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Bruce Baillie
In the world of film studies, one often senses a suspicion of beautiful imagery, a suspicion based on the assumption that the apparatus of the movie camera is so constructed that it produces beautiful images almost automatically. Bruce Baillie's films are full of beautiful imagery, but they are anything but "eye candy." For Baillie, the filmstrip is a space where the physical world around him and the spiritual world within him can intersect; the screening room is a place where cinema devotees can share moments of illumination. The remarkable textures and colors of Baillie's films are not the products of a movie camera doing what it does automatically; they are achieved by means of homespun technologies Baillie devises to modify the camera so that it can be true to what his inner vision reveals to him, rather than to conventional visual and narrative expectations.
In his earliest films Baillie explored ways of visualizing his own mental states and of capturing something of the lovely simplicity of the people around him he saw as most deeply spiritual. Increasingly, his films became characterized by a tendency to layer or combine multiple images and by an unusual sensitivity to texture, color, and light. Each of these tendencies can be understood as an emblem of a particular understanding Baillie had developed. The layering and combining of imagerymost memorable, perhaps, in
Mass for the Dakota Sioux
(1964),
Tung
(1966), and
Castro Street
(1966)became a way of expressing the complexity of experience, the discovery that reality is not simply a set of surfaces available to perception and intelligence, but a composite of surface and of spirit that flows beneath the surface and behind our perception of it. Baillie's dexter-