THIS KIND OF THING – HE AND US (BRUCE BAILLIE)

... it is like the final hours of the image in the pool, holding it there with my limited strength for others to come see before the sea washes it clean and deep. Bruce Baillie

Super8 film on DV, sound, 24’
© Anderwald + Grond

Screened at:
︎ Whitechapel Gallery
︎ Centre Pompidou
︎ Forum des Images, Paris

This Kind of Thing – He and Us (Bruce Baillie) is a filmed portrait of Bruce Baillie, a mythical figure from the northern Californian experimental film scene. Produced without a script or shooting schedule, the film lies somewhere between a home movie and documentary. It integrates chance and discontinuity, repeats the same sequences in loops, alternates between color and black and white, and is interspersed with frames that are empty, blurry, or reversed. The soundtrack consists of an improvised monologue by Bruce Baillie which unfolds without interruption, following his discontinuous flow of thought.

This Kind of Thing thus mimetically reproduces the spirit of some of Bruce Baillie’s films, particularly those in which the filmmaker endeavored to explore, through non-illustrative relations between sound and image, the power of film to bring about, at the very heart of modern acculturation, a more profound or more authentic relation between the individual and nature or the real. […] 

Philippe-Alain Michaud, ‘This Kind of Thing’. In Hasn’t it been a great journey so far?. Spector Books. 2014