For this very brief lyrical portrait of the eponymous Japanese gardener at work, Bruce Baillie has said: “A living saint projected onto the silver screen. Why did I make this film? I wanted to help my friend find a job in Berkeley. It was one of my first attempts to create film as both utilitarian and Art. Cinema must be meaningful and wonderful in a single stroke of camera and mind. Mr. Hayashi was my own, simple example, derived from an experience in a Zagreb city well, where water and daily gossip flowed freely.”
Bruce Baillie
Bruce Baillie (Aberdeen, SD, USA, 1931) served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and studied filmmaking at the London School of Film Technique. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s, becoming soon a guiding light of the New American Cinema. He founded Canyon Cinema in 1961, bringing to light underground authors of the time, and transforming it into a distribution company in 1967. He also founded, along with fellow filmmaker Chick Strand, The San Francisco Cinematheque. His film Castro Street (1966) was selected in 1992 for preservation in the United States' National Film Registry.
