Untitled - EMAF

RETROSPEKTIVE // RETROSPECTIVE
The soundtrack of ›Quixote‹ is especially experimental, complementing the savage image manipulation carried over from ›Mass‹ by
mangling samples from B-movies, political speeches, and snatches of radio broadcasts, sometimes approaching Cagey abstraction. A politician
is heard saying ›extremism, in defence of liberty, is no vice‹ over shots of bombers stationed in the New Mexico desert - it's Barry
Goldwater, but there's nothing to distinguish it from the fragments of movie dialogue. The film's electronic noise effects bring to mind
another Antonioni, 1964's ›Red Desert‹ - also a film in which industrialism is regarded as inhuman on aesthetic, rather than strictly
political grounds.
Shots of computers in ›Quixote‹ connect the film with Godard's ›Alphaville‹ (1965) and William Burroughs' ›Towers Open Fire‹ (1964),
both deeply suspicious of the power of mass communications over a (it's implied) passive population. (Closer to home might be George
Lucas's debut ›THX 1138‹ (1968-71), another nostalgic anti-technology film deriving from the distinctive Northern Californian microclimate
of the late 1960s.) Baillie's film, like Burroughs', is concerned to ›storm the reality studio‹ by scrambling the picture of society (protected
by those bombers, rewarded for its labour) which the controllers of mass communications present to the controlled. As in Godard's
film, the social analysis is unremittingly negative, and in many ways conservative: horror at the visible traces of consumerism - here
including a careening trolley-mounted shot of supermarket aisles, scored to marching music - can be as much a right- as a left-wing trait.
Conversely, it's an open question whether the artisanal, pre-industrial, minority mode of film-making taken up by Baillie and the Co-op
avant-garde came out of necessity or anti-commercial choice.
The title ›Quixote‹ acknowledges that Baillie's search for heroes - as well as the farmer, native Americans, some in traditional garb,
and a superman-type character filmed off the television figure among others - is a forlorn one. Beyond this, it is ironically in the
sequences of industrial and consumer hell that the film comes alive: scenes of environmental desecration bring out some extreme colour
manipulation that is beautiful in the same way that the shots of burning oilfields in Herzog's ›Lessons in Darkness‹ are - this confusion
stands in, perhaps, for nuance.
But although Baillie's take on industrialism is romantic-conservative, his depiction of native American culture is incisive. Cutting
between shots of pages which use pictures of archaically-dressed native Americans and diagrams of internal organs to back up a theory of
›race-distinction‹, and verité footage of two native Americans, looking as fatigued as everyone else in the film, in what looks like a trucker
cafeteria, Baillie simultaneously issues a corrective to the romantic view in which native Americans are represented as noble savages
(as in the post-›Broken Arrow‹ western), and a lament, also somewhat romantic, for the impoverishment and oppression of native Americans
by the very culture that patronizes it.
III
Baillie's last film, ›Commute‹ (1995), is in some ways an ironic reprise of his '60s work. Apart from a brief prologue and a briefer codacum-credits
sequence, it's a single camcorder take of a fifty minute car journey, taken from the perspective of the front passenger seat.
Like ›Quixote‹, it comprises a journey across the American landscape, with a complex, allusive soundtrack, and like some of Baillie's other
work - ›Castro Street‹ (1965) and ›In My Life‹ (1966) - it engages in a structuralist-materialist discourse about the cinema's perceptual
properties. But the landscape is the nondescript Northwest, traversed not on the Harley-Davidson or Cadillac of ›Mass‹, but in a formless,
anonymous commuter vehicle. The ›structural‹ element consists of the repeated focus on a corner of the car's windscreen: most of the
journey is conducted in the rain, and the shots, in which the divide between ›wiped‹ and ›non-wiped‹ segments of the windscreen forms a
diagonal on the cinema screen, are at once an investigation of the double meaning of the word ›screen‹ and a replication of a very basic
(for children and non-drivers) fascination with the way rainwater moves across glass. Perhaps most interesting is the soundtrack, the
provenance of which is not made explicit in the film itself.
The car's passenger, Baillie, whose point of view we share, almost never converses with the driver, whose face we never see, and pretty
much all we hear is what seems to be a tape of a nostalgic radio broadcast consisting of clips from radio classics dating back to the 1940s
- it's on a similar frequency, in a sense, as the collage soundtrack of ›Quixote‹. Research reveals that the tape is the work of one ›Dr Bicks‹,
aka Bruce Baillie: it's a collection of favourite skits from Jack Benny via Orson Welles to Robin Williams, linked by the sardonic, lugubrious
voice of the good doctor himself. The effect is charming, bringing to mind that highest form of pre-internet home production: the
compilation tape, and spacey: the effect of the rain on the windows, combined with the absorbing tape, contrive to make the interior of
the car practically all that one is conscious of. The landscape barely registers.
Taken in the context of Baillie's early work, ›Commute‹ reveals a further dimension, with the soundtrack constituting a commentary
on how far the aspects of the '60s avant-garde have entered everyday life, and a vindication of how the perceptual concerns of the American
Co-op movement relate as much to ordinary experience than was acknowledged at the time. It's also more sympathetic to that ordinary
experience - if the supermarket in ›Quixote‹ is utterly alien, here the film-maker has himself entered into the life of the many.
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