To kick
off their Summer program at the Lightbox, The Free Screen will be
screening Bruce Baillie’s Quixote, "the Baillie film most in need
of rediscovery" according to The Free Screen programmer Chris
Kennedy, and All My Life with Arthur Lipsett’s 21-87, and
Joshua Romphf’s Ride This Country (May 30th, 7PM), a portrait
of a southern Ontario farm, with Romphf in attendance. The Free Screen
summer schedule will also include the programs Liquid
Metal (June 20th, 7PM), a series that explores the changing
textures of new digital effects; Fractured Movement / Constituent Parts (July
18th, 7PM), whose centerpieces are the restored work of Los Angeles
avant-gardist Gary Beydler, and with works by Alexandre Larose and Alexi Manis
who will be in attendance; and Jonathan Schwartz: The Skies Can't Keep Their
Secrets (August 15th, 2012). On the subject of
experimental-films, there are also the Pleasure Dome screenings of the
recent work of Basma Alsharif at A Space Gallery (June 2nd – July 14th);
James Richards recent videos at Cinecycle (June 2nd, 7PM) and a
conversation between Richards and Steve Reinke at The Power Plant (June 3rd,
3PM); a book launch and screening of the short movies of Emily Vey Duke and
Cooper Battersby at Cinecycle (June 15th, 8PM) and artist talk with
Mike Hoolboom (June 16th, 2PM); Robert Frank’s Me & My
Brother at the Courtyard (July 21st, 9PM); an Open Screening at
the Courtyard (August 11th, 9PM); and screenings of performance art
curated by Johannes Zits at Artscape Gibraltar Point (August 19, 7:30PM). The
next Early Monthly Segments will feature Ute Aurand, Ulrike Pfeiffer and
Marie Menken at the Art Bar in the Gladstone Hotel (June 11, 8PM), as well they
will continue their programming into the summer. As part of the TIFF
Cinematheque First Peoples Cinema program, Kate MacKay programmed Chick
Strand's Anselmo Trilogy a three-part look ath the Mexican native
Anselmo Aguascalientes (July 11th, 6:30PM). And to keep up-to-date on all
experimental film related screenings in Toronto make sure to keep checking out
John Porter’s website super8porter.
To
discuss Baillie it is relevant to bring up the book Radical Light:
Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000 as
Baillie is most readily known as one of the grandfather figures of the San
Francisco experimental film community.
The book
Radical Light which is edited by Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid
is described by film critic Nicole Brenez as being "a scientifically and
visually magnificent survey". The title, Radical Light, according
to Seid, “emerges from this sense of a cinema that considers its origins in a
substrate of emulsion and luminescence.” And, according to Anker, “They
were filmmakers, many of them not-so-recovered painters and poets, ill at ease
with cinema as an entertainment but rather fondly fixated on the apparatus, the
alchemy of light and chemistry, and their own eccentric admixture that might
make this all art.” In the books two introductions by Seid and Anker, what is
highlighted is the Bay Area's topography, from Anker’s introduction A Haven
for Radical Art and Experimental Film and Video, the Bay Area “remains
unsurpassed as a place where artists using film and video for personal expression
choose to live.” The history of this art form, as Seid brings up in Form
from the Fog: A Book Takes Shape, "begins in the late nineteenth
century, in 1878 in nearby Palo Alto. It was then that Eadweard Muybridge began
his pioneering experiments with the photographic image and the incremental
improvements that would result in the motion picture.” The avant-garde film
flourished in San Francisco after World War II with people like Sidney
Peterson. In Scott MacDonald’s essay, Art in Cinema: Creating an Audience
for Experimental Film, things started, in the fall of 1946, with the San
Francisco Museum of Art which had a film series Art in Cinema, organized
by Frank Stauffacher, that focused on “avant-garde films in modern art forms -
surrealist, non-objective, abstract, fantastic.”” The series was called Art
in Cinema which was “established to present a more vigorous and liberated
attitude towards the film medium.” The popularity of experimental cinema
was connected not only with advantageous exhibition venues, but also with the
educational institutions that taught production and appreciation of
experimental film and video, and media arts centers that fostered it.
Baillie
was one of the founding members of Canyon Cinema in 1961, “a nomadic group
presenting underground programs in different settings, and developed into a
small organization that presents a regular series, produced by artists and
curators,” which was named after the small town of Canyon which is just outside
of Oakland. Canyon Cinema later became the San Francisco Cinematheque.
Baillie,
as Kennedy describes him, “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.”
Radical Light includes a really nice artist page by Baillie, which includes
a picture of him as a boy with his dog, a younger picture of him in an open
field carrying a camera on a tripod, and a few colorful figural sketches.
Michael Sicinsky's contribution, The Bay Area as Cinematic Space in
Twenty-five Stops or Less, includes Baillie’s All My Life, and
Sicinsky writes, “Bruce Baillie’s lasting achievement (in this and all his
films) is his attention to the living surfaces of the physical world, the way
he allows them to disclose themselves.” While in Canyon Cinema: The Early
Years – Interviews with Bruce Baillie, Ernest Callenbach, Chick Strand, and
Emory Menefee by Kathy Geritz, Baillie talks about the aura around the
early screenings, programming criteria, and projection details. Bailie: “Years
of fun, work, and thoughtful exchange, covering perhaps everything under the
sun!”
David Davidson
David Davidson
*****
“This
visually exquisite masterpiece of minimal-budget, low-tech filmmaking has
nothing to do with the Castro Street of San Francisco’s gay district, or with
Fidel Castro of Cuba. Named for a Spanish land grantee, Castro Street, in
Richmond, California, is a gritty industrial byway lined with refinery
structures, railroad switchyards, omnipresent power lines, and the general
detritus of modern heavy industry. Bruce Baillie, with his magical eye, has
taken these unpromising materials and constructed a flowing lyric poem. Its
steady rhythm of pans and dissolves is set by the ponderous motion of trains
over a sound track bass line of industrial noises: bangs, regular beats,
whirrs, clangs, toots. Baillie makes iris effects in the camera; he softens and
blurs the imagery, perhaps with Vaseline on the lens; he distorts images,
perhaps with mirrors; he catches a gorgeous palette of colors in the wasteland;
he twists human voices into abstract sounds; he runs some images in negative
color. This elegant playfulness combines the half-recognizable, the luminously
abstracted, and occasional flashes of ordinary vision: train wheels, yellow
earth-moving machinery, flowering lupines glowing purple, corrugated iron. Yet
everything is carried along with the flow, the dance of exploration and
perception: this is what we can see, if our inner eyes are open. Castro
Street is a meditation on the reality of our industrial condition, not
redeeming it, but transcending it." - Ernest
Callenbach on Castro Street (1966)
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