An experimental film dedicated to the Dakota Sioux, which follows the form of the Christian Mass. A series of images of contemporary America interwoven with the ritual spiriting away of a dead Indian.
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......
A sensitive, low-key portrait of the East Bay Activity Center, a school in Oakland, California, started in the 1950s to help emotionally disturbed children. The atmospheric documentary opens with hilly East Bay streets shrouded in fog. The mist lifts as the film moves to children at play. Often...
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....
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.
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...
These scenes are a one-minute, condensed version of the conclusion to my last work, Memories of an Angel. The scene of children was shot in the Phillipines recentely, including my daughter, Wind Baillie. The birds, near our home in Washington State. The concluding Pietà, with my wife Lorie and...
Introduction of the element of illusion (masquerade). Imagery of war – documentary, the movies, and the author recording himself, self-consciously in uniform! One cannot here avoid an implicit reference to the Bhagavadgita; the warrior, Arjuna and Lord Krishna in Dharma combat on the battle...
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 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.
