A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I went wherever my knight errantry took me, like Don Quixote.

MacDonald:

It's like a feature-length newsreel. It seems to come out of

Mr. Hayashi

and the early Canyon newsreels.

Baillie:

Yes.

MacDonald: Castro Street

uses still another method of combining imagery.

Baillie: Castro Street

took about three months of solid work. To go into the process at length would take us all day, but there are a lot of notes about the film, some at Anthology Film Archives. The notes were very important. After I had finished

Castro Street,

there was a long period of going back to my tent at night and writing notes on the lessons I had learned from having made it. The film was still teaching me.

Castro Street

was made by the most horrendous effort of intellectualization and intuition combined, using the back and the front of the brain simultaneously, which blew my fuses for life. When I was editing

Castro Street,

I would come out of my morning editing session around noon to lie in the sun and eat, and people I lived with in the commune would pass by, and I couldn't recognize them. I didn't know who they were. I was like someone with Alzheimer's disease. I just blew my brains out every morning editing that film. Now, I try to dissuade my students from this kind of suicidal single-mindedness!

Technically, when I made

Castro Street,

I went into the field again with my "weapon," my tools. I collected a couple of prisms and a lot of

Page 129

From Baillie's

Castro Street

 (1966). Still courtesy of Anthology

Film Archives.

glasses from my mom's kitchen, various things, and tried them all in the Berkeley backyard one day. I knew I wouldn't have access to a laboratory that would allow me to combine black-and-white and color, and I was determined to do it by myself. I went after the soft color on one side of Castro Street where the Standard Oil towers were; the other side was the black and white, the railroad switching yards. I was making mattes by using high contrast black-and-white film that was used normally for making titles. I kept my mind available so that as much as one can know, I knew about the scene I had

just

shot when I made the

next

color shot. What was white would be black in my negative, and that would allow me to matte the reversal color so that the two layers would not be superimposed but combined.

I shot the railroad material in shorter shots, as "masculine." The "feminine" was the longer, more continuous, simpler, steady color. So one side of the street was feminine for me; the other side masculine. I discovered that I had in my archives some music from Southern India that was based on that idea, and although I didn't particularly recognize why it was that way, I enjoyed the music, and I needed inspiration so I always played it while I edited. I wanted to visualize that ancient, univer-

Page 130

sal fact of opposites that are one, both in conflict and harmonyopposing each other and abiding together and requiring each other.

MacDonald:

On one level it would seem strange to make a beautiful film about an industrial landscape, and yet, if you're combining opposites, it seems very logical. It's like taking the place where one might think there's nothing to look at, or at least nothing of a poetic sort, and then making the opposite thing from it. Your film is a kind of magic.

Baillie:

That sounds good to me. At that time my work was recognized mostly as social criticism: the theme of modern systems as evil always seemed to be there. I remember thinking, "Well, I'm just dropping all that; I'm going to make a

film

film." And then I began to recognize the inner meaning of it. Naturally that

would be

the foundation of it, since it was clear to me always that my purpose in making each film was to find myself, and each film took me further, until finally I was beyond the necessity of making films. Originally, I showed

Castro Street

with stereo sound. I'd take a little Ampex speaker and amplifier along. We'd have the one optical track, and we'd play the magnetic B track on the tape recorder. That was the original plan. Then it got to be too much trouble, and it went around with only the monaural optical track.

MacDonald:

Who was Tung in

Tung

?

Baillie:

Well, she still is a close friend who lives in San Francisco. At the time, we were very close. I think it was one New Year's that I found myself in love with her again, feeling so much love for her. I remember sleeping on the floor in my room at my folks' house, waking with a momentary impressionthat

was

an idea that preceded the imagesand getting right up and making myself work before it was gone, to capture exactly what I had seen in just a half an instant. I'd trained myself for a lifetime to catch

some

of those instancesnot only visualizations, but thought-stuff.