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Instead, to make a combined image, I used black Mylar tape. I'd lay stuff down side by side on a light table, and mask parts of the frame, so that later the frame would share two disparate scenes
without
the effect of superimposition. I had to do it manually because I didn't have access to optical printers. And a lot of that had to be taken off again, gradually, because it was a mess, but that's how some of those little effects were done. Lots of the material was put aside because it just wouldn't match up: lots of segments weren't used.
Finally I got the car running better and went north. I wanted to go up to Cutbank, Montana, 'cause that always had the coldest weather; I wanted to be there in the middle of winter. It was so cold that I broke the handle on my tripod while panning in a blizzard. It was crazy. I got up into the Indian reservations and then headed east. I wanted to do something in New York City, but Selma was happening, so I borrowed some money and flew to Selma. I was a day or two behind the terrible beating days that had sent me down there. I got what I could.
MacDonald:
You had no sense at the beginning of the overall route you would take?
Baillie:
I went wherever my knight errantry took me, like Don Quixote.
MacDonald:
It's like a feature-length newsreel. It seems to come out of
Mr. Hayashi
and the early Canyon newsreels.
Baillie:
Yes.
MacDonald: Castro Street
uses still another method of combining imagery.
Baillie: Castro Street
took about three months of solid work. To go into the process at length would take us all day, but there are a lot of notes about the film, some at Anthology Film Archives. The notes were very important. After I had finished
Castro Street,
there was a long period of going back to my tent at night and writing notes on the lessons I had learned from having made it. The film was still teaching me.
Castro Street
was made by the most horrendous effort of intellectualization and intuition combined, using the back and the front of the brain simultaneously, which blew my fuses for life. When I was editing
Castro Street,
I would come out of my morning editing session around noon to lie in the sun and eat, and people I lived with in the commune would pass by, and I couldn't recognize them. I didn't know who they were. I was like someone with Alzheimer's disease. I just blew my brains out every morning editing that film. Now, I try to dissuade my students from this kind of suicidal single-mindedness!
Technically, when I made
Castro Street,
I went into the field again with my "weapon," my tools. I collected a couple of prisms and a lot of