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You're given a certain responsibility and a gift or grace, a certain unique capability, which can turn against you if it's not attended to properly. Even the king who possessed this emblem of purity or perfection, this divine weapon, was heir to temptation, and the weapon fell into the hands of his nemesis. The wound was ultimately mortal. Though he was still alive, still functioning, he was incapable of carrying on this essential divine mission to celebrate Infinite Truth, embodied in the Holy Grail, so it was foretold that there would be a successor who would come along, a "pure fool" as Wagner called himwhether the original name was Parsifal or Percivil, it really meant "pure fool."
MacDonald:
So you saw yourself as cinema's Parsifal?
Baillie:
Parsifal was object and subject all at once, an objectified depiction
and
a reflection of my subjective pursuit of an identity, my recognition of myself. To try to make
my
own films against enormous resistance was perhaps Parsifal-ian: to be out there in the woods and on the ocean with a movie camera, unemployed, not doing the usual thingsmarrying, making children, setting up the pension plan, carrying the mail.
MacDonald:
At the beginning of the film a superimposed text says "Part One," but there's no "Part Two." Did you have in mind another film that would be Part Two of
To Parsifal
?
Baillie:
No. That film, as it is, was conceived as being in two parts: the sea and the Sierra Nevada. Even though I didn't say "Part Two," evidently, there is a definite closing of one section and an opening of the other. Perhaps, I said, "Part One" just to indicate that it
was
in parts. That first part was shot off of Steve Brenner's boat. We hear the sounds of the VHF radio and the fishermen talking to one another, early morning. Sort of beautiful, isn't it? And then up in the cliffs the wind was blowing through those grasses that grow along the Northern California coast.
MacDonald:
That gorgeous shot of the wind in the grasses is a motif all through your work and apparently your lifeeven your child [Baillie had a baby girl in March 1989] is named Wind.
Baillie:
The horses, the grasses blowing in the wind, the sea, the flesh of young girls' faces, edges of bodies, movement . . . those are my motifs.
MacDonald:
You know, it's very hard to verbalize about your work.
Baillie:
But it's kind of fun, isn't it, to verbalize around things, because each person gets a chance to see for him- or herself!
Parsifal
isn't closed down like a Coke ad. It gives a lot of room to the viewer. I think there are lovers of the medium who are more amorous perhaps than some of the filmmakers. I like to make analogies between filmmaker and the man of arms. The man of arms becomes so much
of
his/her weaponry that he can become inured to that pure love, which is his/her source.