From Baillie's
(1966). Still courtesy of Anthology
Film Archives.
glasses from my mom's kitchen, various things, and tried them all in the Berkeley backyard one day. I knew I wouldn't have access to a laboratory that would allow me to combine black-and-white and color, and I was determined to do it by myself. I went after the soft color on one side of Castro Street where the Standard Oil towers were; the other side was the black and white, the railroad switching yards. I was making mattes by using high contrast black-and-white film that was used normally for making titles. I kept my mind available so that as much as one can know, I knew about the scene I had
shot when I made the
color shot. What was white would be black in my negative, and that would allow me to matte the reversal color so that the two layers would not be superimposed but combined.
I shot the railroad material in shorter shots, as 'masculine.' The 'feminine' was the longer, more continuous, simpler, steady color. So one side of the street was feminine for me; the other side masculine. I discovered that I had in my archives some music from Southern India that was based on that idea, and although I didn't particularly recognize why it was that way, I enjoyed the music, and I needed inspiration so I always played it while I edited. I wanted to visualize that ancient, univer-
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sal fact of opposites that are one, both in conflict and harmonyopposing each other and abiding together and requiring each other.
On one level it would seem strange to make a beautiful film about an industrial landscape, and yet, if you're combining opposites, it seems very logical. It's like taking the place where one might think there's nothing to look at, or at least nothing of a poetic sort, and then making the opposite thing from it. Your film is a kind of magic.
That sounds good to me. At that time my work was recognized mostly as social criticism: the theme of modern systems as evil always seemed to be there. I remember thinking, 'Well, I'm just dropping all that; I'm going to make a
film.' And then I began to recognize the inner meaning of it. Naturally that
the foundation of it, since it was clear to me always that my purpose in making each film was to find myself, and each film took me further, until finally I was beyond the necessity of making films. Originally, I showed
with stereo sound. I'd take a little Ampex speaker and amplifier along. We'd have the one optical track, and we'd play the magnetic B track on the tape recorder. That was the original plan. Then it got to be too much trouble, and it went around with only the monaural optical track.
Who was Tung in
?
Well, she still is a close friend who lives in San Francisco. At the time, we were very close. I think it was one New Year's that I found myself in love with her again, feeling so much love for her. I remember sleeping on the floor in my room at my folks' house, waking with a momentary impressionthat
an idea that preceded the imagesand getting right up and making myself work before it was gone, to capture exactly what I had seen in just a half an instant. I'd trained myself for a lifetime to catch
of those instancesnot only visualizations, but thought-stuff.
I remember my folks were going to church, and I went up on the roof of the house. I had a blue glass that I'd brought back from Japan, which I taped over my lens and did that long pan around the house, diffusing and giving that purple-blue to everything, shooting the sun as though it were the moon. We shot the material of Tung herself out by the Berkeley horseracing track where there was nothing disturbing the horizon line. I shot at a low angle against the sky with black-and-white copy film, high contrast, so that if I used the negative as a reversal, the black sky would in effect be a matte with her against it. I shot her on roller skates in slow motion to get the image that had come to me that morning.
Did the little poem come in that early morning impression?
I had written the poem the night before, I think, as I went to sleep. It was one film that only needed to be assembled. Later, I found
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myself down in my mother's flower garden getting some reds. I did an A, B, C roll, like I did for
. My technique was the most successful that I know about, aside from using optical printers. I laid out the A, B, and C rolls, doing the dissolves between A and C (I had a spring motor then that could do, at most, twenty-five- second runs), dissolving from one shot of the sky to another, to make it look like one long shot. And B would fade in smoothly to bring in the black-and-white material of Tung. I could see where to fade her in, or fade her out, by just looking at the film on a light table. That was the nice thing about working in reversal.
Now there are no film stocks left! They removed them one at a time, like they remove everything else that's beautiful in our world. They take away all the nice old buildings and the old fences, all the visually beautiful stuff. They modified the old Ektachrome three times I think; then they withdrew it. They had an Ektachrome 50, ASA 50,
