Henry K Miller revisits some of West-coast filmmaker Bruce Baillie's key works to mark LUX's acquisition of new film prints.
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| Bruce Baillie's Quixote |
For straights, the Bay Area bikers provided, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, ‘an image flat guaranteed to boil the public blood and foam the brain of every man with female flesh for kin’. To the Berkeley crowd that attended Baillie’s screenings (he characterized his own films as ‘news’ for the local audience), associated with Civil Rights, beat culture, and, within a few years, psychedelia, the bikers would have posed no less of a threat in person, but they held a romantic appeal as fellow outsiders. Thompson: ‘The Hell’s Angels’ massive publicity – coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley – was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal for a natural alliance.’
‘ Mass’ opens with a man writhing in agony on the sidewalk. The body of the film, composed of what would become Baillie’s trademark superimpositions and collage techniques, is an uncomprehending howl in the face of a suburban America which is, you infer, afflicting the poor man: zombie pedestrians and autogeddon, pre-fab townships and country-clubbers, re-filmed TV images of battleships and baseball. Within the structure of the film the biker, given a mythic aspect (this is the same year as Anger’s biker-fetish classic ‘Scorpio Rising’), appears to be on his way to somehow ‘save’ the benighted citizen; yet we learn that the biker is escorting a Cadillac, which in turn carries a priest, and which will function as the man’s hearse. The biker is an unworthy hero, his potential unfulfilled; in this way Baillie reproduces the ambivalence of the West Coast left towards biker culture. Allen Ginsberg, trying to persuade the Angels to participate in, rather than break up, the students’ protests against the Vietnam war wrote:
If you dig POT why don’t you dig that whole generation
who don’t dig the heat war also dig pot an consciousness &
spontaneity & hair & they are your natural brothers.
rather than the moralistic rigid types
who have fixed warlike negative image of America?
II
As things turned out, few of the Angels saw themselves as ‘natural brothers’ to the similarly-coiffed hippies. Baillie’s next film, ‘Quixote’ (1964-5, revised 1967), broadens his search for heroes in modern America in the course of a road trip from the West coast to New York, a reversal of the Westwards progress of American history that matches the film’s protest against the despoliation that progress left in its wake. The heroes take some finding: ‘Quixote’ expands ‘Mass’’s attack on consumer culture and the militarized society. The period of the film’s gestation saw the Johnson administration step up US intervention in Vietnam, and a concomitant escalation of radicalism back in Berkeley. TV images from the conflict are superimposed on some street scenes in New York towards the end of the film, ‘bringing the war home’, as the slogan had it. Probably the closest mainstream film comparison is Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’ (1970), which for all its hippy hubris has some remarkable views of the States as a nation of billboards, anticipated by Baillie here. If Baillie’s howl here is a little more comprehending – the desolate industrial landscape here, unlike the more suburban scenery of ‘Mass’, are populated with real, exploited people – it’s also yet more despairing.
The film begins with an old white farmer muttering, barely comprehensibly, about the ‘federal army’. ‘There are no two saddles alike’, he says. If this rugged-individualist outlook isn’t hard enough to decipher, his words are soon made inaudible by the sound of an unseen aircraft, which also serves to undermine his position. The independent farmer is an adrift in the age of airborne crop spraying, but not a total anachronism. Under the wings of the light aircraft, under the shadow of factory smokestacks, masked from the highway, perhaps, by all the billboards, and drowned out, on the soundtrack, by a jaunty pop song, men (possibly immigrant workers) still work on the land.
The soundtrack of ‘Quixote’ is especially experimental, complementing the savage image manipulation carried over from ‘Mass’ by mangling samples from B-movies, political speeches, and snatches of radio broadcasts, sometimes approaching Cagey abstraction. A politician is heard saying ‘extremism, in defence of liberty, is no vice’ over shots of bombers stationed in the New Mexico desert – it’s Barry Goldwater, but there’s nothing to distinguish it from the fragments of movie dialogue. The film’s electronic noise effects bring to mind another Antonioni, 1964’s ‘Red Desert’ – also a film in which industrialism is regarded as inhuman on aesthetic, rather than strictly political grounds.
Shots of computers in ‘Quixote’ connect the film with Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ (1965) and William Burroughs’ ‘Towers Open Fire’ (1964), both deeply suspicious of the power of mass communications over a (it’s implied) passive population. (Closer to home might be George Lucas’s debut ‘THX 1138’ (1968-71), another nostalgic anti-technology film deriving from the distinctive Northern Californian microclimate of the late 1960s.) Baillie’s film, like Burroughs’, is concerned to ‘storm the reality studio’ by scrambling the picture of society (protected by those bombers, rewarded for its labour) which the controllers of mass communications present to the controlled. As in Godard’s film, the social analysis is unremittingly negative, and in many ways conservative: horror at the visible traces of consumerism – here including a careening trolley-mounted shot of supermarket aisles, scored to marching music – can be as much a right- as a left-wing trait. Conversely, it’s an open question whether the artisanal, pre-industrial, minority mode of film-making taken up by Baillie and the Co-op avant-garde came out of necessity or anti-commercial choice.
The title ‘Quixote’ acknowledges that Baillie’s search for heroes – as well as the farmer, native Americans, some in traditional garb, and a superman-type character filmed off the television figure among others – is a forlorn one. Beyond this, it is ironically in the sequences of industrial and consumer hell that the film comes alive: scenes of environmental desecration bring out some extreme colour manipulation that is beautiful in the same way that the shots of burning oilfields in Herzog’s ‘Lessons in Darkness’ are – this confusion stands in, perhaps, for nuance.
But although Baillie’s take on industrialism is romantic-conservative, his depiction of native American culture is incisive. Cutting between shots of pages which use pictures of archaically-dressed native Americans and diagrams of internal organs to back up a theory of ‘race-distinction’, and verité footage of two native Americans, looking as fatigued as everyone else in the film, in what looks like a trucker cafeteria, Baillie simultaneously issues a corrective to the romantic view in which native Americans are represented as noble savages (as in the post-‘Broken Arrow’ western), and a lament, also somewhat romantic, for the impoverishment and oppression of native Americans by the very culture that patronizes it.
III
Baillie’s last film, ‘Commute’ (1995), is in some ways an ironic reprise of his ’60s work. Apart from a brief prologue and a briefer coda-cum-credits sequence, it’s a single camcorder take of a fifty minute car journey, taken from the perspective of the front passenger seat. Like ‘Quixote’, it comprises a journey across the American landscape, with a complex, allusive soundtrack, and like some of Baillie’s other work – ‘Castro Street’ (1965) and ‘In My Life’ (1966) – it engages in a structuralist-materialist discourse about the cinema’s perceptual properties. But the landscape is the nondescript Northwest, traversed not on the Harley-Davidson or Cadillac of ‘Mass’, but in a formless, anonymous commuter vehicle. The ‘structural’ element consists of the repeated focus on a corner of the car’s windscreen: most of the journey is conducted in the rain, and the shots, in which the divide between ‘wiped’ and ‘non-wiped’ segments of the windscreen forms a diagonal on the cinema screen, are at once an investigation of the double meaning of the word ‘screen’ and a replication of a very basic (for children and non-drivers) fascination with the way rainwater moves across glass. Perhaps most interesting is the soundtrack, the provenance of which is not made explicit in the film itself.
The car’s passenger, Baillie, whose point of view we share, almost never converses with the driver, whose face we never see, and pretty much all we hear is what seems to be a tape of a nostalgic radio broadcast consisting of clips from radio classics dating back to the 1940s – it’s on a similar frequency, in a sense, as the collage soundtrack of ‘Quixote’. Research reveals that the tape is the work of one ‘Dr Bicks’, aka Bruce Baillie: it’s a collection of favourite skits from Jack Benny via Orson Welles to Robin Williams, linked by the sardonic, lugubrious voice of the good doctor himself. The effect is charming, bringing to mind that highest form of pre-internet home production: the compilation tape, and spacey: the effect of the rain on the windows, combined with the absorbing tape, contrive to make the interior of the car practically all that one is conscious of. The landscape barely registers.
Taken in the context of Baillie’s early work, ‘Commute’ reveals a further dimension, with the soundtrack constituting a commentary on how far the aspects of the ’60s avant-garde have entered everyday life, and a vindication of how the perceptual concerns of the American Co-op movement relate as much to ordinary experience than was acknowledged at the time. It’s also more sympathetic to that ordinary experience – if the supermarket in ‘Quixote’ is utterly alien, here the film-maker has himself entered into the life of the many.
Henry K Miller
All Bruce Baillie’s films are available from LUX
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