''All My Life'' is a 1966 American

experimental An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when ...

short film directed by

Bruce Baillie Bruce Baillie (September 24, 1931 – April 10, 2020) was an American experimental filmmaker. He was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1931 and died on April 10, 2020 in Camano Island, Washington. Work Baillie founded Canyon Cinema in San Francis ...

. It shows a continuous shot of a fence, soundtracked by

Ella Fitzgerald Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917June 15, 1996) was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, in ...

's 1936 debut single "All My Life". Film critic

P. Adams Sitney P. Adams Sitney (born August 9, 1944 in New Haven, Connecticut), is a historian of American avant-garde cinema. He is known as the author of ''Visionary Film'', one of the first books on the history of experimental film in the United States. Life ...

identified it as an early example of what he termed

structural film Structural film was an avant-garde experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Overview The term was coined by P. Adams Sitn ...

Description

The film consists of a single shot that begins panning along a picket fence. As the camera continues to pan, red flowers on the fence are seen. The film ends after the camera angles upward to show a horizontal telephone wire and, finally, a blue sky. It uses "All My Life" by Ella Fitzgerald as its soundtrack.

Production

''All My Life'' was shot during a summer trip Baillie took to

Caspar, California Caspar is a unincorporated community in Mendocino County, California, Mendocino County, California, United States. It is located on the Pacific Ocean, north of Mendocino, California, Mendocino, at an elevation of . It is bounded on three sides by ...

. Baillie had been admiring the quality of the sunlight, and while driving back down to

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

on the second day, he insisted on stopping so he could film. He used a camera with a

telephoto lens A telephoto lens, in photography and cinematography, is a specific type of a long-focus lens in which the physical length of the lens is shorter than the focal length. This is achieved by incorporating a special lens group known as a ''telephoto ...

, set up on a tripod so he could pan and adjust

focus Focus, or its plural form foci may refer to: Arts * Focus or Focus Festival, former name of the Adelaide Fringe arts festival in South Australia Film *''Focus'', a 1962 TV film starring James Whitmore * ''Focus'' (2001 film), a 2001 film based ...

at the same time. Having only one roll of outdated

Ansco Ansco was the brand name of a photographic company based in Binghamton, New York, which produced photographic films, papers and cameras from the mid-19th century until the 1980s. In the late 1880s, ANSCO's predecessor, Anthony and Scovill, bo ...

16 mm film 16 mm film is a historically popular and economical gauge of film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film (about inch); other common film gauges include 8 and 35 mm. It is generally used for non-theatrical (e.g., industrial, educ ...

to use, Baillie practiced the timing first and had a friend call out the minutes as they passed. He filmed ''All My Life'' as one continuous shot that ended by angling up into the sky. Baillie had "All My Life" in mind for the soundtrack because it had been playing at Paul Tulley's cabin where they had been staying. The

record player A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...

there had a potato sack over its speaker, giving it a scratchy sound that Baillie wanted to use. He completed the film at the Morningstar Commune in

Sebastopol, California Sebastopol ( ) is a city in Sonoma County, in California with a recorded population of 7,521, per the 2020 U.S. Census. Sebastopol was once primarily a plum and apple-growing region. Today, wine grapes are the predominant agriculture crop, a ...

Release

The film was released in 1966 and distributed through

Canyon Cinema Canyon Cinema is an American nonprofit organization for distributing independent, avant-garde, and artist-made films. After starting in the 1960s as an exhibition program, it grew to include a nationwide newsletter and a distribution cooperative. ...

, a cooperative co-founded by Baillie. When a new

internegative An internegative is a motion picture film duplicate. It is the color counterpart to an interpositive, in which a low-contrast color image is used as the positive between an original camera negative and a duplicate negative. After a film is shot, ...

was created in 1989, retaining the film's vibrant colors was a key concern. The

Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

7390 stock that Baillie had used for his prints was no longer available, and to replicate the intense red hues of the flowers, preservationists decided against the cyan correction typically used when transferring to the lower-contrast Kodak 7389. It is now part of

Anthology Film Archives Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema.Manohla Dargis Manohla June Dargis () is an American film critic. She is one of the chief film critics for ''The New York Times''. She is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Career Before being a film critic for ''The New York Times'', ...

called ''All My Life'' "one of the most perfect films that I've ever seen". P. Adams Sitney identified it as an early example of what he termed structural film, in particular for its monomorphic form and its emphasis on the mechanics of filmmaking tools. Filmmaker

Chris Welsby Chris Welsby (born in 1948) is a British/Canadian experimental filmmaker, digital media and installation artist. In the 1970s he was a member of the London Film-Makers' Co-op (now LUX film distributors), and co-founder of the Digital Media Studi ...

remarked that "it has taken me, quite literally, all my life so far to truly appreciate the simple elegant beauty of this cinematic gem. There is nothing in the film that could be changed for the better." Phil Solomon called it "one of the great works of film art". Filmmaker

Laida Lertxundi Laida Lertxundi is a Spanish artist, filmmaker and professor of fine arts based in the United States and the Basque Country. Biography Born in 1981 in Bilbao, Spain. She moved to study in the United States. Lertxundi received an MFA from the Ca ...

cited the camera movement in ''All My Life'' as an influence on her 2009 film ''My Tears Are Dry''.

References

External links

''All My Life''
at

* {{IMDb title, 0205731 1960s avant-garde and experimental films 1966 short films American short films Films based on songs Films directed by Bruce Baillie Films shot in California One-shot films 1960s English-language films 1960s American films American avant-garde and experimental films