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his assistant; I took a few shots with his Bell and Howell which he was able to use. And then I started making a film with my dogs and my dear friend, Miss Wong. I remember Mr. McKinney at Multichrome Lab, on Gough Street, helping me out during this timelater his son, "Mac," took over the lab and was a friend to many of us.
MacDonald:
Was the film with Miss Wong
On Sundays
[1961]?
Baillie: On Sundays
a typical early sixties film where someone gets chased and you go through old buildings and all that.
MacDonald:
There are some nice moments in that film.
Baillie:
Oh, there might be. I can't tell you how hard it was for me to edit. I had started to learn cinematographythat was hard enough. I had never used a still camera in my life before I picked up the Bolex, but after I was getting used to it, I tried editing and couldn't manage it. So I just hung around the studio and kept practicing. I would take a scene with the dogs and I would cut it one way, then another. It took me forever to develop a little bit of freedom. For quite some time, I was like a gymnast without any grace.
The issue of poverty and art was very important then, and it has always been of special interest to me. I had a friend in Berkeley, a very fine commercial artist, Jeff Belcher. He lived in an attic: everybody was living in somebody's shed, or in an attic or in the back of a cara lot of skilled people. I don't know how it is now, in the world at large, or among American intellectuals and poets, but then there were
many
people with skill and sensitivity but no place to live and no place to apply their gifts. Jeff was the only guy I knew at the time who had tried cinema, and when I announced to him that I was going to try it, he said, "No, don't! You cannot make films by yourself, because one person can't do that many jobs, learn that many skills, alone, and without an income, and without a place to live. And where would you find the equipment and the materials? None of it's available to you. Never will be. You can't afford it, never will be able to. Don't do it, I don't want to see you broken!" Well, I had a lot of strength then, and I decided that was how I was going to use it. Later, I invited him to my first show.
I was discovering the principles of working. I saw myself going over the Oakland-San Francisco Bridge on the mission of the day like a knight. I wasn't twenty, I was thirty and headed toward forty, mature enough to learn, and to move toward consciousness at last. One of the many things I discovered was that what my friend had said in the very beginning was obviously true, and that as a result, there were not many of us trying to do this, and very few who understood that attempt. It was close to a one-hundred-percent effort. It was like war.
For me, poverty was really the mother or the sister of our craft and of our lives. Our aesthetic came from Sister Poverty, as Saint Francis used