Page 129
From Baillie's
Castro Street
(1966). Still courtesy of Anthology
Film Archives.
glasses from my mom's kitchen, various things, and tried them all in the Berkeley backyard one day. I knew I wouldn't have access to a laboratory that would allow me to combine black-and-white and color, and I was determined to do it by myself. I went after the soft color on one side of Castro Street where the Standard Oil towers were; the other side was the black and white, the railroad switching yards. I was making mattes by using high contrast black-and-white film that was used normally for making titles. I kept my mind available so that as much as one can know, I knew about the scene I had
just
shot when I made the
next
color shot. What was white would be black in my negative, and that would allow me to matte the reversal color so that the two layers would not be superimposed but combined.
I shot the railroad material in shorter shots, as "masculine." The "feminine" was the longer, more continuous, simpler, steady color. So one side of the street was feminine for me; the other side masculine. I discovered that I had in my archives some music from Southern India that was based on that idea, and although I didn't particularly recognize why it was that way, I enjoyed the music, and I needed inspiration so I always played it while I edited. I wanted to visualize that ancient, univer-