Country: USA
Year: 1963
Duration: 16'
A tribute to the legend of Parsifal and his long quest to attain wisdom, signed by the American experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie.
Biography
film director
Bruce Baillie
Bruce Baillie (Aberdeen, SD, USA, 1931) studied filmmaking at the London School of Film Technique. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s, becoming soon a point of reference for the New American Cinema. He founded Canyon Cinema in 1961, bringing to light underground authors of the time, and transforming it into a distribution company in 1967. Meanwhile, he also directed his first films, like On Sundays (1961) and The Gymnasts (1962), with distinctive documentary features that disappeared in his later works. They were followed by movies with a more synthetic and experimental visual style (not unlike Stan Brakhage’s), such as Castro Street (1966), which was included in the National Film Registry of Congress. Baillie continued making movies during the 1970s and 1980s, and eventually switched from film (a fundamental element on a technical and poetic level) to video, as he did in The P-38 Pilot (1990).
FILMOGRAFIA
On Sundays (1961), The Gymnasts (1961), Mr Hayashi (1963), To Parsifal (1963), Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964), All My Life (1966), Quixote (1965), Castro Street (1966), Valentin de las Sierras (1968), Quick Billy (1970), The P-38 Pilot (1990), Pieta (1998).
Declaration
film director
“This was probably the first film in which I realized I was starting to master the medium. There are still a few blunders that bother me, particularly some cuts of the frames in the trees. But for the most of it, it’s a rather interesting tribute to Wagner, the legend of the Holy Grail, and the hero Parsifal. I was on a fishing boat, mulling over ideas for a new film; spring was in the air, I could feel an oncoming tribute to springtime grace, and then I heard this music coming from the boat’s sound system. I had a camera with me… Willard Morrison, an old friend of mine from the San Francisco Audio Film Center, had given me the first reels of this new color film: there were seven or so rolls of the old Ektachrome ASA 15 or 16. It was gorgeous. Like liquid gold in the camera. Like silver bullets.”
Cast
& Credits
regia/director
Bruce Baillie
Bruce Baillie
