Bruce Baillie's QUICK BILLY
Join us at Good Sport for the third instalment of our curated monthly experimental film series, for this occasion in partnership with Western Film Studies, to present Bruce Baillie’s ‘Quick Billy’ (1970), one of many rarities from the university’s 16mm archive.
PROGRAM
Part Eastern philosophy, part gunslinger Western, Quick Billy plays as a “horse opera in four reels” and meditation on the transition between life and death, death and birth, or rebirth. A personal record of the author's psychic journey and physical recovery during a period of his life which might be described essentially as one of transformation.
Quick Billy is an hour long but divided into four distinct sections, allowing the natural pauses between reels. The first two are abstract, consisting of footage shot largely next to the Pacific on the Californian coast while Baillie was convalescing from severe illness. It does not follow a narrative line but creates a continual flow bound together by the film-maker's superimpositions and mattes into a richly coloured, lyrical stream. Quick Billy is a personal work, more about Baillie himself - with footage taken from 'dreams and daily life'.
This is emphasized by the third reel which continues the abstract feeling but also includes album photographs and in one corner of the screen - using his masterly matting technique - Baillie shows footage in an 8mm home-movie style of the farm where he lived, its animals, its people, and of himself shooting material for the first two reels.
The fourth reel is a total surprise: a Western one reeler which dramatically summarizes the material of the three abstract reels. Set in Kansas in 1863, it's a perfect vision of the early style of westerns, tinted in sepia, with Quick Billy, the amorous, hard drinking hero, played admirably by Baillie himself. -Simon Field
Artist Bio
Born in South Dakota in 1931, Bruce Baillie served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and studied filmmaking for a year at the London School of Film Technique. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and within a few years became a guiding light of the New American Cinema. Simultaneous to his earliest personal experiments in 16mm, Baillie launched Canyon Cinema in the redwoods over Oakland in 1961. It remains today one of the cornerstone experimental film distribution coopertives in the United States.
As he recounted to interviewer Scott MacDonald, "Immediately I realized that making films and showing films must go hand in hand, so I got a job at Safeway, took out a loan and bought a projector."