Market Street, Van Ness, all the financial district. I must have been shooting about a year and a half on the street .... My shooting ratio was outrageous, about 16 to one, two and a half hours for a ten-minute film .... I'd go up to people and tell them that I was making a film about homelessness, about poverty, and that I would like to film them without revealing their identity, and that I had a couple of bucks to give them. I was only turned down a handful of times. Not to discount that couple of bucks, but I spent time with people telling them what I was doing. I was never rushed just to get the shot. I thought part of the process was not about stealing an image but about collecting images. There aren't people who are insane in the film because I didn't want to take advantage of them. You know, it's a dangerous thing to be doing out on the street with people who have such need. But I have an attitude. The longer I make films, the clearer it is to me that the whole gestalt of making them has a dramatic effect and is recorded on the work that you do.
Was the shooting ratio about getting the right image, or about exploring that world?
It took that much because when I would look at the rushes, you know, in a 400' reel or something there would be a couple of people I thought were really working as a shot. Lots of them were pretty marginal. It was just that it took a lot of film to get the images that I thought represented the problem collectively. I also wanted to be demographic in relationship to the eyes, men and women of all races and ages. Whatever insights I had along the way came in intervals after shooting a lot of film.
Did you think about using video?No. Because I thought the electronic feeling would pull people into their television news experience of the events, and that we're saturated by the television's interpretation of the problem. I thought that film allowed me to project it at a scale where the audience could swim in it. And I knew that the music track was going to have a very profound effect upon your capacity to sympathize with the problem. So to combat our collective dullness that we've gotten from television news, video was never a possibility for this piece.
Ever shot in video?Yes. In Between the Notes, which was in India. I'm very proud of it. My commitment to film instead of video has been based on the scale of it. I was a sculptor before I started making films. And the idea occurred to me very early on, and was very profound and shaped my use of film, Of the relationship between a, group of people in ancient times sitting around a fire and telling stories and. that, in fact, I was bringing the fire up to a horizontal. It was exactly the same phenomenological thing, telling a story around a fire, and watching a film projected in the dark 'That allowed me to see myself in a continuum that I was never able to perceive before. You know, I grew up with Irish people. I grew up with lots of people who could talk. I asked the p Irish actor John Molloy, from the Abbey Theater in Dublin, who is over here now, how do the Irish learn to talk? He said they were so poor that all they could put in their mouth was words. [laughter] He was talking, of course, about the famine and the repression by the English, where the Irish actually had to go out in the woods, in the bushes, to speak Gaelic, to speak Irish. They were so poor, all they could put in their mouth was words. That's my people. [laughter]
The other thing about this film [is that] every film I make is in another genre, which is terrible if you're trying to develop a career. I guess I'm beyond career. What I'm starting to figure out, after 25 years, is that I'm involved in a lifestyle. The grace of making films and tapes throws you into worlds that you would have never accessed otherwise. And in the process of recording your experience of being alive, you get to cross paths with people and situations that are greater than your personal experience. I have had the privilege of spending time with everyone from [American Indian activist] Dennis Banks to a holy man in India to working on merchant ship. All in pursuit of making art. And my grandfather worked in the shipyard. My father worked in the shipyard. My brother worked in the shipyard. I was the first one to escape the shipyard. I've begun to recognize that maybe if I haven't succeeded in creating a career, I've succeeded in creating a life.