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posed his free-form approach to written verse into a visually poetic film style (a style that often includes written text). Baillie, too, came to see himself as a visual poet, translating traditional literary stories and rituals (the legend of the Holy Grail, the Catholic Mass,
Don Quixote
) into new, cinematic forms. Both filmmakers were, and remain, appalled by the conformist tendencies of American society, by what they see as the denigration of the spiritual in popular culture, and by the more militaristic dimensions of modern technologytendencies so often reflected in the popular cinema. Both have produced a body of films that sing the nobility of the individual, of the simple beauties of the natural world, and of peaceful forms of human interaction. And both have embodied their personal ideologies in institutions (Mekas: the New York Cinematheque, the New York Film-makers' Cooperative,
Film Culture,
Anthology Film Archives; Baillie: Canyon Cinema) that have attempted to maintain the presence of alternative cinema in a nation dominated by the commercial movie and television industries.
While they have a good deal in common, their work is also quite distinct. Mekas has made a permanent home in New York. His primary influences are European; indeed, one of the central quests of his films has been to maintain his Lithuanian heritage and his contact with European culture. His film style is often wildly free-form; his gestural camera movements, quick editing, and single-framing create a sense of childlike excitement about the people and places he records. His films are sensual but avoid the erotic, and in recent years they have celebrated the joys of the conventional nuclear family. Baillie's filmmaking began when he moved to San Francisco and often reflects the Eastern influences that were so pervasive on the West Coast during the sixties. While he too developed a hand-held personal style, its tendency has always been toward the meditative. Indeed, with Yoko Ono, he was probably the first modern filmmaker to explore the potential of the single-shot film, in
All My Life
(1966) and
Still Life
(1966). Baillie's films are both sensual and erotic; they seem less involved with searching for a homeland and a home than with chronicling the film poet's physical, spiritual, and erotic travels.
Neither Yoko Ono nor Anthony McCall have made films in over a decade, but their films of the late sixties and seventies use minimalist tactics as a means of providing new forms of film experience. Ono's earliest films are either single-shot slow motion portraits of actions that challenge viewers' assumptions about the correct "velocity" of film action, or serial examinations of the body that challenge the commercial film industry's fetishization of "filmic" (i.e., erotically marketable) parts of the body for periods of screen time that conform to conventional audiences' film-erotic "needs." McCall's early films are as minimalist as