A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

After Kennedy's death Jackie went through some difficult years during which she was concerned about the children. She wanted to give them something to do. Peter Beard was tutoring them in art history at the time. He suggested that I teach them some filmmaking. I got them simple cameras and made up some basic examples, which they had great fun executing. It proved to be just the thing they needed. Caroline has since turned to photography and cinema. When John was still in school, he made some very exciting four-screen 8mm filmsactually one of the most exciting four-screen films I've ever seen, almost as good as Harry Smith's.

MacDonald:

Are you to the point where the footage feels like a weight you carry, or is getting back to it something you look forward to?

Mekas:

I really live only in my editing room. Or when I film. The rest

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of my life is slavery. But I am afraid that most of my early materialand my early films tooare fading, going. It would take about forty thousand dollars to preserve my films. That's a lot of money. Moneyor dust. Money against the dust of time into which all our works eventually disappear.

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Bruce Baillie

In the world of film studies, one often senses a suspicion of beautiful imagery, a suspicion based on the assumption that the apparatus of the movie camera is so constructed that it produces beautiful images almost automatically. Bruce Baillie's films are full of beautiful imagery, but they are anything but "eye candy." For Baillie, the filmstrip is a space where the physical world around him and the spiritual world within him can intersect; the screening room is a place where cinema devotees can share moments of illumination. The remarkable textures and colors of Baillie's films are not the products of a movie camera doing what it does automatically; they are achieved by means of homespun technologies Baillie devises to modify the camera so that it can be true to what his inner vision reveals to him, rather than to conventional visual and narrative expectations.

In his earliest films Baillie explored ways of visualizing his own mental states and of capturing something of the lovely simplicity of the people around him he saw as most deeply spiritual. Increasingly, his films became characterized by a tendency to layer or combine multiple images and by an unusual sensitivity to texture, color, and light. Each of these tendencies can be understood as an emblem of a particular understanding Baillie had developed. The layering and combining of imagerymost memorable, perhaps, in

Mass for the Dakota Sioux

(1964),

Tung

(1966), and

Castro Street

(1966)became a way of expressing the complexity of experience, the discovery that reality is not simply a set of surfaces available to perception and intelligence, but a composite of surface and of spirit that flows beneath the surface and behind our perception of it. Baillie's dexter-

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ity in capturing the sensuous textures of the worldparticularly notable in

Valentin de las Sierras

(1968),

Quick Billy

(1970), and the recent video

The P-38 Pilot

(1990)is an emblem of the degree to which he sees the perceivable world as invigorated by spirit. And his fascination with color and light in such films as

Still Life

(1966),

Quick Billy,

and

Roslyn Romance

(1977) is a function of his desire for spiritual enlightenment; it connects his work with that of such predecessors and contemporaries as Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, James Whitney, Stan Brakhage, and Tom Chomont, who have used film as a way of visualizing the colors of the soul on its journey toward spiritual regeneration.

For Baillie, the very idea of making his films is so out of synch with the mainstream history of film and the commoditized world it reflects and reconfirms that it renders him an anomaly, an outcast, a "pure fool" like Parsifal and Don Quixote. Indeed, modern society is encoded in the very tools a filmmaker must work with. Achieving the spiritual by means of filmmakinga mechanical/chemical processsimply "can't be done," and

therefore

is worth doing as a means of demonstrating the ability of film artists to transcend their means. In

To Parsifal

[1963],

Mass for the Dakota Sioux,

and

Quixote

[1965] Baillie becomes the spiritual knight-errant not only in terms of what he trains his camera on and how he uses it but by being willing to enter the field and make films at all.