William Farley hails from Braintree, Massachusetts, on Boston’s South Shore. Raised in a working-class family, his early life included training as a commercial artist. He has worked in a variety of professions including: farm worker, doorman, longshoreman, gardener, asst. night club manager, produce clerk, merchant seaman, furniture mover, bill collector, steel rigger, bartender, garbage collector, college professor, meat carver, construction laborer, waiter, factory worker, haberdashery salesman, bug exterminator, and doughnut maker. Drafted by the U.S. Army, Farley worked as an illustrator for an intelligence unit, which made tools for spies. After receiving an honorable discharge he attended Maryland Institute College of Art on the G.I. Bill as a Sculpture major and winning a scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1968.
Mr. Farley’s first film was made in 1970. As a graduate student majoring in sculpture, he took a class on the history of film, at the… read more
William Farley hails from Braintree, Massachusetts, on Boston’s South Shore. Raised in a working-class family, his early life included training as a commercial artist. He has worked in a variety of professions including: farm worker, doorman, longshoreman, gardener, asst. night club manager, produce clerk, merchant seaman, furniture mover, bill collector, steel rigger, bartender, garbage collector, college professor, meat carver, construction laborer, waiter, factory worker, haberdashery salesman, bug exterminator, and doughnut maker. Drafted by the U.S. Army, Farley worked as an illustrator for an intelligence unit, which made tools for spies. After receiving an honorable discharge he attended Maryland Institute College of Art on the G.I. Bill as a Sculpture major and winning a scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1968.
Mr. Farley’s first film was made in 1970. As a graduate student majoring in sculpture, he took a class on the history of film, at the end of the semester, he had the choice to either write a paper about the films he saw or make a film. He made a film and it was a hit on the film festival circuit and Farley was hooked. When he received his MFA a year and a half later he had more credits in film making then sculpture.
He taught film production at the Center For Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland California for six years and part time at other schools in the bay area, including California College of the Arts, and the San Francisco State University.
He has been a member of the board of New Langton Arts, the Film Arts Foundation, George Coates Performance Works, the San Francisco International Theatre Festival, Canyon Cinema, and the Artist Committee of the San Francisco Art Institute.
His live action short films and documentaries have won numerous awards and have been broadcast and screened around the world, including the Mannheim, Chicago, Sydney and New York Film Festivals.
His first feature film, Citizen , I’m Not Losing My Mind, I’m Giving It Away, features Whoopi Goldberg in her first screen performance, and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. At the same time it had a month’s run at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1983.
Mr. Farley directed his second feature, Of Men and Angels, he co-wrote, starring Theresa Saldana and John Molloy of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. The film tells the story of; three strong- willed individuals who struggle for control of their own dreams and each other’s. In 1989, Of Men and Angels premiered in the dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize.
Farley’s next film, Broke, a meditation on homeless people, showed in numerous film festivals in the United States and Europe. In 1998, Mr. Farley re-master his film SEA SPACE, and was invited to screen it at the Sundance Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.
In the spring of 2000, he co-directed The Old Spaghetti Factory, a documentary, about the last bohemian nightclub in San Francisco’s North Beach. It was shown on PBS in over one hundred U.S. cities. This film was a collaboration between Mr. Farley and Mal and Sandra Sharpe.
In the last nine years, he has completed four films: The Stories, a fictional account about a man urgently looking for an intimate connection with his dying father; Darryl Henriques is in Show Business, a documentary about a comedian struggling to reach a larger audience; Arianna’s Journey, a documentary about an Italian woman and her travels in pursuit of her spiritual destiny; John O’Keefe’s Adaptation Of Walt Whitman’s Song Of Myself, a five camera recording of O’Keefe’s performance at the Marsh in San Francisco. And Shadow & Light The Life And Art Of Elaine Badgley Arnoux, an eighty two year old artist who uses her creativity to forge a greater understanding of herself and to inspire others to see their imperfections as a gift.
Currently, Mr. Farley is developing his third feature script, based on his childhood adventures, living in a family, where his father drank and inadvertently lit things on fire, as well as The Walk, a documentation of a walk I have taken many times, on a spit of land boarding the San Francisco Bay. It has been sculptured by the weather and the hand of man, always the same in it’s splendor, and never the same in it’s appearance. It insists I surrender to the dance of the wind hurling across it’s features, and the waves beating against it’s shore. The generosity of this place permeates my preoccupations with the outer world and delivers to me at times a glimpse of the eternal. –Canyon Cinema
