The assignment the first time, given to me by the conditions of making the film, was not to make a beautiful film, but rather to make a document about this inner passage, a little-described, but very common – in fact universal – phase of being human: the evolution of consciousness through which every man and woman eventually must go.
Bruce Baillie on Quick Billy
This programme features three works surveying America’s (inner) landscape: Quick Billy, Baillie’s most personal piece; along with Pastorale d’Ete by Will Hindle, one of Baillie’s beloved friends, and the astonishing Starlight by Robert Fulton.
Robert Fulton, Starlight, USA 1970, 16mm, colour and black and white, sound, 5 min
‘A Tibetan Lama. His disciple. The disciple’s wife, young boy, and terrier. An old tugboat crossing the Mississippi River. A man in his seventh month of solitude, and the hermitage built by his own hands. The man’s bloodhound; his cat. Clouds crossing the Continental Divide. A mountain stream. A girl. The sun.’ –Robert Fulton
Will Hindle, Pastorale d’Ete, USA 1958, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Joining the lyrical images of a singular high summer’s day, Hindle’s debut film is also one of the nation’s first works from the ‘personal film’ movement.
Bruce Baillie, Quick Billy, USA 1971, 16mm, colour and black and white, sound, 56 min
The essential experience of transformation, between Life and Death, death and birth, or rebirth, in four reels. The first three are adapted from The Tibetan Book of the Dead; the fourth reel in the form of a black-and-white one-reeler Western … The work incorporates a large body of material: dream, the daily recording roll-by-roll of that extraordinary period of the filmmaker’s life – “the moment-by-moment confrontation with Reality” (Carl Jung). Each phase of the work was given its own time to develop, stretching over a period of three-and-a-half years … All of the film was recorded next to the Pacific Ocean in Fort Bragg, California … the Sea is the main force though the film.
Bruce Baillie
Bruce Baillie Quick Billy Rolls 14, 41, 43, 46 and 52, USA 1968–70, 16mm, colour, silent, 18 min
‘Artifacts from the descending layers of an archaeological dig’
Bruce Baillie
Introduced by Garbiñe Ortega, series curator
Tate Film is supported by LUMA Foundation