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sal fact of opposites that are one, both in conflict and harmonyopposing each other and abiding together and requiring each other.
MacDonald:
On one level it would seem strange to make a beautiful film about an industrial landscape, and yet, if you're combining opposites, it seems very logical. It's like taking the place where one might think there's nothing to look at, or at least nothing of a poetic sort, and then making the opposite thing from it. Your film is a kind of magic.
Baillie:
That sounds good to me. At that time my work was recognized mostly as social criticism: the theme of modern systems as evil always seemed to be there. I remember thinking, "Well, I'm just dropping all that; I'm going to make a
film
film." And then I began to recognize the inner meaning of it. Naturally that
would be
the foundation of it, since it was clear to me always that my purpose in making each film was to find myself, and each film took me further, until finally I was beyond the necessity of making films. Originally, I showed
Castro Street
with stereo sound. I'd take a little Ampex speaker and amplifier along. We'd have the one optical track, and we'd play the magnetic B track on the tape recorder. That was the original plan. Then it got to be too much trouble, and it went around with only the monaural optical track.
MacDonald:
Who was Tung in
Tung
?
Baillie:
Well, she still is a close friend who lives in San Francisco. At the time, we were very close. I think it was one New Year's that I found myself in love with her again, feeling so much love for her. I remember sleeping on the floor in my room at my folks' house, waking with a momentary impressionthat
was
an idea that preceded the imagesand getting right up and making myself work before it was gone, to capture exactly what I had seen in just a half an instant. I'd trained myself for a lifetime to catch
some
of those instancesnot only visualizations, but thought-stuff.
I remember my folks were going to church, and I went up on the roof of the house. I had a blue glass that I'd brought back from Japan, which I taped over my lens and did that long pan around the house, diffusing and giving that purple-blue to everything, shooting the sun as though it were the moon. We shot the material of Tung herself out by the Berkeley horseracing track where there was nothing disturbing the horizon line. I shot at a low angle against the sky with black-and-white copy film, high contrast, so that if I used the negative as a reversal, the black sky would in effect be a matte with her against it. I shot her on roller skates in slow motion to get the image that had come to me that morning.
MacDonald:
Did the little poem come in that early morning impression?
Baillie:
I had written the poem the night before, I think, as I went to sleep. It was one film that only needed to be assembled. Later, I found