Wednesday, March 18 at 8:00 PM – Constellation – 3111 N Western Ave
Tickets: $15 at the door or purchase in advance
QUICK BILLY
Directed by Bruce Baillie • 1970
Home movie. Landscape study. Abstract light show. Stag film. Rootin’ tootin’ homage to silent-era Westerns. Quick Billy, magnum opus of experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie, defies easy classification. After founding the pivotal West Coast screening series and distribution co-op Canyon Cinema with savings from his job as a Safeway stock boy, Baillie spent much of the 1960s embodying the hippie dream, criss-crossing North America in his Volkswagen Beetle and shooting a number of the most beautiful 16mm films ever created. The trajectory of Baillie’s life and career changed when he moved into the Morningstar Ranch, an experiment in communal living where in 1967 Baillie and a number of other residents contracted severe cases of hepatitis. Baillie never fully healed from his illness, but the episode and a fortuitous encounter with The Tibetan Book of the Dead inspired him to film through his recovery, a years-long process that resulted in one of the most ambitious works of personal cinema ever conceived. Since its completion in 1970, Quick Billy has proven a lodestar for generations of filmmakers, inspiring the likes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and George Lucas, and forging an entire visual vocabulary to be mined by Bolex-toting experimentalists for decades hence. Quick Billy will be followed by Quick Billy: Six Rolls, a series of “correspondences” with Stan Brakhage which Baillie described as “magic cousins” to his feature. (CW)
56 min • New 16mm restoration print, preserved by Anthology Film Archives
Followed by: “Quick Billy: Six Rolls (Numbers 14, 41, 43, 46, 47, and 52)” (Bruce Baillie, 1968-69) – 16 min – New 16mm restoration prints, preserved by Anthology Film Archives
★ Chicago Restoration Premiere! ★
“The essential experience of transformation between Life and Death, death and birth, or rebirth in four reels…” – Bruce Baillie
“One of the masterpieces of the American avant-garde…a rare ‘synoptic’ film that tries to construct an entire cosmos. [It] immerses viewers in a timeless flow of indistinct forms that nearly obliterates self and place – the clarity of an erotic encounter ends when the woman leans forward into darkness. The finale is a parody western in which Baillie satirizes the aggression therest of his film abjures.” –Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
NEXT UP: AH YING on Sunday, March 29 at the Gene Siskel Film Center