Untitled - EMAF

RETROSPEKTIVE // RETROSPECTIVE
Baillie's latest tape Commute, ›sees the light‹ from a different angle, and the shadow it casts is more playful, more ironic and literal,
but no less infused by the spectre of remembrance. For the better part of a decade, Baillie has been ensconced with his wife Lorie and
daughter Wind on an island north of Seattle, mostly unemployed, nearly devoid of cinematic resources and cut off from even the desultory
communities of interest that populated his previous way stations. Besides a few scattered videos, he has turned out a series of audiotapes
under the imprimatur of ›Dr. Bish Remedies,‹ homemade radio shows specifically designed for ›commuters‹ as a mobile respite from
boredom and stress. They consist of a by-now familiar sort of Bishery, rambling monologues in several personae interspersed with bits of
music, found messages and other oral entertainments. At first Commute seems nothing more than an ›illustrated‹ version of these radio
(non)broadcasts, an hour's worth of continuous-take rainy Northwest scenery filmed from the passenger seat of a car that may be heading
somewhere specific but could just as easily be out for an aimless spin. Whatever else it is, it is clearly post-nomadic, and by the time it
is over the tremors sent back into the body of Baillie's celebrated achievement could rouse even the most sated and saturnine movie
motorist.
In an intended tribute to Jack Smith, Bruce starts off in 1930s drag, a chanteuse in lipstick and black sequined dress lip-synching her
desire to ›share the wild times with you,‹ and a cut later urging us to ›Experiment . . . and it will lead you to the light.‹ The female impersonation
is not unprecedented in Baillie's work, but in the context of what follows, it recalls, in a caustic inversion, the cowboy-gunslinger
figure of Quick Billy's final act. Once tuned in to the self-referential currents amid this seemingly artless, even childlike presentation,
practically every casual item of sound and image becomes ripe for associations with earlier work. Following the direct-address theatrical
prelude, a handheld tracking shot departs the house, crosses the lawn, stops to pet the burly dog and piles into the family Honda.
For this odyssey even the canine alter ego is left behind. The filmmaker is no longer in the driver's seat-a feminine hand starts the ignition-and
neither the title nor the opening procession augur any hope for the appearance of migrant workers, downtrodden Indians, Bowery
bums or any similar icons of the Quixote quest. We are being chaperoned around a flat, commercialized, lower middle-class semi-suburbia;
the Frontier has been closed for alterations.
Much as it had been before the onset of domesticity, the car is mobilized as cinematic tool, a rolling studio with its own mixing boardthe
cassette player into which the radio play is inserted at the start of the trip-screen, and perspectival array. Much of the time the camera
is focused on a view of the road through the windshield, but as the ride develops Baillie pans, zooms, and racks focus to include
images of the dashboard, out the side window, the side mirror, and the rear mirror. Even more prominent are slow de facto dissolves from
the wet surface of the windshield to what lies beyond it. A signature of Baillie's style from at least Quixote and Valentin de las Sierras,
this sinuous exchange between foreground blockage (which itself must be perceived as meaningful image) and figure in the landscape
keeps directing the gaze outward and inward by turns.
153