Bruce Baillie

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

During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.

Impressions during a visit to Bruce Baillie’s farm in Fort Bragg.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Finnish filmmaker Sami van Ingen, a great-grandson of Robert Flaherty, made an expedition to the residence of Bruce Baillie not long after the turn of the century and documented the results of his visit. Study Reel is, as Baillie described it in a letter to the Brazilian magazine Tropico, "filled with commentary on various of the films along with the one-hour video of myself and family".

With Lorie, Wind and BB.

(The Laundry Lesson) For Jefferson Sunflower

From Ross Lipman's "personal ethnographies" series, an informal visit with legendary filmmaker Bruce Baillie at his home on Camano Island in Washington State.

Video recording made by Bruce Baillie to accompany public presentations and classroom screenings of his work.

Filmed portrait of Bruce Baillie, a mythical figure from the northern Californian experimental film scene. Produced without a script or shooting schedule, the film lies somewhere between a home movie and documentary. It integrates chance and discontinuity, repeats the same sequences in loops, alternates between color and black and white, and is interspersed with frames that are empty, blurry, or reversed. The soundtrack consists of an improvised monologue by Bruce Baillie which unfolds without interruption, following his discontinuous flow of thought.

This very special film features a carefully curated selection of some of the priceless messages that have graced Anthology’s voicemail system over the years. From the historically important to the utterly (and sublimely) absurd, they feature a cast of characters ranging from legendary avant-garde filmmakers, scholars, and other cultural figures to civilians whose legend has (until now) been confined to the offices of Anthology, thanks precisely to their witty, eloquent, eccentric – or in some cases unforgettably psychotic – voicemails. We’ve toyed with the idea of sharing these messages in some form for years, and the “Imageless Films” series provides a perfect pretext.

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

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

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.

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

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.

By the "Canyon Cinema Documentary Film Unit" - (Paul Tulley, Bruce Baillie, etc). Made in Spring, '66 for a small community of Indian people near Laytonville, California.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"One continuous, intimate shot from within the commune…Being is seen as transitory; everything is in the infinite process of becoming." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

The film proper begins as Baillie takes the passenger seat of an older Honda and films an hour-long drive in the rain. Baillie's attention moves from passing images on the roadside to other vehicles to the raindrops that squirm across the windshield. Underneath the real-time gambol, Baillie supplies a soundtrack, ostensibly on a tape thrust into the car's cassette-radio player at journey's start, that lampoons local, folksy radio shows with snippets from movies, Golden Age radio, public service announcements and authoritative commentary by an incomprehensible child. The track lends a nostalgic air to a film devoid of humans as objects but filled with meditative rumination and startlingly poetic imagery, such as a large truck enveloped in the water spray kicked up by its own wheels.

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

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 sailing of the boat Everyman into the Pacific nuclear testing area as protest. John Adams and guitar.

"Cycle scrambles poem. Bass solo by Pat Smith, LA". - BB...

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.

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.

An ardent tribute to filmmaker Robert Fulton (who died in a plane crash in 2002) by Canyon Cinema co-founder Bruce Baillie, made for the occasion of a screening of Fulton's work arranged by Dominic Angerame not quite a decade after his passing.

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

SALUTE, the first installment of Bruce Baillie's proposed three-part final film, MEMOIRS OF AN ANGEL, chronicles (in collage form) the legendary filmmaker's time in the Navy and beyond. The subsequent installments, NIGHT and LIGHT, are still works-in-progress. "A few of the thematic elements... Introduction of the element of illusion (MY LAST MASQUERADE). Imagery of war [in the form of] documentary footage, film and the author recording himself, self-consciously, in uniform! One cannot here avoid an implicit reference to the Bhagavad Gita; the warrior Arjuna and Lord Krishna in Dharma combat on the battlefield as metaphor for the human dilemma in confrontation with the world of time/space, illusion of opposites [and the] attachment to the merely transient." - Marcel Joyeux, L'illumination

With Lorie, Wind and BB.