Experimental film pioneer Bruce Baillie embarks on his ‘final project’
Email | Print Josh Lintereur | Skagit Valley Herald
June 08, 2008 - 09:15 AM

Frank Varga

Independent filmmaker Bruce Baillie discusses his film career while seated inside the office of his Camano Island home.
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Inside filmmaker Bruce Baillie’s small Camano Island home, a pile of old blankets and stuffed animals are all that’s keeping the light and dust off the original film stock of some of his most important work.

Six years ago, Baillie, known as one of the founding fathers of the West Coast experimental film community, began the painstaking process of digitally archiving the 25 or so avant-garde films he’s made during his lifetime. The job has required him to unearth the negatives of his 16mm films from universities, libraries, film vaults and even the dark corners of his own home.

It’s an undertaking the 76-year-old calls his “final project,” and it’s the capstone to a career that’s left an indelible mark on the film world.

Nearly 50 years ago, Baillie — then a budding young filmmaker in his own right — began screening the works of other art film pioneers for his friends and neighbors on a sheet he’d hung in the backyard of his San Francisco Bay Area home.

Baillie’s screenings, which later moved to other basements, backyards and local coffee houses, helped birth the West Coast’s independent film movement of the 1960s.

Dubbed “Canyon Cinema,” and later turned into a film distribution cooperative that still exists, the screenings would help influence a future generation of filmmakers. One of those would be a teenager named George Lucas, who would go on to direct and produce blockbuster movies, including the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” series.

Through it all, Baillie — who, as he puts it, has “never been obliged to the scheme or system” — never strayed from his indie roots and remained intensely committed to making experimental art films of his own.

Now, film experts say, it’s time to preserve that work.

“Bruce Baillie’s films have had an amazing impact on experimental and commercial filmmakers around the world for 50 years,” said Dominic Angerame, executive director of Canyon Cinema. “Right now, it’s important for Bruce to digitize the work and attempt to restore the original materials so it’s reproducible for future generations.”

Baillie has been orchestrating the process of digitizing his films from his home, which he shares with his wife, Lorie Baillie, and their two children. Most of the technical restorative work is done in film labs in New York and California.

The digital transfer process hasn’t been easy. The first DVD containing five of Baillie’s films has taken six years to produce. That DVD will be released later this year by Canyon Cinema and distributed to museums, libraries, universities and the general public.

The film soundtracks have to be overhauled and the film itself — which in some cases is scratched or dirtied — has to be restored.

Exact replications of Baillie’s films are critical, because his work eschews narrative structure altogether and instead evokes meaning and expression through abstract visual elements and sound. Thus, changes in the sound or image quality in a Baillie film can alter its impact.

“It’s not actors moving around on a set with dialogue,” Baillie said. “It’s abstract and the meaning depends on the quality of the color and contrast.”

The restoration process isn’t cheap. So far, Baillie has been archiving his work using a grant he received from George Lucas’ Lucasfilm Foundation.

Baillie has never earned a steady income, having instead devoted his entire life to art without regard for its commercial value.

The South Dakota native and University of Minnesota graduate moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1960s, following a brief stint at the London School of Film Technique.

While living in Canyon, Calif., a friend bought him a camera, which he learned to use by working for free assisting a local documentary filmmaker.

“I started out like all of us when we’re young, just trying to find a way to be connected in the world some way,” he said. “It took me years as a teenager to search out what I should do, and then I did it.”

As his career evolved, Baillie received grants to make his films, which typically took one year to produce. One of his most notable films, “Castro Street,” is preserved in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

In the film, Baillie visually explores the poetic beauty of a train yard. Like most experimental films, it challenges the viewer to break down their preconceived notions of what cinema is all about.

“For most people, it’s like going into a bookstore and pulling the first book off the shelf, and it’s James Joyce,” Angerame said. “How do you read that if you normally read Raymond Chandler?”

But that’s not to say it’s inaccessible art.

“Baillie has a way of captivating you immediately with the beautiful images he captures on his camera,” Angerame said. “It presents things we see on an everyday level and presents it in a different way. Like a lot of experimental cinema, it tries to expand the way we see the world.”

For the past two decades or so, Baillie has lived with his family in relative anonymity on Camano Island. Unemployed and mostly cut off from other filmmakers, his creativity hasn’t waned.

In his home, entire drawers overflow with cassette tapes containing his homemade radio programs, complete with pseudo- interviews, pop quizzes and mysteries. Some were hatched with bored and stressed commuters in mind. Others are for pets, when their owners are away.

Inside Baillie’s office, the walls are covered with a collage of pictures of his family, friends, artists and spiritual masters who’ve influenced him over the years. There are even photographs of Hollywood icons like Bob Hope, Johnny Carson and Richard Burton, on which Baillie has playfully autographed their names and signed “To Bruce.”

His office also contains several manilla folders where he’s stashed piles of notes on his final film, titled “Memoirs of an Angel,” which he’s been working on for 15 years. The film, he says, is meant to represent his “final thoughts on the human condition.” In his notes, he’s condensed and interpreted the writings of Dylan Thomas and other poets and philosophers, which have inspired the film.

Looking back at his career, Baillie takes pride in seeing how the avant-garde movement has influenced conventional filmmakers.

During a nature documentary he watched on television recently, Baillie smiled when the director cut from a shot of elephants walking to a close up of one of the animal’s enormous feet.

The jarring close-up was wholly unnecessary to the narrative of the film, Baillie explained. But given the image’s beauty, it was a subtle metaphysical nod to the director’s love and passion for his work.

“Beauty was not always the guide,” Baillie said, reflecting on the stodgier conventions of mainstream film, which the avant-garde movement helped break down. “You can’t help but feel good about it.”

Josh Lintereur can be reached at 360-416-2141 or at .


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