Bruce Baillie

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This seems to be one of Baillie’s most under-seen but it’s my favorite of his. Only an artist with beautiful heart and soul can create something like this, point camera as firmly as Lumiére’s to daily observation but instead the family unit transcends the everyday and the observational; father’s ode to his child becomes expression of the most meaningful love, the haptic communication reveals so much and every little detail that doesn’t make sense just strengthens the feeling of life and love. This is the film that should echo in the eternity – if someone from strange planet should come and visit after the earth is in ruins and all life is gone, this is what they should be seeing.Read More »

“A living saint projected onto the silver screen. Why did I make this film? I wanted to help my friend find a job in Berkeley. It was one of my first attempts to create film as both utilitarian and Art. Cinema must be meaningful and wonderful in a single stroke of camera and mind. Mr. Hayashi was my own, simple example, derived from an experience in a Zagreb city well, where water and daily gossip flowed freely.” – Bruce BaillieRead More »

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The film is made up of one single take. The camera pans to the left, focusing on a delapitated fence in a rural field, as Ella Fitzgerald’s “All My Life” plays on the soundtrack. At the end of the 3 minute film, the camera tilts up to the blue sky just as the song ends.Read More »

Bruce Baillie’s (…) Quixote (1965) stands alongside other synoptic 60s masterpieces such as Stan Brakhage’s The Art of Vision and Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise, which use dense collages of diverse images in an attempt to make sense of a troubling world. In Quixote wild horses and a basketball game are part of a cross-country trip that ends with an antiwar demonstration in Manhattan. Baillie says he’s depicting our culture as one of conquest, but his film’s greatness lies not in its social analysis, which can seem as simpleminded as equating businessmen with pigs. Rather it’s in the way his superimposed and intercut images float almost weightlessly in space, creating a hypnotic sense of displacement that lets us see beyond aggression.Read More »

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“This film by Bruce Baillie, completed in 1966 but unreleased until 2014, is contemporaneous with Castro Street, but is much more formally connected to All My Life or Still Life, also from the same year. In three sections with three different formal strategies, Baillie shares distilled moments of found natural beauty as he encountered them in the North Bay outside San Francisco. The first section features a study of plum blossoms, rendered in rich, multiple superimpositions that allow the white flowers to explode into a blizzard of visual complexity, framed by a panning shot of purple mountains. In the second section, Baillie allows us a furtive glimpse of the titular little girl, waving to cars with her dog on the side of the road, lost in her world and thoughts. Bruce#s framing remains unadorned, feeling no need to add to or take away from a beautiful piece of simple portraiture. The third section, of waterbugs on the surface of a pond, remind us how remarkable and sensitive Baillie’s camerawork can be, as he observes their graceful dances, and the subtle light and water effects they produce by their movements.”
Mark ToscanoRead More »

A montage of images of film making is followed by a silent western story.Read More »

Bruce Baillie appeared on Screening Room in April 1973 to screen and discuss the films:

On Sundays (excerpt, 11:40)
The Gymnasts (excerpt, 6:45)
To Parsifal (full film, 15:12)
Tung (full film, 4:32)
Castro Street (full film, 9:54)Read More »

Inspired by a lesson from Erik Satie; a film in the form of a street – Castro Street running by the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California … switch engines on one side and refinery tanks, stacks and buildings on the other – the street and film, ending at a red lumber company. All visual and sound elements from the street, progressing from the beginning to the end of the street, one side is black-and-white (secondary), and one side is colour – like male and female elements. The emergence of a long switch-engine shot (black-and-white solo) is to the filmmaker the essential of consciousness.Read More »

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A film mass, dedicated to nobility and excellence.

‘No chance for me to live, Mother, you might as well mourn.’ – Sitting Bull, Hukpapa Sioux Chief.

Applause for a lone figure dying on the street. INTROIT. A long lightly exposed section composed in the camera. KYRIE . A motorcyclist crossing the San Francisco bridge accompanied by the sound of a Gregorian chant, recorded at the Trappist monastery in Vina , California.The EPISTLE is in several sections. In this central part the film becomes gradually more outrageous, the material being either from television or the movies, photographed directly from the screen. Read More »