Bruce Baillie

SALUTE, the first installment of Bruce Baillie's proposed three-part final film, MEMOIRS OF AN ANGEL, chronicles (in collage form) the legendary filmmaker's time in the Navy and beyond. The subsequent installments, NIGHT and LIGHT, are still works-in-progress. "A few of the thematic elements... Introduction of the element of illusion (MY LAST MASQUERADE). Imagery of war [in the form of] documentary footage, film and the author recording himself, self-consciously, in uniform! One cannot here avoid an implicit reference to the Bhagavad Gita; the warrior Arjuna and Lord Krishna in Dharma combat on the battlefield as metaphor for the human dilemma in confrontation with the world of time/space, illusion of opposites [and the] attachment to the merely transient." - Marcel Joyeux, L'illumination

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Magic hour in Chapala, Jalisco. A previously unseen, edited section of film gleaned from Baillie's sprawling scrolls spanning several decades that now comprise his 12-hour unreleased "Magic Box" series. Julio en Chapala was shot during the period when Baillie lived in Mexico and was filming Valentin de la Sierras.

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An avant-garde film commissioned for the trailer for the 1998 Viennale: three scenes showing children playing, birds flying and a mother feeding her child on a beach.

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This video work often used by the filmmaker to introduce, in his absence, film programs scheduled in distant venues. Created also as formal Introduction to an eleven-hour archival collection of unfinished films.

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The film proper begins as Baillie takes the passenger seat of an older Honda and films an hour-long drive in the rain. Baillie's attention moves from passing images on the roadside to other vehicles to the raindrops that squirm across the windshield. Underneath the real-time gambol, Baillie supplies a soundtrack, ostensibly on a tape thrust into the car's cassette-radio player at journey's start, that lampoons local, folksy radio shows with snippets from movies, Golden Age radio, public service announcements and authoritative commentary by an incomprehensible child. The track lends a nostalgic air to a film devoid of humans as objects but filled with meditative rumination and startlingly poetic imagery, such as a large truck enveloped in the water spray kicked up by its own wheels.

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“For the dispossessed, the excluded, the condemned, fallen from life and loving.” These words are typed across the screen at the outset of THE P-38 PILOT, Bruce Baillie’s experimental video portrait of a former pilot outraged by old age and bitter with regrets. We hear the man's disputatious monologue on the soundtrack: “I’m not the kind of guy to end up in a slime pit… I can’t understand it, see?” Baillie, an established master of 16mm cinematography, uses the video medium to search the man's confined space for rustling movements and leaking colors. Chet Baker sings “There Will Never Be Another You” as the filmmaker bids the pilot a peaceful adieu.

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With Lorie, Wind and BB.

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Not long after settling on Camano Island, Bruce Baillie began creating works on video. Many of these shorts and fragments were little-seen since Canyon Cinema, the distribution organization he co-founded in 1961, limited its efforts to film and declined to distribute Baillie's video pieces. Undeterred, this brevity of video feedback and suggestive text was distributed by the French film co-op Cinédoc and now appears here. Unlike a number of Baillie's later biographical video works which are titled after the individuals they profile, ROY ELDRIDGE takes its name from one of the jazz performers on the soundtrack.

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Kodachrome film diary.

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A personal and experimental film by San Francisco Bay area avant-garde filmmaker, Bruce Baillie. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

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A psychedelic montage of home movie footage gives way to a silent western story.

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Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of Mexican hero, Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nadiso en Santa Cruz de la Soledad.

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Six uncut camera rolls to be shown with QUICK BILLY. The ‘rolls’ took the form of a correspondence, or theater, between their author and Stan Brakhage, in the winter of 1968-69.

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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.

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One of San Francisco Cinematheque co-founder Bruce Baillie's sensuous tone poems, TUNG is a portrait of a friend; sandy skin and flaxen hair in the early-morning light.

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It is a picture of me in a stream saluting the audience on the soundtrack.

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The film is made up of one single take. The camera pans to the left, focusing on a dilapidated 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.

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"One continuous, intimate shot from within the commune…Being is seen as transitory; everything is in the infinite process of becoming." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

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By the "Canyon Cinema Documentary Film Unit" - (Paul Tulley, Bruce Baillie, etc). Made in Spring, '66 for a small community of Indian people near Laytonville, California.

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Kind of a "News," for the people of the 24-hour a day vigil around the US Marine Ammunition Depot at Port Chicago, California.

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Co-founder of Canyon Cinema and the San Francisco Cinematheque and one of the godparents of experimental film, Bruce Baillie (1931-2020) has forged a singular path in his visionary explorations of the world, his exquisite treatment of light and fragmented storytelling influencing successive generations of like-minded filmmakers. Shot on a cross-country journey during 1964 and 1965, is the Baillie film most in need of rediscovery. Joining the ranks of Bob Dylan, Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac in chronicling a tumultuous period in American history from the road, Baillie sets out "to show how in the conquest of our environment in the New World, Americans have isolated themselves from nature and from one another."

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"Cycle scrambles poem. Bass solo by Pat Smith, LA". - BB...

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An experimental film dedicated to the Dakota Sioux, which follows the form of the Christian Mass. A series of images of contemporary America interwoven with the ritual spiriting away of a dead Indian.

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Made for the Oakland Public Schools on an experimental series of classes in the arts.

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The 16-minute film falls neatly into two nearly equal parts, separated by fades to and from black. Part one depicts a sunrise, a journey out to sea in a boat, then gulls flying around the boat while fish are cleaned, and finally the journey back and the reappearance of land.

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Bruce Baillie's Mr. Hayashi might be thought of as a putative East Coast story transformed by a West Coast sensibility. The narrative, slight as it is, mounts a social critique of sorts, involving the difficulty the title character, a Japanese gardener, has finding work that pays adequately. But the beauty of Baillie's black-and-white photography, the misty lusciousness of the landscapes he chooses to photograph, and the powerful silence of Mr. Hayashi's figure within them make the viewer forget all about economics and ethnicity. The shots remind us of Sung scrolls of fields and mountain peaks, where the human figure is dwarfed in the middle distance. Rather than a study of unemployment, the film becomes a study of nested layers of stillness and serenity.

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Dedicated to Albert Verbrugghe, whose wife was killed in Katange by UN soldiers.

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Made on the north coast of California, in Mendocino, combining spontaneity and preconception in a film that is essentially a short lesson in feature form.

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A sensitive, low-key portrait of the East Bay Activity Center, a school in Oakland, California, started in the 1950s to help emotionally disturbed children. The atmospheric documentary opens with hilly East Bay streets shrouded in fog. The mist lifts as the film moves to children at play. Often shown in unobtrusive close-up, the youngsters appear as thinking individuals, enjoying the swings, puzzling out problems, or interacting with their teacher in the classroom.

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Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

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With Lorie, Wind and BB.

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During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.

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Independent filmmakers are given a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station.

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Impressions during a visit to Bruce Baillie’s farm in Fort Bragg.

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An early work by Bruce Baillie, originally a Canyon Cinemanews.

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