A very brief lyrical portrait of the eponymous Japanese gardener at work.

“A living saint projected onto the silver screen. Why did I make this film? I wanted to help my friend find a job in Berkeley. It was one of my first attempts to create film as both utilitarian and Art. Cinema must be meaningful and wonderful in a single stroke of camera and mind. Mr. Hayashi was my own, simple example, derived from an experience in a Zagreb city well, where water and daily gossip flowed freely.” – B.B.

A film mass, for the Dakota Sioux. The Ordinary Mass is traditionally a celebration of Life; thus perhaps there is a contradiction between the form of the Mass and the theme of death in any Requiem Mass (Mozart, etc.). The dedication is to the (religious) nation destroyed by a civilization that evolved from the Mass. Created during the winter of 1963-64, between Berkeley and Mendocino, after a trip into North and South Dakota, down through the junction of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, and back to the West Coast. The heroic aspect of this work is part of a personal chain of discovery for the author, including To Parsifal, Quixote, and Quick Billy.

“Filmed in Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico. Titles in Spanish. Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of a Mexican hero, Valentin, sung by the blind Jose Santollo Nacido en Santa Cruz de la Soledad… The film emerges from the always painful, continuing impossibility of recording one’s own life! I remember that the strength of my daily impressions there was so severe that I really thought I couldn’t live through it… It led me… into an essential question about recording, filming itself. Whether it’s a distinct action from those actions you make according to just being, and not being a recorder of being, or the concern with creating another being. That is, I am talking about being an artist, a vehicle through which something flows: And all the particular pain from that flow was really at a peak when I was in Mexico… So, in Mexico, I began to shoot, using an extension tube with my Bolex and the three-inch lens—skin, the vibrations in the wooden paving bricks, and the ground, the sun coming up through the road, and the blood flowing down there in the earth. And the sun was so intense I would have thought that the images would be more overexposed. They were so heavy. I deliberately purchased Kodachrome reversal stock down there—contrasty and saturated …

I kind of liked Valentin. I named my horse after that film, and I’m still stuck with a kind of primitive view of terrestrial-temporal existence—like horse, home, woman, man.” – B.B.

“A film for the East Bay Activity Center in Oakland, a school for mentally disturbed children.” – B.B.

In three sections with three different formal strategies, Baillie shares distilled moments of found natural beauty as he encountered them in the North Bay outside San Francisco. The first section features a study of plum blossoms, rendered in rich, multiple superimpositions that allow the white flowers to explode into a blizzard of visual complexity, framed by a panning shot of purple mountains. In the second section, Baillie allows us a furtive glimpse of the titular little girl, waving to cars with her dog on the side of the road, lost in her world and thoughts. Bruce’s framing remains unadorned, feeling no need to add to or take away from a beautiful piece of simple portraiture. The third section, of waterbugs on the surface of a pond, reminds us how remarkable and sensitive Baillie’s camerawork can be, as he observes their graceful dances, and the subtle light and water effects they produce by their movements. (Mark Toscano)