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a stylistic way of expressing the fact that things are more complex than they first seemed to you. As your films develop in the years after
Mass,
layering becomes more and more important, even characteristic.
Baillie:
Perhaps.
We can't leave out of this discussion of
Mass
the tribute to the American aborigine, the original people who were considered by the celebrants of the Holy Mass as unholy savages. The hero in the film was a tribute to the native people of Dakota, the Lakota Sioux in general and all their tribes, and it was a tribute to the best of man who lies on the sidewalk, dead already at the beginning of the film and hauled off later by the celebrants: the body of Everyman taken away in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. It was also a tribute to
the poet
(and specifically to Jean Cocteau). I portrayed the gift of poetry as deceased, gone. The film is a celebration of what has passed away from our hysterical milieu of materialism and technological redneckery!
MacDonald:
Though paradoxically it hasn't passed away because you're making film poetry.
Baillie:
Right. I am that very person, or if it isn't me, it's others. I'm making this film and portraying myself, betraying myself, uncovering the self, expressing Every Person's dilemma.
MacDonald:
At times,
Mass
has a strange sheen to it, especially on the bridge . . .
Baillie:
I did a couple of things to get that. A lot of times I used a green filter in the summer sun. It gave an odd flatness to a pretty good, contrasty reversal film. And then I put Vaseline on my clear filter for the diffusion. A lot of times I would shoot and wind back and shoot againas people did in those daysmaking double images
in
the camera, taking what happened and declaring that another clue to what was developing, discovering the film as I went.
MacDonald: Quixote
was the biggest film you'd done up to that point and still is, except for
Quick Billy
and
Roslyn Romance
(if one counts all the sections of those two films). In many ways, it's an extension of
Mass
.
Baillie:
I was living with my folks. I never could afford my own room or anything, and by this time my father was saying, "You're getting to be thirty-whatever and you're doing these films, and you're getting nowhere. You just can't live here anymore." I had to quit in the middle of
Mass
about three times 'cause I had no place to house it. I was always living in someone's back room, where I couldn't work. Finally, I went home to my folks' house where the film was, and walked quietly back into my room and went to work on the
Mass,
and no one said anything, and I finished it. Ultimately, it was my father and mother whose support made this period [of creativity] possible. All the films and my life are thanks to my mother, Gladys, and my father, E. Kenneth Baillie.