Introduction to the Holy Scrolls

It is a picture of me in a stream saluting the audience on the soundtrack.

One of San Francisco Cinematheque co-founder Bruce Baillie's sensuous tone poems, TUNG is a portrait of a friend; sandy skin and flaxen hair in the early-morning light.

"First film, 1961, dedicated to Jean Wong. Featuring Ms Wong, Mamma Dog, Petey, (son of Mamma Dog), and San Francisco." -BB

A psychedelic montage of home movie footage gives way to a silent western story.

A personal and experimental film by San Francisco Bay area avant-garde filmmaker, Bruce Baillie. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

The 16-minute film falls neatly into two nearly equal parts, separated by fades to and from black. Part one depicts a sunrise, a journey out to sea in a boat, then gulls flying around the boat while fish are cleaned, and finally the journey back and the reappearance of land.

An early work by Bruce Baillie, originally a Canyon Cinemanews.

A short film by Bruce Baillie, made in 1966, but never released. It was restored by Academy Film Archives, Los Angeles.

Inspired by a lesson from Erik Satie, a film in the form of a street: Castro Street, running by the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California.

Since 1995, the Viennale has invited renowned directors to create short, one-minute films as personal contributions to the festival. Ranging from home movies to political essays, musical sketches to abstract studies, these “little films” form a unique anthology of cinematic moments. 20 Little Films collects a selection of these works, premiering together for the Viennale’s 50th anniversary at the Locarno Film Festival.

Bruce Baillie's Mr. Hayashi might be thought of as a putative East Coast story transformed by a West Coast sensibility. The narrative, slight as it is, mounts a social critique of sorts, involving the difficulty the title character, a Japanese gardener, has finding work that pays adequately. But the beauty of Baillie's black-and-white photography, the misty lusciousness of the landscapes he chooses to photograph, and the powerful silence of Mr. Hayashi's figure within them make the viewer forget all about economics and ethnicity. The shots remind us of Sung scrolls of fields and mountain peaks, where the human figure is dwarfed in the middle distance. Rather than a study of unemployment, the film becomes a study of nested layers of stillness and serenity.

Co-founder of Canyon Cinema and the San Francisco Cinematheque and one of the godparents of experimental film, Bruce Baillie (1931-2020) has forged a singular path in his visionary explorations of the world, his exquisite treatment of light and fragmented storytelling influencing successive generations of like-minded filmmakers. Shot on a cross-country journey during 1964 and 1965, is the Baillie film most in need of rediscovery. Joining the ranks of Bob Dylan, Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac in chronicling a tumultuous period in American history from the road, Baillie sets out "to show how in the conquest of our environment in the New World, Americans have isolated themselves from nature and from one another."

The film is made up of one single take. The camera pans to the left, focusing on a dilapidated fence in a rural field, as Ella Fitzgerald's "All My Life" plays on the soundtrack. At the end of the 3 minute film, the camera tilts up to the blue sky just as the song ends.

Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of Mexican hero, Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nadiso en Santa Cruz de la Soledad.

Not long after settling on Camano Island, Bruce Baillie began creating works on video. Many of these shorts and fragments were little-seen since Canyon Cinema, the distribution organization he co-founded in 1961, limited its efforts to film and declined to distribute Baillie's video pieces. Undeterred, this brevity of video feedback and suggestive text was distributed by the French film co-op Cinédoc and now appears here. Unlike a number of Baillie's later biographical video works which are titled after the individuals they profile, ROY ELDRIDGE takes its name from one of the jazz performers on the soundtrack.

Filmmaker Bruce Baillie curated a Canyon Cinema program in 2005 dedicated to the work of Will Hindle (with whom he collaborated from time to time during the 1960s and early-1970s). For the occasion, Baillie (along with his daughter, Wind) made this short introductory film.