A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I remember my folks were going to church, and I went up on the roof of the house. I had a blue glass that I'd brought back from Japan, which I taped over my lens and did that long pan around the house, diffusing and giving that purple-blue to everything, shooting the sun as though it were the moon. We shot the material of Tung herself out by the Berkeley horseracing track where there was nothing disturbing the horizon line. I shot at a low angle against the sky with black-and-white copy film, high contrast, so that if I used the negative as a reversal, the black sky would in effect be a matte with her against it. I shot her on roller skates in slow motion to get the image that had come to me that morning.

MacDonald:

Did the little poem come in that early morning impression?

Baillie:

I had written the poem the night before, I think, as I went to sleep. It was one film that only needed to be assembled. Later, I found

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myself down in my mother's flower garden getting some reds. I did an A, B, C roll, like I did for

Castro Street

. My technique was the most successful that I know about, aside from using optical printers. I laid out the A, B, and C rolls, doing the dissolves between A and C (I had a spring motor then that could do, at most, twenty-five-second runs), dissolving from one shot of the sky to another, to make it look like one long shot. And B would fade in smoothly to bring in the black-and-white material of Tung. I could see where to fade her in, or fade her out, by just looking at the film on a light table. That was the nice thing about working in reversal.

Now there are no film stocks left! They removed them one at a time, like they remove everything else that's beautiful in our world. They take away all the nice old buildings and the old fences, all the visually beautiful stuff. They modified the old Ektachrome three times I think; then they withdrew it. They had an Ektachrome 50, ASA 50, reversal. That was pretty decent. Nobody used it a lot, but it was real nice. And the Kodachrome before it was very interesting, but that disappeared right in the beginning. Then they got into these flat, uninteresting TV newsreel stocks and that's all they had left for a while.

This society has a way of homogenizing every goddamn thing. It's terrifying. I just can't tell you how I feel about it. When I moved to Olympia, there were a few little alternative corners left in town. Within five years, they were all destroyed, all the old docks, the alleys, the berry bushes, the crazy sailors, all gone. Horrible. And now we have the New World Order, the storm troops, a world of "winners."

MacDonald:

When I interviewed Yoko Ono, she had an idea for a travelogue of Japan, where everything would be in super close-up: you wouldn't have to leave your room to make a travelogue. You could talk about noodles and have an extreme close-up of noodles . . .

Baillie:

[laughter]

MacDonald:

Her idea reminds me of

Valentin de las Sierras

.

Baillie:

Yeah.

MacDonald:

Which is like an ethnographic film made up of textures.

Baillie:

That's right.

MacDonald:

How did you end up in Mexico? Did you always carry a camera with you when you traveled?

Baillie:

That was one of the banners of the sixties, filmmakers carrying their cameras. They got too heavy after a while.

In

Valentin

I just shot simply but used a telephoto lens with an extension tube on the back, which gives you a very limited focal plane, a few inches. No one I know ever uses it with a long lens, especially with a moving subject, but I really liked the way it looked. I had to get into the flesh of that town, with the merciless sun beating into the bricks of the

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street and all the deathevery night there'd be something or somebody killed, lying in the street in the morning. I had met up with this (archetypal) young girl, riding her pony. And I was afraid to meet her father. I'd sent word out trying to see her, and

he

sent word back to come meet him, and I thought, "Oh, God!" But he turned out to be a very nice fellow: Manuel Sasa Zamora, of Jalisco. They were very poor and lived behind a big gate and had a horse and a dog named Penquina. That horse didn't like me and would not let me film. I had to give it up for a while. Later, I named my horse after the filmValentina.

MacDonald:

When I was looking through your films, the biggest discovery for me was

Quick Billy

. It's a pretty amazing film, and certainly begs for questions because it's so diverse. Reel one is very much about morning and creation.

Baillie: