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Then I used all the rolls from fourteen up to forty-one. And so on. And I shot after I knew I was done making the main body of the film. I had to let it keep going since there was so much vitality in what I was shooting. Finally, it got to be like the Greek Golden Age passing when everything got too elaborate and touched up and didn't have the newness of the earlier stuff. So I stopped. Later, I selected the best "rolls" and released them as such. I consider them as artifacts, essentially, as in an archeological dig.
MacDonald: Roslyn Romance
is also made up of a lot of little rolls.
Baillie:
Yes. They're not all small, but generally they have the roll concept, or they're like "postcards," as the intro explains. They're all separate but have the basic connection of belonging to the Romance. I use "romance" in the French sense, of story, and also in the sense that the human and mind seems to prefer inventing, rather than accepting, from moment to moment, the
what is
of life/reality.
Roslyn, Washington, was one of the few remaining examples in North America of the kind of Old Europe village life that ended at the beginning of the twentieth century and was to a degree transported over here. I found myself in that town, with people from the "Old World." For them, reality was, "Well, I'm here in this house and I have a job and I'm respectable and I feed my children and love and protect them; I built this house to defend myself, my family. and this town from others and from the wilderness around us." That was the life I recorded in infinite detail in
Roslyn,
and a major theme of
Quixote
which preceded it.
I wanted to know, like Stendhal,
is that all there is?
I did ask them this question constantly. Every day I would leave my house and walk down the street like anyone else in the village and be stopped and invited in for Italian pastry or some other treat and an hour's gossip, on the way to the post office. I would ask myself, "Is it really true?"the subtitle of the work. The unanswered question works itself through lots of rolls and reels after the formal introduction, which I just barely managed to finish in the seventies while at Bard College before I had to move again. The rolls and notes to
Roslyn Romance
remain in my Washington archivery waiting to be finished and released.
The concluding part, which is called "The Cardinal's Visit," is a narrative film, conceived with my close friend and filmmaker Elliot Caplan. I shot it with the last grant I had (an NEA) with the help of Elliot and a lovely apprentice and friend, Ms. Harley, who stayed in my little trailer in Upstate New York, between 1979 and 1981. We worked very hard for a while. I was the cardinal (I still have the costume). We shot about four hours of really pretty color negative with very elaborate lighting setups. We'd do two or three setups a day, just about like a Hollywood film. There were usually three of us: me, the young woman, and the man who