Still Life

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

“For the dispossessed, the excluded, the condemned, fallen from life and loving.” These words are typed across the screen at the outset of THE P-38 PILOT, Bruce Baillie’s experimental video portrait of a former pilot outraged by old age and bitter with regrets. We hear the man's disputatious monologue on the soundtrack: “I’m not the kind of guy to end up in a slime pit… I can’t understand it, see?” Baillie, an established master of 16mm cinematography, uses the video medium to search the man's confined space for rustling movements and leaking colors. Chet Baker sings “There Will Never Be Another You” as the filmmaker bids the pilot a peaceful adieu.

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.

This video work often used by the filmmaker to introduce, in his absence, film programs scheduled in distant venues. Created also as formal Introduction to an eleven-hour archival collection of unfinished films.

Set to the music of Hindemith, filmed entirely in a Gothic cathedral and edited to precision counter-point. An almost somber beginning that rises to brilliant exaltation. As with PASTORALE, extremely innovative for its day and even now. Entire film was an "optical print" to retain light nuances. Has never been placed in competition.