A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Choosing programs, however, was like making films: we didn't take audience preference into consideration. Our decisions were totally personal and aesthetic. Putting a program together is like making art. It's one of the few places where a person can function without damage to others, with personal power, self-centeredness, ego, whatevertheir own vision. Our theater was like that. During the tea ceremony in the old Japan, nobody would ever ask could you bring out the

other

scroll, please? [laughter]. Or could we maybe have some

other

tea? No, you'd come and there it was, and because the master of the ceremony, the master of ceremonies, is a particular person, with all the limitations of being particular, the master would do it his or her way. And as a result, this particular ceremony would have a universal touch.

Teaching for me should be done the same way. If a student approaches me, implicitly assuming that I should be concerned with the same politics she is, or he issome fashionable dogmaI always fade out immediately. That's not education. I don't like to please students and I don't like to please audiences. If I did, I'd make Coke ads or porn films, and right now we'd have a fat income. College students are so fashion conscious. These days, they're very concerned about how you're supposed to treat each other, "correct politics." I've always taken to the Zen way, where you make a big joke of what everybody thinks is serious and you're very serious about what everybody thinks is not. You mix it all together and throw it out backward. It stays new that way.

MacDonald:

What else do you remember about the early Canyon days?

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Baillie:

After we moved over the hill from Canyon to Berkeley, we were a small, impoverished, but very alive collective, a few people who put together some equipment that other people could borrow (and that we could use to make our own films). We came up with

The News,

the Canyon Cinema newsreel. It was like in the old days at the movies when they had a feature and a cartoon and a serialand a newsreel. We used outdated, reversal, black-and-white 16mm film. Ernest Callenbach [editor at University of California Press and of

Film Quarterly;

author of

Ectopia

(New York: Bantam Books, 1975)] had a little house in back of his place that we used. We couldn't mix sound at that point, so we made wild sound and used a quarter-inch tape recorder. The news itself would sometimes be the guys laying some pipe somewhere, mundane information, or it might be a totally cinematic piece. When new people came through, we'd tell them, "Don't feel obliged, but if you want to make a newsreel, just make whatever you want to make, and we'll call it "The News."

MacDonald: Termination

[1966], the film about Indians in Laytonville, and

Mr. Hayashi

[1961] were "news items," right?

Baillie:

Yes.

MacDonald: Mr. Hayashi

is like an ad. It gives Mr. Hayashi's hourly rate, a dollar twenty-five an hour.

Baillie:

It had an immediate basis in necessity.

MacDonald:

When I was going through

The Pleasure Dome,

the catalogue for the Swedish show of American experimental film put together by Jonas Mekas and Claes Söderquist for the Modern Museum in Stockholm in 1980, I noticed that your filmography lists several films not included in the Canyon or Film-makers' Cooperative catalogues:

David Lynn's Sculpture

[1961],

Friend Fleeing

[1962],

Everyman

[1962],

The News No. 3

[1962],

Here I Am

[1962],

The Brookfield Recreation Center

[1964], and

Port Chicago Vigil

[1966]. Were those Canyon newsreels?

Baillie:

Mostly. Those are either in my negative archive box in the house here or were part of what I shipped to Jonas to be stored at Anthology.

David Lynn's Sculpture

was one of my first films, a newsreel of David Lynn's big log sculpture, made for the first Canyon Cinema up in Canyon. I was leaving Canyon one day to go on a little trip, so I made a little film for everybody:

Friend Fleeing

. I think

News No. 3

is about the testing of the bomb on one of the South Seas Islands during the early sixties.

Here I Am

was made in the early days for an Oakland school for children with mental disorders of various sorts. It was quite a nice film. I gave them one print, and I made a print for myself. I don't know if I ever got the original reversal back; the San Francisco lab folded. The Brookfield Recreation Center was another school, and I made them a looser, rougher film than

Here I Am. Port Chicago Vigil

was made at a time

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