Bruce Baillie conceived this film on the occasion of President Kennedy’s murder. “[...] it is a requiem. [...] I had just come back from a long lonely trip to where I’d been born in the Dakotas. One night after I was back I stayed up all night and listened to the requiem masses being played on the radio, especially Mozart’s. One of the many really nice ways to respond to the world is through sadness. [...] The requiem mass is a way of celebrating death joyfully. The hero in the film was a tribute to the native people of Dakota, the Lakota Sioux and all their tribes. [...] It was also a tribute to Jean Cocteau. The film is a celebration of what has passed away from our hysterical milieu of materialism and technological redneckery!”
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.
