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myself down in my mother's flower garden getting some reds. I did an A, B, C roll, like I did for
Castro Street
. My technique was the most successful that I know about, aside from using optical printers. I laid out the A, B, and C rolls, doing the dissolves between A and C (I had a spring motor then that could do, at most, twenty-five-second runs), dissolving from one shot of the sky to another, to make it look like one long shot. And B would fade in smoothly to bring in the black-and-white material of Tung. I could see where to fade her in, or fade her out, by just looking at the film on a light table. That was the nice thing about working in reversal.
Now there are no film stocks left! They removed them one at a time, like they remove everything else that's beautiful in our world. They take away all the nice old buildings and the old fences, all the visually beautiful stuff. They modified the old Ektachrome three times I think; then they withdrew it. They had an Ektachrome 50, ASA 50, reversal. That was pretty decent. Nobody used it a lot, but it was real nice. And the Kodachrome before it was very interesting, but that disappeared right in the beginning. Then they got into these flat, uninteresting TV newsreel stocks and that's all they had left for a while.
This society has a way of homogenizing every goddamn thing. It's terrifying. I just can't tell you how I feel about it. When I moved to Olympia, there were a few little alternative corners left in town. Within five years, they were all destroyed, all the old docks, the alleys, the berry bushes, the crazy sailors, all gone. Horrible. And now we have the New World Order, the storm troops, a world of "winners."
MacDonald:
When I interviewed Yoko Ono, she had an idea for a travelogue of Japan, where everything would be in super close-up: you wouldn't have to leave your room to make a travelogue. You could talk about noodles and have an extreme close-up of noodles . . .
Baillie:
[laughter]
MacDonald:
Her idea reminds me of
Valentin de las Sierras
.
Baillie:
Yeah.
MacDonald:
Which is like an ethnographic film made up of textures.
Baillie:
That's right.
MacDonald:
How did you end up in Mexico? Did you always carry a camera with you when you traveled?
Baillie:
That was one of the banners of the sixties, filmmakers carrying their cameras. They got too heavy after a while.
In
Valentin
I just shot simply but used a telephoto lens with an extension tube on the back, which gives you a very limited focal plane, a few inches. No one I know ever uses it with a long lens, especially with a moving subject, but I really liked the way it looked. I had to get into the flesh of that town, with the merciless sun beating into the bricks of the