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ity in capturing the sensuous textures of the worldparticularly notable in
Valentin de las Sierras
(1968),
Quick Billy
(1970), and the recent video
The P-38 Pilot
(1990)is an emblem of the degree to which he sees the perceivable world as invigorated by spirit. And his fascination with color and light in such films as
Still Life
(1966),
Quick Billy,
and
Roslyn Romance
(1977) is a function of his desire for spiritual enlightenment; it connects his work with that of such predecessors and contemporaries as Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, James Whitney, Stan Brakhage, and Tom Chomont, who have used film as a way of visualizing the colors of the soul on its journey toward spiritual regeneration.
For Baillie, the very idea of making his films is so out of synch with the mainstream history of film and the commoditized world it reflects and reconfirms that it renders him an anomaly, an outcast, a "pure fool" like Parsifal and Don Quixote. Indeed, modern society is encoded in the very tools a filmmaker must work with. Achieving the spiritual by means of filmmakinga mechanical/chemical processsimply "can't be done," and
therefore
is worth doing as a means of demonstrating the ability of film artists to transcend their means. In
To Parsifal
[1963],
Mass for the Dakota Sioux,
and
Quixote
[1965] Baillie becomes the spiritual knight-errant not only in terms of what he trains his camera on and how he uses it but by being willing to enter the field and make films at all.
His refusal to betray his cine-spiritual quest, despite the resistance that surrounded him, became a demonstration of the spiritual integrity of his work. Throughout the sixties, Baillie functioned as both film artist and as organizer. He was the catalyst for the Canyon Cinema exhibition programs that finally resulted in Canyon Cinema distribution, now (along with the Museum of Modern Art's Circulating Film Program) the most successful American distributor of a wide range of critical forms of cinema.
I spoke with Baillie in June 1989 at his home on Camano Island in Washington State.
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MacDonald:
How did you get started?
Baillie:
What led me toward making films in the beginning, in 1960 or even a little before, was an interest in theater and the need to function in the world through art. When I was a kid, in sixth or seventh grade in Aberdeen, South Dakota, we messed up one time and the principal's punishment was that we had to give a play for an assembly. At first, we thought this was a severe penalty, but pretty soon we liked the idea.