A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

At the beginning of the film a superimposed text says "Part One," but there's no "Part Two." Did you have in mind another film that would be Part Two of

To Parsifal

?

Baillie:

No. That film, as it is, was conceived as being in two parts: the sea and the Sierra Nevada. Even though I didn't say "Part Two," evidently, there is a definite closing of one section and an opening of the other. Perhaps, I said, "Part One" just to indicate that it

was

in parts. That first part was shot off of Steve Brenner's boat. We hear the sounds of the VHF radio and the fishermen talking to one another, early morning. Sort of beautiful, isn't it? And then up in the cliffs the wind was blowing through those grasses that grow along the Northern California coast.

MacDonald:

That gorgeous shot of the wind in the grasses is a motif all through your work and apparently your lifeeven your child [Baillie had a baby girl in March 1989] is named Wind.

Baillie:

The horses, the grasses blowing in the wind, the sea, the flesh of young girls' faces, edges of bodies, movement . . . those are my motifs.

MacDonald:

You know, it's very hard to verbalize about your work.

Baillie:

But it's kind of fun, isn't it, to verbalize around things, because each person gets a chance to see for him- or herself!

Parsifal

isn't closed down like a Coke ad. It gives a lot of room to the viewer. I think there are lovers of the medium who are more amorous perhaps than some of the filmmakers. I like to make analogies between filmmaker and the man of arms. The man of arms becomes so much

of

his/her weaponry that he can become inured to that pure love, which is his/her source.

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MacDonald:

You mention the openness of

To Parsifal

. Some years ago, there was a tendency to see that film as having a clear, almost polemical message: people who ran trains were bad and people who looked at nature were good. In the film the issues seem more complicated. You seem simultaneously a person in love with the purity of nature and fascinated with these processes that people engage inpartly because they're

also

drawn to naturein order to exploit nature. I want to go up into the mountains near here, and I'll use an automobile to do it: I have to bring

with

me the opposite of the mountains in order to get to the mountains to enjoy this illusion of purity!

Baillie:

That's right: the combination of ingredients which seems to transcend good and evil

and

at the same time, the clear continuing theme of good versus evil that began with

On Sundays

. There's always the simpleminded theme of what's good and what's bad, but it isn't carried on in a simpleminded way.

MacDonald:

That's certainly true of

Mass

.

Baillie:

Yeah.

MacDonald:

The hero of

Mass

is the guy on the motorcyclehis "noble steed"which on one level is distinct from the tract houses he passes and what they seem to mean; but on another level the motorcycle is part of the same consumer culture. The people coming to take care of the guy lying in the street is a parable of taking action within a society where the tendency is to ignore the suffering of others.

Baillie:

Disposable people, as Tulley says.

Mass

is a requiem, conceived on the occasion of President Kennedy's murder. A sad time for many people. I had just come back from a long lonely trip to where I'd been born in the Dakotas. I don't remember if I shot anything on that tripI think notbut I knew I was into a film. One night after I was back I stayed up all nightone of those rare times when I stay up all nightand listened to the requiem masses being played on the radio, especially Mozart's. It was so beautiful. You know, Celtic people love to weep over the beauty of things. One of the many really nice ways to respond to the world is through sadness. It's very deeply rooted in me, and maybe you too. The requiem mass is a non-Celtic way of celebrating death joyfully. So I knew I was making a mass, but again it was new information for me. I'll run into Catholics who think I'm a Catholic. But I only studied the mass for a short time in order to do my work, and then I forgot it. I have almost no data stored in my brain. My life and my art are entirely "noninformative."

The film has a very strong critical thesis: it's

against

contemporary society, buildings, pollutionall the rest of itand it's

for

the at least implied joy of nature and selfhood and being human!

MacDonald: Mass

is full of layered imagery, superimpositions. That's

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a stylistic way of expressing the fact that things are more complex than they first seemed to you. As your films develop in the years after

Mass,

layering becomes more and more important, even characteristic.

Baillie:

Perhaps.

We can't leave out of this discussion of

Mass