A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I think that beginning section is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in the movies. I had to get out of bed to make every one of those takes. I was really sick, with hepatitis. Tulley would come over, and I would tell him what part of the house I had to go to, and he would help me up. I'd tie a knot in a big beach towel and pull in my liver with it. He'd walk me over to, say, the fish tank, and set the tripod up and load the camera. Then I'd do the take and go back to bed.

MacDonald:

The opening shot of Part One is very mysterious. The spectator never actually sees anything, just a shade of pink that gets a little more dense, then less, over a period of about two and a half minutes. And I'm not sure what I'm hearing: sometimes it sounds like traffic, sometimes like the ocean.

Baillie:

It's the ocean. Later, there are the sounds of passing timber trucks.

That opening is supposed to be the highest moment of illumination in the whole work. I was following the Tibetan description of the time between life and death, and that's either the illumined memory of perfection or the illumined moment of discovery. It can go either way. I never played the film backward, but it was designed so it could run backward or forward.

MacDonald:

You mean the whole film, all four parts?

Baillie:

Let's see, the last reel was in narrative form so that would always run forward. Then would come the end of Part Three, from the end to the beginning; then the end of Part Two would come, then the end of Part One. The end of the whole film would be the beginning shot with that pure light.

MacDonald:

So that version would move from the mundanery of conventional narrative toward this moment of supreme illumination, like a journey up the chakras?

Baillie:

I don't remember the whole story. I was describing my own

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death experience through the catalyst of hepatitis. I had studied

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

. There the deceased is on a journey, "the time of uncertainty." The specters come to us as our own personal cinema: we are obliged to confront the results of our own deeds. It becomes more and more frightening. As I pursued the experience, I found this delightful moment in the beginning which was so lovely; it degenerated into a terrifying but lovely cosmic storm. In

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

each moment has an opposite side, and there's a color for every aspect. I forget their phraseology, but green, for example, on the positive side might be the jewel from the knowledge of equality (or some such Buddhist term), and on the opposite, negative side, the fearful aspect, jealousy.

In all the segments of

Quick Billy

I had a ruling form or deity. One was an old, wise horse named Amber that lived with us. I shot her mane against the black stormy sky. Then there'd be another form, another creature or person. Their opposite would appear in the second reel, all in the same order exactly, with the opposite meaning. So those first two reels were mates; they ran almost the same length. There's a continuing gradual degeneration, and the beasts of light become the terrifying beasts of darkness that are the guiding entities of the second reel.

The assignment the first time, given to me by the conditions of making the film, was not to make a beautiful film, but rather to make a

document

about this inner passage, a little-described, but very commonin fact universalphase of being human: the evolution of consciousness through which every man and woman eventually must go. There's hardly any information about it in our modern age, but it's common in some of the old civilizations, perhaps in all of them: information as to how to make that passage. In contemporary culture we have the ball-game or warfare scores on TV, the homogenized newscasters all reading the same news.

I think my concept for

Quick Billy

is almost identical to Stan Brakhage's

Scenes from Under Childhood

[196770], which explores the "scenes" prior to childhoodthe scenes so near that time between being and being. Brakhage was sending me those films at the time I was going through all this, and they were essentially identical to what I was making, I thought.

MacDonald:

Do you see reels three and four at all as mates?

Baillie:

No. I just saw reel three through my own sequential experience, almost like lessons in a course. I went from presexuality into sexuality, using recollections of boys I grew up with, the athletes I admired so much, out of the yearbooks. That wasn't too well shot.

MacDonald:

Were you an athlete?

Baillie:

No. I was underdeveloped in high school, this little punky guy with a cute haircut. I really admired athletes a lot; they were big, muscu-

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