Brakhage lectures - Bruce Baillie_CUT 2

Audioaren transkripzioa jatorrizko hizkuntzan | Transcripción del audio en idioma original | Audio transcription in original language Brakhage lectures - Bruce Baillie CUT 2 Another thing that I had difficulty within viewing Bruce's work, particularly when I first saw this film, was his use of superimposition. I don't mean use. I mean how superb what I took to be his use of it because of the particular problems I had up to that time, which seemed to engage a number of other people of my generation were how to get the right and left guy to work together, i.e. not together as intended down that long tube of renaissance perspective into the vanishing point. But how to give expression to the fact that there are two eyes in every head and that they don't work together, that the most what's called daydreaming, which is when someone can become him or herself more fully realized in any instant, the eyes are drifting. One is seeing something, the other seeing something else. And that this too is a seeing and it's a seeing that's vital, was vital for my life and for my continuance of living.

So I did not understand this. And Bruce was trying to combine images to express the inner vision and the outer vision.

Now, I was doing this, too, but I was doing it just so far as in relationship to him negative vision. That is what the spots that are seen when the eyes are closed, the shapes they make, and the memory patterns that relate to those shapes.

And I was painting on film to achieve this, but his struggle was to get that inner metaphoric vision that he had been so much as a child, as all we were taught as a child, one of these model airplane kids that was trying to believe everything that was told to him and therefore was baffled that the first actual social encounter and just ultimately baffled by the first game of competition or the first day of kindergarten or whatever it happened to him the first day or and there he not only uses it works with this through superimposition, but very often through changes of focus, for instance, that that American flag, as it buzzes out, is seen nested in bars or that that shot where where the camera lifts off a roof of of TV antenna and smokestacks and whatnot.

There are two, two sets of roofs and smokestacks that are superimposed. One of them dissolves intoclouds. Clouds which metaphor smoke from the chimneys or the clouds in the sky or the heaven thatthis might more properly be set in or be reaching for and containing the contradiction of the roof flaps and its vulgar appendages.

So then this concerns us very much because, for instance, one part always of his superimposition seems to be struggling with what society has given, i.e., as we discussed in this class, that there is a relationship between sex and death, which, if a person accepts as an absolute physiological fact, will indeed proceed to make it seem as if there is one.

And Bruce's struggle is to, at the same time, express, express what the flat contradictory surface actually is and what the metaphor, what the inner mind has been trained to think of it as, and then juxtaposed this in a jarring and often ecstatic and often torturous relationship, and most often, which is the miracle of his work of both, are existing at the same time. So that was the nature of the complexity. It was hard for me to come to see it because of the particularities of my struggle. I do see it now and treasure it very much and in fact out of my own need.

So I then came also to be dealing with that third eye, the inner eye, the two in the head, which which life granted me as in a totally non functioning manner, and which society tried to correct with increasingly thicker glasses and, and which all the same wet wall I'd off in each direction and presented me constantly with the barrage of superimposed images to deal with literally off the surface of things. And then, then I had got as far as the curtain, you might say, the wonderfully sequined curtain of closed television, most available when rubbing the eyes.

But then there was this further step to really deal with the inner eye, which was a real. Esthetics to deal with because it was so much in tracks by the institutional training, i.e. what the American flag issupposed to mean is so much inner that it will override.

Most obviously, as you can see, everyone's contradictory relationship with it as the lights just bouncing off of it and going into the eyes and that he would have both these ideas. He would never just creditthe inheritance, the great inheritance and the ideals of those inheritance, but would not, on the other hand, traduced them by a pretense that they were operative when they were only trappings. Again, his involvement with the mask, which emerges very much more clearly in 'Quick Billy'. His involvement with the mask is so incredible, as is end source, and surely there must be a marvelous justification that his struggle would lead him to the next film we're going to see.

You certainly then know in the absolute dark where the chair is. And so but what then happens is that the way is prepared to see a Bruce not as an argument with this, but as the fulfilled as one person who by trusting his eyes and trusting also what his trained social idealism had come to that same realization we showed the most torturous in films yesterday afternoon. Those that are really struggling with this, except for Valentine de la Sierras, which I said posited that singular vision he finally came to actually know. And again, all during those years, he came to a singular vision of ‘All my life’, which will see a still life which I think is blocked in some others. But basically it was that struggle between the trained ideal or idea or sex death as a social phenomenon and his own physical sight of any and everything that, as he puts it, seemed to ask to be taken or photographed.

‘Quick Billie’ in 1967, he finished Valentine de la Sierras. He had completed in the mid-Sixties Quixote, which really, if you start To Parsifal and you sense that as the search for the Grail, which the title really indicates, and that digging in to his own trained sensibility of where the Grail is, because the whole idea of the Grail is. And again, social training and then and then goes through the mass, which is the most reverent consideration of it at worst. And then through all of Quixote, the old of bitter tough Don, who who begins the film and and the ending of it, which seems to suggest that the Grail, which you might take the woman to be in To Parsifal, has become a show which we must fuck that horror. If that is the Grail, then we'll have to live with it. And that, of course, can be done with atomic bombs or businessmen. Hope it can be done in a detente of some sort more passion and that surely will enter in and it will be a gruesome and joyful problem to the extent that one can live with it. Illness came to Baillie after Valentine de la Sierra in 1967, he became very ill with hepatitis, where he began to learn to protect himself, i.e. not to regard an obligation as a necessity where he began, just to put it simply, to take afternoon naps, I imagine, because he was so sick that he was napping most of the time, all day long in those years, he was living by that time no longer on the road, but had the house that he spoke of in Roswell.

It was, I visited it once. It was like a farm. He was at that point a couple of years into serious hepatitis, and he had not stopped drinking. I don't know if you know the terms of the disease, but the worst thing that you can do is to continue to drink under hepatitis.

He was infatuated with death, as I saw him in that period. And I was so and also that the farm, the home that he refers to was like a model farm. In fact, it reminded me continually of those little farm they used to make a little children's farm in the Rockies for the tourists where ducks wandered here and a pig there and something else there that were all really like play. I mean, in that sense, wasn't a real farm. And I was so terrified by he was also surrounded by some people who were rather infatuated with death, I thought, and encouraging him to continue drinking in a sort of up to hell with it attitude

and he was working on ‘Quick Billy’, and with that sense that same kind of sense, at least I felt with which I'd worked on anticipation of the night years earlier, that film where I had literally intended whenI had done everything else to go out with a camera, to leave a note, to tell them to attach the film in the camera to the end of the film unedited, and to go out and to hang myself in my front yard camera and hand photographing as long as I was able, which would have been probably about 3 seconds.

He was those romances that hang over from the 19th century can be very, very dangerous in moments of despair. And I felt so strongly about this farm that I called his mother. I told on him to his mother in Berkeley, in addition to which I wrote 14 or 15 extremely long letters, an entire book, in fact, to himover the next several months. But like everyone does, he was saving himself. Anyway. Maybe I helped a little. Maybe not. Still in all of Quick Billy is the track of the emergence from this death wish. And death is never seen as more attractive, I think, than in Baillie's film.

I mean, when I die, I hope I get visions like that, or like the text of light or something really lovely, probably. I just get, I don't know, a brick coming straight at you, but you have that chance to make that use of it, which I now am and which I'm offering in terms of this whole year's course to really see a try and attempt to grasp the infatuation with death and the infatuation with sex, which a lot of people misread in this film as that which saved him. I think his comments today should make perfectly clearthat it didn't.

In fact, that love he was done having was a contributor to his troubles or however he put it.