Castro Street (Bruce Baillie, 1966)

En su obra Castro Street (1966), Bruce Baillie (Aberdeen, South Dakota, 1931), -cineasta y confundador de la cooperativa Canyon Cinema- utilizaría técnicas similares (mezcla de positivo y negativo, sobreimposición, cambios de ritmo, movimiento en distintas direcciones...) a las que usó para realizar su anterior Tung (1966) para crear uno de sus filmes más potentes.

Inspired by a lesson from Erik Satie; a film in the form of a street - Castro Street running by the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California... switch engines on one side and refinery tanks, stacks and buildings on the other- the street and film, ending at a red lumber company. All visual and sound elements from the street, progressing from the beginning to the end of the street, one side is black-and-white (secondary), and one side is color- like male and female elements. The emergence of a long switch- engine shot (black-and-white solo) is to the filmmaker the essential of consciousness. (1)

Baillie: Castro Street took about three months of solid work. [...] (it) was made by the most horrendous effort of intellectualization and intuition combined, using the back and the front of the brain simultaneously, which blew my fuses for life. When I was editing Castro Street, I would come out of my morning editing session around noon to lie in the sun and eat, and people I lived with in the commune would pass by, and I couldn't recognize them. [...] (2)

Castro Street acaba de ser editada en DVD como parte de una edición limitada que recoge el top 5 de los favoritos del autor.

(1) Nota de Bruce Baillie, citada en Visionary Film, P.Adams Sitney, Oxford University Press, 2002.
(2) Entrevista de Scott MacDonald a Bruce Baillie en A critical Cinema 2, University of California Press, 1992.