Quick Billy (16MM)
<div><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial;">Bruce Baillie’s magnum opus, the four-reel masterpiece QUICK BILLY (1970), found Baillie synthesizing his previous work to conjure up a breathtakingly ambitious, visually exquisite meditation on the cycle of life. Purporting, for its first three reels, to represent an adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, QUICK BILLY embodies Baillie’s unsurpassed camera eye, his mastery of editing and superimposition, his profoundly philosophical sensibility, as well as his mischievous sense of humor and bold sense of play. The latter qualities manifest most dramatically in the fourth and final reel, which – in a dramatic stylistic about-face – morphs into a kind of Beat parody of a melodramatic silent-era Western.- Anthology Film Archive</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial;"></div><div><div class="x14z9mp xat24cr x1lziwak x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="white-space: pre-wrap; margin-inline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0.5em; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(8, 8, 9); font-size: 15px;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“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</div></div><div class="x14z9mp xat24cr x1lziwak x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="white-space: pre-wrap; margin-inline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0.5em; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(8, 8, 9); font-size: 15px;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“Baillie identifies all forms of the Self with the cinema. QUICK BILLY’s first two reels present a first-person cinema (offering a document of a delirious consciousness becoming adapted to the actual world), Reel Three offers a second-person cinema (with Baillie looking at a family album and observing pictures of himself as though they were of another with whom he has an intimate relation), and Reel Four offers a third-person narrative. Through this taxonomic organization, Baillie suggests that cinema evolved out of consciousness and over time assumed forms increasingly distant from the deep Self. In presenting these cinematic modes in reverse chronology, Baillie suggests that the cinema’s original and true nature is as a document of consciousness.” –Bruce Elder, LA FURIA UMANA</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><br></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Included in the program will be <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: normal;">Quick Billy Rolls 14, 41, 43, 46, 47 and 52, a series of silent 3-minute reels shot during the construction of Quick Billy.</span></div></div></div>WesternPT1H10M2026-11-23USenBruce Baillie
Quick Billy (16MM)"Quick Billy (16MM)"Showtimes
November 23, 7:30 pm
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