Bruce Baillie

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 ... switch engines on one side and refinery tanks, stacks and buildings on the other - the street and film, ending at a red lumber company... (imdb)

A short film from Bruce Baillie

The film is made up of one single take. The camera pans to the left, focusing on a delapitated 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. (imdb)

Bruce Baillie's most intensely lyrical film, is a portrait of a friend named Tung, deriving directly from a momentary image on walking, which features shots of a girl dancing in black and white negatives, intercut and superimposed over shots moving along of plants. (Facets.org)

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. (imdb)

The key repeated image in Baillie's early film, 'Mass for the Dakota Sioux' (Winter 1963-4), is a leather-clad youth astride his motorcycle, gliding over San Francisco Bay Bridge, and attracting looks of fear and loathing from passers-by... (lux.org.uk)

An early film made for an Oakland school for mentally disturbed children

"'Quick Billy' is a tale of going into the underworld, experiencing terror, undergoing transformation, and being reborn. The agency that brings on the transformation in both cases is the experience of light." (making-light-of-it.blogspot.com)

Spending time amongst day laborers in California, on the Blackfoot reservations in southern Alberta and making it to Selma, Alabama just days after the first violence against civil rights marchers, Baillie crafts intimate portraits of the people he encounters, then superimposes these episodes over each other to create lucid dream narratives that foresee the explosive years to come. (tiff.net)

The 16-minut film falls neatly into two nearly equal parts, separated by fades to and from black. Both parts exhibit a circular (symmetrical) construction which also contributes to the mythic - ritualistic - aspects of the work. (MUBI)

In three sections with three different formal strategies, Baillie shares distilled moments of found natural beauty as he encountered them in the North Bay outside San Francisco. (Mark Toscano)

Avant-garde film commissioned as the trailer for the 1998 Viennale: Three scenes with Childrens playing, birds flying and a mother feeding her child in a beach. (imdb)

"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. (Fandor)

Not long after completing QUICK BILLY, Canyon Cinema co-founder Bruce Baillie disappeared from the Bay Area and ventured north to the state of Washington. First to Roslyn where he completed the extraordinary ROSLYN ROMANCE. Then to Camano Island, Baillie's home ever since. In his own words, ROSLYN ROMANCE "seems to be a sort of manual, concerning all the stuff of the cycle of life, from the most detailed mundanery to... God knows." The complete film is contained within the elusive HOLY SCROLLS. (Fandor)

Legendary filmmaker Bruce Baillie's first film, shot in San Francisco (and utilizing the city as an effective backdrop). A combination of documentary and fantasy starring Baillie's "lovely friend" Miss Wong, ON SUNDAYS evokes an evocative quote by Carl Jung, "...remembering a potentiality of life which has been overgrown by civilization. (Fandor)

Completed in February 1998, was an "introductory video with author commenting on films, video inserts from more recent life, family, etc."