Back in the late 1970s, when I was still in college, my film studies professor started a class one day by screening a movie we’d never heard of. It was called “All My Life,” it was less than three minutes long, and it consisted of nothing but a continuous panning shot of a flower-covered picket fence on a sunny day, scored to a 1936 performance of the title song by Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra featuring vocals by a young Ella Fitzgerald.
That’s it: a fence, flowers, sun, Ella. The class didn’t know what to make of it, and noisy arguments ensued. How was this a movie? Was it a movie? What made it a movie? So what? I recall coming up with a torturous metaphor: The fence represented the timeline of a person’s life, see, while the blooms of bright red flowers symbolized significant events in that life and the pan upward to the sky at the end was an ascent to the afterlife. (I was very proud of myself.)
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I’ve seen 10,000 movies since then, give or take, yet not only has “All My Life” never left me, it has grown larger in my mind over the decades, forcing all those additional films into a smaller space. When the Internet and then YouTube came along at the turn of the new millennium, I found myself revisiting the movie often, calmed by its simplicity and occasionally moved beyond words.
The erratic line of the pickets, like musical notes on a staff; those RED flowering bushes, efflorescing into Impressionism through the grain of 16mm film stock; Ella’s Olympian assurance as she sings, “I’ll be waiting for you.” Then the unexpected drama of the final tilt upward, a single black telephone line crossing the azure sky like Abstract Expressionism in motion. The way that telephone line hangs in the very bottom right corner for a taunting nanosecond before bidding us farewell and releasing us into the blue.
“All My Life” was made in 1966 by the experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie, who died last week at 88 in Washington State after a long decline from Alzheimer’s disease. An anchor of the West Coast school of avant-garde cinema along with Bruce Conner, Chick Strand, and others, Baillie started Canyon Cinema, a key distribution nexus for non-narrative film, and he cofounded the San Francisco Cinematheque, where a young George Lucas soaked up early influences.
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Baillie called himself a “cinema artist,” as in painting or poetry or music, and his films found visual correlatives to all three. (He likened the editing process to “composing.”) “Castro Street” (1966), which was selected in 1992 for preservation in the National Film Registry, is an epic visual ode to the industrial Bay Area, sounds and images of trains and machinery overlaid into an intoxicating sensory overload. By contrast, “All My Life” was a product of Zen chance, Baillie driving down a country road north of San Francisco, seeing the fence, deciding, “No, I can’t go back without doing this,” and pulling out his Ansco 16mm camera and a tripod. “We had three minutes to go up to heaven on a reel,” he later recalled.
At a certain point in my own online visitations to the film, I finally understood that my pompous college self had it all wrong. “All My Life” isn’t about something. “All My Life” is something: That summer day in Caspar, Calif., 1966. A fence, flowers, sun, music. That’s it. That’s all. That’s what movies actually give us: a frame to hold life’s there-ness and teach us to see it here. Others have called “All My Life” a perfect piece of cinema. I’ll go further. The older I get, and the more I see, the more I’m inclined to think of it as the only perfect movie ever made.
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As we move into Month Two of Massachusetts’ COVID-19 response, movie theaters are starting to feel the pain of empty auditoriums. Even the national multiplex chains are hurting: Wall Street analysts are expecting AMC to file for bankruptcy and the Cinemark chain recently launched a $250 million debt offering.
On the local independent front, the situation varies from theater to theater (and has been covered in great detail in a series of articles written by Jake Mulligan for Boston’s Weekly Dig.) The nonprofit Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, for example, is expected to survive: It has robust community support and has been more aggressive than any other Boston-area arthouse in programming online film seminars and “virtual screenings” of first-run releases, where half of the $12 “ticket” fee goes straight to the house. The Somerville Theatre, the Dedham Community Theatre, and the West Newton Cinema have all experimented with virtual screenings as well, and the West Newton has raised nearly $40,000 via a GoFundMe page. By contrast, the Landmark chain, which runs the Kendall Square and the Waltham Embassy, has simply shut down.
The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, arguably the birthplace of the US arthouse movement in the 1950s and, like the Coolidge, a nonprofit, is up against a harder wall. Unlike our other independent theaters, it has only one screen, which is never conducive to building a cash reserve. It offers first-run local premieres of important movies from smaller distributors and it features creative repertory programming, specializing in hosting events like the Boston Underground Film Festival, the Wicked Queer festival, and the Independent Film Festival of Boston — all of which have now been postponed.
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According to creative director Ned Hinkle, community support has been strong and, like the Coolidge, the Brattle continues to keep staff on payroll while offering selected virtual screenings and recommending streaming rentals. As the original reopening date of April 2 has come and gone, though, what lies ahead is a gray area. Battered and beloved, the Brattle isn’t just a link to American filmgoing history, it is that history, not to mention a crucial part of the present. It deserves to have a future, too.
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