Bruce Baillie (1931-2020) (Patreon)

Bruce Baillie: consummate filmmaker of the West Coast avant-garde. Co-founder of Canyon Cinema. Instigator of what would become SF Cinematheque. We know he is one of the all-time greats. Why has it taken us so long to act like it?

Some filmmakers are axiomatic; others are, perhaps, contingent. In his classic send-up of academic criticism, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," Jorge Luis Borges had his fictional man of letters declare that Cervantes' masterwork was "contingent," explaining that he could imagine the universe without Don Quixote, as opposed to other, "necessary" works. But then he avers, "(I am speaking, of course, of my personal ability, not the historical resonance of those works.)"

The films of Bruce Baillie are among the most subtle, poetic, and exquisitely observed works the American avant-garde has ever produced. But unlike Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, or Hollis Frampton, Baillie did not engender a historical "school," inspire dozens of anxious acolytes, or seek status as the hander-down of grand theoretical pronouncements. In the introduction to his 1989 interview with Baillie, Scott MacDonald noted that these were films so preternaturally beautiful that they were sometimes looked upon with suspicion, as if they simply sprang forth from the apparatus like fruit from a tree.

Bruce Baillie's films were clearly the work of a master craftsman, but his "curse" was to make them appear effortless. These films could seem somehow contingent in the history of the American avant-garde because, like the sun and sky, they just somehow seemed to be there, striking us on an affective, emotional frequency. These films claimed a place in our vision, and in the experimental canon, without needing to mount an argument on their own behalf.

Take Castro Street (1966), what has effectively become Baillie's signature film. Filmed along the titular street in Richmond, California -- a working-class, industrial suburb of Oakland -- the film uses as its basis two horizontal pans, going down both sides of the street. One is filmed in color, the other black and white. Baillie achieves cresting, sculptural waves of light, by cupping his hand over the lens, manipulating focus, and then finally superimposing the two film passages with careful post-production exposure.

Possibly his second most well-known film, All My Life (1966) is another horizontal pan, this one taking less than four minutes. The camera moves from right to left, following a picket fence covered in bright red flowers, positioned against a perfect blue midday sky. Baillie's tracking shot is so tight, the fence seems to unroll like the sheet music inside a player piano, as the density of the flowers gradually dissipates. On the soundtrack, we hear the title song by Ella Fitzgerald: "All my life, I've been waiting for you.." And then, the film achieves an indescribable liftoff, from the ground and into the galaxy.

Baillie was not averse to engaging in social and political concerns in his films, although he did so with a light touch and an inquisitive eye. In many ways, he is a spiritual forefather of the non-argumentative cinema of fact that is such a major part of today's experimental film scene, including artists such as Fern Silva, Sky Hopinka, and Ben Rivers. His early film Here I Am (1962) depicts an ordinary day at the East Bay Activities Center, "a day program for emotionally disturbed children." Despite its topic, Here I Am is a cinematic oasis of peace, showing the difference that volunteer social services could make in kids' lives. (Programmers: screen this before Allan King's 1967 documentary Warrendale for a study in aesthetic contrast.)

And in fact, Baillie made one of the definitive cinematic tone poems of the 1960s. Sort of a non-narrative Easy Rider, the film is a densely elaborated 45-minute journey across America, offering fragmentary portraits of hippies and dropouts, scenes from the circus and high school basketball and the starched-shirt comportment of legislative politics, all punctuated by expansive landscapes, from the vast Western desert to the concrete and steel of the urban North. 

It's a film whose epic scope appears holy writ, as if Baillie simply found it out there in the land and wisely used his Bolex to jot it down. Its title? Quixote. 

ADDITIONAL FILMS BY BRUCE BAILLIE:

-On Sundays (1960)

- Tung (1966); Mass for the Lakota Sioux (1964); Valentin de las Sierra (1971); Castro Street (1966); All My Life (1966) 

-Little Girl (1966)

- I Wish I Knew (1989)

-Commute (1995)

-Salute (1999)

-Baillie in conversation with P. Adams Sitney, Film Society of Lincoln Center, 2016