Screening Room with Bruce Baillie

Streaming video - 2015

Bruce Baillie appeared on Screening Room in April 1973 to screen and discuss the films: "¢ On Sundays (excerpt, 11:40) "¢ The Gymnasts (excerpt, 6:45) "¢ To Parsifal (full film, 15:12) "¢ Tung (full film, 4:32) "¢ Castro Street (full film, 9:54) Bruce Baillie was one of the founders of the San Francisco avant-garde film movement. Born in South Dakota and educated at the University of Minnesota, the University of California at Berkeley, and the London School of Film Technique, he began making film in 1961 with On Sundays and The Gymnasts. With Chick Strand he founded Canyon Cinema, the important West Coast film distribution and exhibition collective. Baillie's innovative films, including Mass for the Dakota... Sioux and Castro Street, are renowned for their beauty and visual richness, their acute lyrical sensibility, and their invocation of myth in dealing with the commonplace world. His works are in the Library of Congress collection and are considered national treasures. About the Screening Room series In the early 1970s a group of idealistic artists, lawyers, doctors and teachers saw an opportunity to change commercial television in Boston and the surrounding area. It would require years of litigation up to and including the Supreme Court, but the case was won and the Channel 5 license was given to WCVB-TV. Screening Room was one of several programs offered in an effort to provide alternative television viewing. The idea behind Screening Room was to give independent filmmakers an opportunity to discuss their work and show it to a large urban audience. Nearly 100 ninety-minute programs were produced and aired between 1973 and 1980. Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986). more