A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

the tribute to the American aborigine, the original people who were considered by the celebrants of the Holy Mass as unholy savages. The hero in the film was a tribute to the native people of Dakota, the Lakota Sioux in general and all their tribes, and it was a tribute to the best of man who lies on the sidewalk, dead already at the beginning of the film and hauled off later by the celebrants: the body of Everyman taken away in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. It was also a tribute to

the poet

(and specifically to Jean Cocteau). I portrayed the gift of poetry as deceased, gone. The film is a celebration of what has passed away from our hysterical milieu of materialism and technological redneckery!

MacDonald:

Though paradoxically it hasn't passed away because you're making film poetry.

Baillie:

Right. I am that very person, or if it isn't me, it's others. I'm making this film and portraying myself, betraying myself, uncovering the self, expressing Every Person's dilemma.

MacDonald:

At times,

Mass

has a strange sheen to it, especially on the bridge . . .

Baillie:

I did a couple of things to get that. A lot of times I used a green filter in the summer sun. It gave an odd flatness to a pretty good, contrasty reversal film. And then I put Vaseline on my clear filter for the diffusion. A lot of times I would shoot and wind back and shoot againas people did in those daysmaking double images

in

the camera, taking what happened and declaring that another clue to what was developing, discovering the film as I went.

MacDonald: Quixote

was the biggest film you'd done up to that point and still is, except for

Quick Billy

and

Roslyn Romance

(if one counts all the sections of those two films). In many ways, it's an extension of

Mass

.

Baillie:

I was living with my folks. I never could afford my own room or anything, and by this time my father was saying, "You're getting to be thirty-whatever and you're doing these films, and you're getting nowhere. You just can't live here anymore." I had to quit in the middle of

Mass

about three times 'cause I had no place to house it. I was always living in someone's back room, where I couldn't work. Finally, I went home to my folks' house where the film was, and walked quietly back into my room and went to work on the

Mass,

and no one said anything, and I finished it. Ultimately, it was my father and mother whose support made this period [of creativity] possible. All the films and my life are thanks to my mother, Gladys, and my father, E. Kenneth Baillie.

Page 126

Well, anyway, all these critical personal issues were hitting me. Where was all this going? How long could I keep it up? I don't know when I first got a grant, but I remember I couldn't go another inch. I'd got myself way in debt. No income. I didn't have any equipment, and I had all this work to do. And then my friend Ramon Sender from the San Francisco Tape Music Center told me a fellow from the Rockefeller Foundation was coming out to find western artists, possibly to give them grants. I got to talk to him, and he looked at my work.

A little while later, I was on my way to Eugene, Oregon, to give a show, and the Volkswagen broke down. I put a pin in it somewhere and got a little further down the road to a phone, and I called this Rockefeller guy and said, "What about the grant? Can you do it or not, because I'm either going to quit right now or push ahead; it depends on what you say right now, because my car's broken down, I'm in debt, I can't go any further." And he said, "Yeah, we're going to give you a grant." And I said, "Well, can I pay my debts off?" He said, "No, you can't use a grant that way. You have to spend it on your films." And I thought for a minute and said, "Well, that's OK.'' Because when it came, that's what I did: I paid all my debts, and bought a little equipment. So I was able to push ahead through the middle sixties and get

All My Life

finished and

Still Life, Castro Street, Valentin,

and

Tung

some of my very nicest films.

But

Quixote

was before all this, when poverty was really facing me. The first phase was the Southwest. I went with a friend of mine from Kowloon, named Tseng Ching. She was a wonderful girl who'd finished college, and her visa was almost up. She gave me two hundred dollars that her uncle had given her. I've never gotten over that. I told her "Absolutely not!" when she offered it; I couldn't believe it, and as time went on, I couldn't raise a penny. So I took her money and she came with me, and my dogMama Doga big shepherd. I was reading

Don Quixote