A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

While not a conventional narrative, it has a lot of conventional narrative elements, and it's interesting that the next two

The Gymnasts

[1961] and

Have You Thought of Talking to the Director?

[1962]are a little different: they're both narratives, but the story seems only a pretext for a trip into a mental state. There's a development from learning how to tell a story to learning how to externalize what you're thinking or feeling. Could you talk about those early developments?

Baillie:

Hard to recall. Generally, each film showed me what

it

wanted, as the Eskimo carvers say. I was slowly coming to understand more about my medium. I do recall deciding to proceed slowly with this huge task and to proceed in a conventional way, meanwhile looking around and seeing others going off into modern art and expressing themselves in their own unique ways. I simply couldn't at first.

I was just pushing on to uncover hidden ground. Looking back on that time, I think of a Japanese garden with all the neatly laid stones you walk along that emulate the randomness of nature and yet have the exactness of the Zen Buddhist's mind. I look back and see that each step, each stone, was something I laid of necessity, my own necessity, the necessity to know myself. I would make each film as it came along, I'd smell in the air when the time had come again.

I remember more clearly what started me to work on the later films. In

Castro Street

it was the color quality of the Standard Oil tanks in Richmond, California, on a particular rainy day. For

All My Life,

it was the quality of the light for three summer days in Casper, California, up the

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Flowers grow along the "clef" of the fence in Baillie's early

single-shot film,

All My Life

 (1966).

coast where Tulley lived. It looks like Cork, Ireland, used to. The managerial class, as usual, invaded that lovely little place and neutralized it. But it was a beautiful place for a while. There were three days: the peak day was the first day I noticed the light. I had this outdated Ansco film I wanted to use. But I didn't want to make a film. By that time, I knew the toll making

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a film can take. But the second day the light was still marvelous. A friend was with me, and we started to drive back to San Francisco, and suddenly I said, "No, I can

not

turn my back on this!" We stopped, and I got the tripod, fixed it real solid. Then I practiced and had her call off the minutes: we had about three minutes to get up into the sky in one roll, one continuous shot. Then we shot it and it went as smoothly as possibleI panned with the three-inch telephoto lens and pulled focus as I panned.

All My Life

came out well. It was inspired by the light (every day is unique as you know), and by the early Teddy Wilson/Ella Fitzgerald recording ["All My Life"], which was always playing in Tulley's little cabin, with its condemnation sign on it (one evening, we were having supper and heard ''tack tack." We went out and looked at the door. The sign said, "You are required to leave these premises by twelve o'clock tomorrow!"). I knew that song had to be the track and that it had to have the same sound it had at Paul's, with a potato sack over the speaker. It's supposed to sound a little scratchy. When I got back to the commune, I put the music and the image together.

MacDonald: A Hurrah for Soldiers

[1963] is dedicated to Alfred Verbrugge because his wife was killed; why wasn't the film dedicated to her?

Baillie:

Well, generally, I'm not politicalespecially then I was not. And I did not keep myself very well informed about the world, history, events. But all of a sudden in

Life

magazine there was this terrible, tragic picture of a man, Verbrugge, screaming: these soldiers had murdered his wife, by mistake. It was a horrifying picture. I couldn't stand that human beings could do such things to one another. I just couldn't contain it, so I immediately set out to make a film, my first color film. Somebody'd given me a few rolls. The light was so pretty in the lower sky and made such nice grays and blacks. It was almost a-chromatic. That interested me.

So it was a tribute to a man who had lost his beloved through the savagery of total obedience to an idea. Krishnamurti abhors that we follow ideas, not to mention ideologies, like little puppy dogs, or

soldiers