in the universe: murder never stops, and I wanted to have some say about that kind of ignorance, that obedience to authority. I was a newcomer to the medium and that film was probably the best I'd done with it. By then, I had a little equipment to work with, though I had to borrow or rent things every time I wanted to make a movie. I recall the tears, the total frustration, at not being able to work when it was time!
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was also inspired by a seemingly completely different event. I was down by the beach, and on the sea wall was written one of those things that odd mentalities will write privately in public places: 'I want to be beaten up by girl gangs.' That interested me, too, so I got a 'girl gang' togetherall my girl and women friends who were part of Canyon Cinema, and said, 'I want to see some guy joyfully getting beaten up by a bunch of females.' It didn't have any particular implications or complications for me at the time. I didn't read much into it; I was just amused by that statement out there on the wall. Before we shot, I repainted it over so it'd be darker, more obvious, and [laughter] a neighbor came along and said, ''So
the one writing this crap on the wall! I'm calling the police!' So we had to get out rather quickly. I don't think we ever photographed the words. For the beating, we found an old rubber tire and beat on that, out of frame. I don't know where I got that strange Mexican choir of children singing 'Maria.'
was an odd mishmash. My father played the priest.
When I was looking at your films chronologically and came to
it seemed as though you had reached a point where it was enough just to look at something gorgeous in the world. It was as though you had realized, 'Oh, this can be a film. I don't need to put this into anything else.'
I remember the exact process of making that film. That was probably the first film where I felt I was starting to get a hold of the medium. There are some awkwardnesses, especially a few still cuts between trees, that remain disturbing to me, but for the most part it's a pretty interesting tribute to Wagner and the myth of the Holy Grail and the Parsifalian hero.
I was out on a fishing boat, and I knew a new film was cooking in me and that it was spring and a tribute to the loveliness of spring was coming, and I heard this music on the boat and had my camera. An old friend, Willard Morrison of Audio Film Center, in San Francisco, had given me the first rolls of new color film I ever had, about seven rolls of the old Ektachromeso beautiful. ASA 15 or 16. It was like liquid gold in my camera. Like silver bullets. I had a couple rolls of that with me, so I listened to the music coming in over a little speaker up on the mast as we rolled along in the Pacific Ocean off the Golden Gatewe were very low to the ocean because of the way the boat was designedand you could really feel the sea, and so I just shot it the way it was. Then I thought, 'Well, what's this music: it's got to go in there,' and it was
by Richard Wagner. I didn't know anything about him or his music at the time, though I was familiar with the Grail legend. So it all mixed togetherthe magic sword and the wound given Amfortas, the result of his own indiscretions or imperfections.
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You're given a certain responsibility and a gift or grace, a certain unique capability, which can turn against you if it's not attended to properly. Even the king who possessed this emblem of purity or perfection, this divine weapon, was heir to temptation, and the weapon fell into the hands of his nemesis. The wound was ultimately mortal. Though he was still alive, still functioning, he was incapable of carrying on this essential divine mission to celebrate Infinite Truth, embodied in the Holy Grail, so it was foretold that there would be a successor who would come along, a 'pure fool' as Wagner called himwhether the original name was Parsifal or Percivil, it really meant 'pure fool.'
So you saw yourself as cinema's Parsifal?
Parsifal was object and subject all at once, an objectified depiction
a reflection of my subjective pursuit of an identity, my recognition of myself. To try to make
own films against enormous resistance was perhaps Parsifal-ian: to be out there in the woods and on the ocean with a movie camera, unemployed, not doing the usual thingsmarrying, making children, setting up the pension plan, carrying the mail.
At the beginning of the film a superimposed text says 'Part One,' but there's no 'Part Two.' Did you have in mind another film that would be Part Two of
?
No. That film, as it is, was conceived as being in two parts: the sea and the Sierra Nevada. Even though I didn't say 'Part Two,' evidently, there is a definite closing of one section and an opening of the other. Perhaps, I said, 'Part One' just to indicate that it
in parts. That first part was shot off of Steve Brenner's boat. We hear the sounds of the VHF radio and the fishermen talking to one another, early morning. Sort of beautiful, isn't it? And then up in the cliffs the wind was blowing through those grasses that grow along the Northern California coast.
That gorgeous shot of the wind in the grasses is a motif all through your work and apparently your lifeeven your child [Baillie had a baby girl in March 1989] is named Wind.
The horses, the grasses blowing in the wind, the sea, the flesh of young girls' faces, edges of bodies, movement . . . those are my motifs.
