Brakhage lectures - Bruce Baillie_CUT 1

Audioaren transkripzioa jatorrizko hizkuntzan | Transcripción del audio en idioma original | Audio transcription in original language Brakhage lectures - Bruce Baillie CUT 1 Which had to do really with I took it as camp because I'd been listening too much to New York. It took me years to find out that Bruce just simply meant someone was working on the docks and they had spare a banana, so why not pass up bananas at the show?

For years I think I was put off and there's this problem people influenced as this school too much is by the news from New York, which is still supposed to be the needles eye that you can't get rich peoplethrough but artists have to squeeze through in order to make it in this culture.

Uh, may misread much that's in his work not due to his fault, but surely due to that propaganda which has been so pervasive as camp in any sense. And I don't ever find it in the long run as such.

Whip Yes, never camp. The bananas were meant in the simplest sense. To Parsifal is the next film coming up and I, and this was made well I should say that in not by 1960 and 61 he had made OnSundays and a number of other films that we cannot see.

I would have liked to show you, Mr. Hayashi. Mr. Hayashi, for instance, was made as a newsreel that again and noticed that there should be this normalcy, that there not be a shunning of normal rules, that if you're having a movie, there should be the normal movie. There should be a sound of some sort. There should be some kind of food. If the people couldn't afford it, you pass it out. It doesn't have tobe popcorn. It can be bananas. That that there be in every show a newsreel and a serial.

For years he ran the Captain Midnight serials, a chapter at a time.

That art have a more normal place as it does certainly in an artist's life, in any viewer's life of it. These things offended me because I've always been trying as hard as I could to distinguish myself and my friends and everything I care about from the general slaughter as I can barely had more faith. And finally, I've come to recognize the goodness of that act. To Parsifal, and a few other films. Have you thought of talking to the director was made in 1962.

And essentially Bruce says about this It's a film about how society is always screwing up the good guys.I saw it when we were living briefly in San Francisco and didn't think much of it at the time. Subsequently, I thought more of it because when finally a vision is perceived in someone's later work, then it can indeed be seen in all the earliest vestiges in some way or other usually. But I have very little memory of it and we did not have the funds to rent it for, you know. So again, that these films werecoming in as that title would almost apply.

They were coming in as if he were a social commentary maker, which is how I too much took him fortoo long. In fact, the film we're about to see I once judged against in an art competition. I had only decided to be a judge so that I could find out what it was like to be one. And I was one once, and I found out and swore I'd never judge Art again, and in fact, have been one of the bitterest attackers of the art competition that they run in this school. I think that's accepting an ordinary blasphemy and letting it into the school process to run a competition in art.

I think a lottery would be much better. Leave it up to the fates or the gods or the angels or whatever you believe in, or sheer chance to decide who gets a scholarship next year and who doesn't. Rather than engage in the blasphemy that there is a competition in art.

Okay. Well, I was a judge while viewing 400 films in five days. I decided against To Parsifal, but it hoped its barbed in me haunted me sufficiently that about a year later I wrote Bruce, a very tortured letter about his gesture within a few years was beautifully typical.

He sent it to me and I have it now and I've looked at it. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,70 times, and it's to me one of the greatest films I've ever seen, but deceptively so. I would only hope to do for you or give a suggestion or a pathway where you seeing this up and coming film once can beimmediately into it in the way that I so much couldn't when I first saw it that I even voted against it.

And the best thing I can say again is this path as answer, is such a clarity and an exponent of that that vaguely does not issue pulp picture postcard compositions. That which most surrounds him and all ofus can also bounce the light, can also be recharged is in fact, if you think about it, the toughest thing to recharge i.e. not as camp as again I mistook he was doing it to make a fun of comic strips or somesort to put them down that adolescent push in art pop gave us a brief spanking of.

But what I so much more value that it can be seen with love and with the clarity of its absurdity. Oneand at the same time.

And carry a fullest possible charge. That is that individual shots of this film that we're about to see.

Oh, Shell Oil would love to bone pick a shot here and there to prop up their sagging see wells. Could do it. Butchers that they are but if seen in context this otherwise mistakenly taken as pretty photography becomes terrifying terrifying in all its implications.

Just to lay out a track for you that's been helpful to me. Two things occur in this film that shouldconcern us deeply.

Remembering the discussions about Alexander Nevsky that the Swedes settling in Russia, the struggle between the Vikings who were moving into the land and settling down and fishing at first and then moving further. And those who and other migratory peoples that were sweeping with weapons out of Asia and elsewhere, and those people who were determined to be farmers who'dstoned to death, anybody with too much intelligence, they'd be dangerous to the crops or any weird acting woman.

You see? That whole settling proclivity, which most of us have inherited the full curse of, and some few blessings of, and that drive to be forever searching. The film is called To Parsifal. Parsifal is about the last esthetic, epic statement as out of Wagner of the search for the Holy Grail and here it is seen in the most modern terms and in the most modern compositions.

Much of what happens in this film, you could see compositionally by spinning a picture postcard Iraq, even in Aberdeen, North Dakota,certainly one on the coast of California, which is where it occurs.

But if you look for it or even just open yourself to that possibility, there is a full charge of of tenderness and terror that informs every picture and every order within every picture meticulously. So, forinstance, Baillie's totem ism is extreme that there be boats and that there be water bugs and whatever one might think of the boat and its adventure on the ocean as a beauty, it shall be seen also as aslaughter. And whatever beauty of bird that one might look up to in flight shall be seen also as scavenger. That this bolt activity and whatever one might finally have thought of it.

All the contradictions of current terms shall also be metaphoric with water bugs in a small pool that whatever one thinks of the railroad of building through the forest and taking down the trees and the kind of informed by cough on the soundtrack of actually audience waiting for Parsifal to begin that dry enslavement of of human to this track. And then this machine which shall run on it shall be seen in relationship to the industrious art and that in fact that very train itself shall be seen in such perspective

at some moment, which is the full magic of his work that it shall metaphor the caterpillars which eat upon and destroy the trees.

So let's look at it.

(They watch the film) I had principally a lot of trouble with the side of this work when I first saw it. I think the simplest thing to say about it is that when I know that something is really great is when it works against the grain ofevery single prejudice I have, and I come to love it more even than those that at first come more easily. That seems to be within the means of my persuasion. And finally, also, Bruce's work as it develops, as you will see and hear, makes clearer what was intended here and does actually operate here, though not as strong.

That is that that in ‘Quick Billy’ which you'll see next week for instance music comes in over the radio as a background and it always it was as it would be in his mind as back from that courage to just take that normal proclivity which was interfering with so many of us at the time, and certainly with myself in making film and make it work for the art, even over whatever desperate prejudices I had and needed to have about it. And then, of course, finally, that shows the spaciousness of all esthetic quarrels and arguments. Always there is this public matter of what's acceptable and what is and what's destroyingthings for everybody and what isn't and I'm certainly yammering about it a lot. But finally, it always does come back to and I do always try to reveal to you so simple. The thing is that I make mostly silent movies because I am not any good at making sound movies.

My mind doesn't work that way. And I had the problem that when I began making movies, I was in real trouble because there were almost no movies that were shown silently. Even the old silent movies, they always put on the phonograph or had an organist or a whole orchestra if they could afford it, and accounted that a main event. So in order to find out of what didn't involve me and on the other hand, mind you, my ears are good and very involved in music. The inner ear is extremely involved in music. I spend two, 3 hours a day when I have the chance just listening to music specifically, not having it as any kind of background. But the crisis was not in the ears, and there was no way that I could solve what was essential for me and accept the social norm. So of course, I had to roll up my sleeves and fight like hell for the possibility that there be a silent film and I won.

And then that doesn't mean anything. Of course, more than that, that was my need. And some few other people's needs were made easier by my fight and a few other people's fight that there could be such a thing.

So that by the time this film came out, it was within the inner art crowd. Very much misunderstood because Baillie did me song as background and music and so used it and was used by it and madefinally something that's of no use at all, but is an integral world one and peaceful with this possibility.

So much for esthetic arguments. That's all politics. Which is to say one can't rule it out. I mean, if you want to make a space for yourself in the world anywhere. Good luck. To try to do it without involving yourself in creating a major storm, just to make that little space and then having other people beinghurt by what you've made. I don't want to say much about Mass for the Dakota Sioux. I want to just look at it now because this is a film I haven't been enabled to see for some time, and I'll have some comments after the viewing of it. But I think it is important to make clear something else about sound and about Bruce is working this in this I don't mean background when I refer to the music in To Parsifal in the usual sense.

Obviously it is integral with the images.

Mass for the Dakota Sioux, I don't know how many of you are, you know, really involved with the masks or know the terms of it, either off of LP records or in church. But this is as he's laid it out and has, and I'm holding him on, this is strictly in his mind in relationship to that mass in its most classic sense. Yet. The film is also a mixture of documentary and drama, which is something that that's Ron integralthroughout his work, that there not have to be a distinction that they're be one or the other, but that where something needs to be staged, he'll stage it in such a way that it's clear it's drama, but it weaves itself right in well with what might be called the cinema verité aspect of his work, or just lifting images off as he finds them. Um, the just to break it down simply for you the motorcyclist is really tangential in his the motorcycle sequence is at the beginning is tangential to the query.

The epistle is seen in terms of the tears swinging around the TV images, etc. of that section. The Gloria and I think this is particularly pertinent to this work as it revolves around the street accident which is staged. The street accident is one of the I don't know how to say this. For centuries, painters could rely upon painting the crucifixion and achieving within the Catholic world a shared social response of great power with the subject matter, with that event and have all that, every painting had all that emotional muscle behind it automatically something that was shared by most of the society and feeling of great power. Also, it was limited and crippled by this greatness because that meant that that any crucifixion, for instance, would get more power than it deserved and so forth. And it meant also that it came finally to be underestimated, the symbolized and so on, as we know that he should face the glory around the street. Accident is amazing because really when you think about it, when painting, for instance, returned or once they returned but evolved to an involvement with photographs or making meticulous images of what they call non abstract.

I don't believe in these terms, but I'm laying them out there for you. Only in their social context are an extraordinary number of painters painted street accidents. And I wondered why. And it was Donald Sutherland that explained it to me over drinks in a bar in Boulder.

He said, Well, it's simple. He said, people don't have any shared social response anymore, and that's of any depth in comparison to the crucifix. And the closest you can come to it is the street accident, i.e. something that practically anybody will have seen one time or another.