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Baillie’s Blasts of Complex Imagery by Doniphan Blair
Alt-cineaste Bruce Baillie surveys the crowd at a Pacific Film Archives show. photo: D. Blair
BRUCE BAILLIE—CRAZED SENIOR
citizen (by his own admission), art filmmaker-extraordinaire (according to an early review in the NY Times), and '60s founder of the seminal Canyon Cinema (in Canyon, a redwooded wonderland just over the hill from Oakland)—dropped by his old stomping grounds recently and showed some films.
On April 29th, he was in "Shorts 5: Experimental", the San Francisco International Film Festival's art film series, at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley.
There, he shared the proscenium with old friends Janis Crystal Lipzin, who projected her colorful and intensely-soundtracked "De Luce 2: Architectura" (2013), and Lawrence Jordan, whose gentile but visionary "Entr’Acte" (2013) was in his classical, animated collage-style, among other filmmakers. Su Friedrich's nearly perfect non-narrative life survey, "Queen Takes Pawn", opened the show.
While he certainly enjoyed that show, Baillie adored outright the next evening at the Black Hole Cinemateque, given how comfortably he glided between the old couches that give it its name and regaled the assembled crowd of 20-30-somethings.
"It appears we may be witnessing another renaissance, an early Canyon or Haight-Ashbury," Baillie effused afterwards in an email.
Baillie was overjoyed to address a motley crew of film freaks. photo: D. Blair
A cool, if small, Oakland venue, Black Hole Cinemateque is the brain child of filmmaker and film activist Tooth, who has been showing classics, avant-garde, found footage and more since the fall of 2011.
The unmarked theater sits in a small, old church at 1038 24th Street, in Oakland, and there is never any admission fee.
"Very important to appear unprofessional," Baillie also told me in another recent email, "[Stan] Brakhage used to remind us of the original meaning of 'amateur'," which is "lover of."
Then he asked me to forgive his "haranguery" (his word), which the Canyon Cinema-ites were always sensitive about. Last year, when I inquired if they issued any manifestos back in the day, Baillie said, "Having no manifestos was our manifesto."
Despite a reluctance to haranguery, however, after the show he started in with a German accent, a tribute to the fact that German was his only post-graduate course at the University of California, Berkeley, and that his new film, "Memoirs of an Angel (Remembering Life)" had a lot of footage of fighters, planes and bombers, most WWII-era.
You might think it odd that the creator of "All My Life"—arguably one of the most perfect AND pretty art shorts ever made (a long, smooth pan of a picket fence, festooned with exploding, Kodachrome-red flowers)—would make a personal film about fighters, planes and bombers, especially with him playing a kitschy squadron commander with binoculars...
From a 'All My Life', Baillie's nearly perfect little film. photo: courtesy B. Baillie
But Bruce, like many artists, is big and his interests are vast. Although there are other images—children, birds taking flight, he was in the military and loves planes.
"Yes, planes," he wrote me in his clipped style. "I made models in teen years. [I] went into USNR [US Naval Reserve at] 17 or 18, activated Korean War, duty aboard carrier, some of same planes, very interesting. They offered me flight training in Pensacola, which I finally turned down [in order to get out of the service]."
The Black Hole's blog talks of "the Bhagavadgita; the warrior, Arjuna and Lord Krishna in Dharma combat on the battle field, as metaphor for the human dilemma" as well it should—since art must stand alone and war is closer to life than peace—but for the artist himself, "Memoirs" is about playing with childhood dreams.
"During WWII, some of us saved pix of [our] favorite planes, from both sides, in scrapbooks. Also, we boys each had our favorite student pilot at the local college."
Coincidentally, I connected to Baillie about this aspect of "Memoirs", which is part of a proposed trilogy, since my father flew as a photographer on B-17s in WWII. Moreover, I recently viewed John Ford's wartime doc about B-17s flying out Britain. It was surprisingly structuralist with repetitive shot after shot of the big machines taking off, flying, taking flak, etc.
Black Hole's promo piece for Baillie show is also an homage to the '60s. photo: courtesy B. Baillie
"The 'Memoirs' work doesn't reveal itself in its current, partial form," Baillie worried in another email. "I hope to be able to finish it: 'Part II, Night'—'In the night with none but the light that burns in my heart,'" he wrote, and then "Part III, Light".
Baillie works entirely with 16mm film, or "stand-alone" equipment, as he calls it, with nothing digitized until distro, although he does have a web site.
In addition, Black Hole showed "Castro Street" (albeit a poor digital print) but a cine-landmark which is always nice to see. The previous night at the PFA, however, was another premiere, "Little Girl". Although from 1966 (10 min), it was only recently discovered and resurrected by the Academy Film Archive.
Another '60s cinema tour-de-force, which Baillie himself hadn't seen for years, it featured the eponymous little girl, in a tight shot, standing on a road waving to drivers, over and over, and then, even more closeup, waterbugs skating on water, some coupling (another favorite Baillie theme, albeit often metaphorical), climaxing with a gorgeous overlaying of images of liquids.
All in all, a lovely visit from "Dr B", as Baillie likes to close his emails, to Canyon Cinema ground zero. Hopefully he will return soon, in corporality or light, to light the way through the redwood-darkened trail to "another film renaissance". Posted on May 06, 2014 - 10:14 AM