of what has passed away from our hysterical milieu of materialism and technological redneckery!
Though paradoxically it hasn't passed away because you're making film poetry.
Right. I am that very person, or if it isn't me, it's others. I'm making this film and portraying myself, betraying myself, uncovering the self, expressing Every Person's dilemma.
At times,
has a strange sheen to it, especially on the bridge . . .
I did a couple of things to get that. A lot of times I used a green filter in the summer sun. It gave an odd flatness to a pretty good, contrasty reversal film. And then I put Vaseline on my clear filter for the diffusion. A lot of times I would shoot and wind back and shoot againas people did in those daysmaking double images
the camera, taking what happened and declaring that another clue to what was developing, discovering the film as I went.
was the biggest film you'd done up to that point and still is, except for
and
(if one counts all the sections of those two films). In many ways, it's an extension of
.
I was living with my folks. I never could afford my own room or anything, and by this time my father was saying, 'You're getting to be thirty-whatever and you're doing these films, and you're getting nowhere. You just can't live here anymore.' I had to quit in the middle of
about three times 'cause I had no place to house it. I was always living in someone's back room, where I couldn't work. Finally, I went home to my folks' house where the film was, and walked quietly back into my room and went to work on the
and no one said anything, and I finished it. Ultimately, it was my father and mother whose support made this period [of creativity] possible. All the films and my life are thanks to my mother, Gladys, and my father, E. Kenneth Baillie.
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Well, anyway, all these critical personal issues were hitting me. Where was all this going? How long could I keep it up? I don't know when I first got a grant, but I remember I couldn't go another inch. I'd got myself way in debt. No income. I didn't have any equipment, and I had all this work to do. And then my friend Ramon Sender from the San Francisco Tape Music Center told me a fellow from the Rockefeller Foundation was coming out to find western artists, possibly to give them grants. I got to talk to him, and he looked at my work.
A little while later, I was on my way to Eugene, Oregon, to give a show, and the Volkswagen broke down. I put a pin in it somewhere and got a little further down the road to a phone, and I called this Rockefeller guy and said, 'What about the grant? Can you do it or not, because I'm either going to quit right now or push ahead; it depends on what you say right now, because my car's broken down, I'm in debt, I can't go any further.' And he said, 'Yeah, we're going to give you a grant.' And I said, 'Well, can I pay my debts off?' He said, 'No, you can't use a grant that way. You have to spend it on your films.' And I thought for a minute and said, 'Well, that's OK.'' Because when it came, that's what I did: I paid all my debts, and bought a little equipment. So I was able to push ahead through the middle sixties and get
finished and
and
some of my very nicest films.
But
was before all this, when poverty was really facing me. The first phase was the Southwest. I went with a friend of mine from Kowloon, named Tseng Ching. She was a wonderful girl who'd finished college, and her visa was almost up. She gave me two hundred dollars that her uncle had given her. I've never gotten over that. I told her 'Absolutely not!' when she offered it; I couldn't believe it, and as time went on, I couldn't raise a penny. So I took her money and she came with me, and my dogMama Doga big shepherd. I was reading
as I went. I was aware of the structure of Cervantes's work; the transitions, in particular, were important to me. Also, I'd studied some of John Cage's notes and his music and some of Stan Brakhage's films and writings, and some e.e. cummings. But especially, Cervantes. I liked how he would get out of one chapter and into the next. There'd be the name of a chapter and then a subtitle would say, 'Of what was said when on the road to. . . .' Then there'd be submaterial indented with space around it where, say, the shepherd's song would be. I liked that shape. I knew I was going to have very unique, disparate materials that had to fit together, and it was going to be quite an assignment. I felt up to it 'cause I had made quite a few films now, and I wanted to make a long film with an interesting form. I wanted to show how in the conquest of our environment in the New World, Americans have isolated themselves from
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nature and from one another. As you may remember, in the Southwest sequences I go way away from the town and film it from out among the cacti and cicadas.
The passage about the pigs in South Dakota being herded around and the guys eating dinner was
supposed to be an obvious pun on 'piggish eating,' which would never have occurred to me. I never think of
