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a film can take. But the second day the light was still marvelous. A friend was with me, and we started to drive back to San Francisco, and suddenly I said, "No, I can
not
turn my back on this!" We stopped, and I got the tripod, fixed it real solid. Then I practiced and had her call off the minutes: we had about three minutes to get up into the sky in one roll, one continuous shot. Then we shot it and it went as smoothly as possibleI panned with the three-inch telephoto lens and pulled focus as I panned.
All My Life
came out well. It was inspired by the light (every day is unique as you know), and by the early Teddy Wilson/Ella Fitzgerald recording ["All My Life"], which was always playing in Tulley's little cabin, with its condemnation sign on it (one evening, we were having supper and heard ''tack tack." We went out and looked at the door. The sign said, "You are required to leave these premises by twelve o'clock tomorrow!"). I knew that song had to be the track and that it had to have the same sound it had at Paul's, with a potato sack over the speaker. It's supposed to sound a little scratchy. When I got back to the commune, I put the music and the image together.
MacDonald: A Hurrah for Soldiers
[1963] is dedicated to Alfred Verbrugge because his wife was killed; why wasn't the film dedicated to her?
Baillie:
Well, generally, I'm not politicalespecially then I was not. And I did not keep myself very well informed about the world, history, events. But all of a sudden in
Life
magazine there was this terrible, tragic picture of a man, Verbrugge, screaming: these soldiers had murdered his wife, by mistake. It was a horrifying picture. I couldn't stand that human beings could do such things to one another. I just couldn't contain it, so I immediately set out to make a film, my first color film. Somebody'd given me a few rolls. The light was so pretty in the lower sky and made such nice grays and blacks. It was almost a-chromatic. That interested me.
So it was a tribute to a man who had lost his beloved through the savagery of total obedience to an idea. Krishnamurti abhors that we follow ideas, not to mention ideologies, like little puppy dogs, or
soldiers
. He often admonishes his students to try to learn to transcend ideas. An idea is fixed; it's a nonexistent point in the continuity of the moving spirit: the essential infinite life we seek in all our thinking, feeling, acting. I just hated that these soldiers were obedient to a command that resulted in this tragic moment that reverberates forever in the universe: murder never stops, and I wanted to have some say about that kind of ignorance, that obedience to authority. I was a newcomer to the medium and that film was probably the best I'd done with it. By then, I had a little equipment to work with, though I had to borrow or rent things every time I wanted to make a movie. I recall the tears, the total frustration, at not being able to work when it was time!