The Legacy of an Outsider

Richard Bailey
May 2020

I admire and am transported by the art of William Blake. Thinking about his methodology is helpful to me when I begin a new film. I’m intrigued that Blake’s pictures are never straightforward illustrations of his poems. Nor do the poems ever directly describe the pictures. There’s a field between image and word, one lit with the same edge of evening colors Blake uses in his pictures, where the mind can wonder. The mind delights in making connections, and I believe Blake knew that the distance between his pictures and words presented an appealing challenge, one in which his viewers/readers could discover new visions and fresh apprehensions.

It’s an interesting aspect of Blake’s legacy that one can buy a book of his pictures that doesn’t include the poems. Likewise, one can buy a book of his poems that doesn’t include the pictures. The distance between pictures and words, which Blake intended as a space to invite contemplation, has been misunderstood for the opportunity to create a separation. For my part, until I got to college I thought there were two William Blakes, like there are two Francis Bacons, one Blake a painter and the other a writer. To discover that those pictures and poems go together was a revelation.

My interest in Blake’s methodology is mostly a pragmatic one. As an independent filmmaker, I can’t possibly afford to film all the things I write in a screenplay. Often, I use pictures as emotional correlatives for the details in a story that one character tells another. In this way, I don’t have to film all the specific images of a character’s memory or confession. The right image will serve as an emblem for a complex idea. For a filmmaker operating on a shoestring budget, there’s plenty of incentive to find such emblematic images.

In all of my short films, and for long sequences in the feature films, images are not direct depictions of the dialogue. If I’m doing my job correctly, then this distance between the pictures and the words doesn’t frustrate the audience. The right emotional correlative creates a sense of inevitability in the way the pictures play over the story being told, even when those two things aren’t exactly matched. I aim for the delight that occurs when such connections are made. A whole range of emotions come on stronger for audiences when they can put together in their own mind the experiences of the character. The character’s discoveries, pleasures, and the crucibles of their trials become more of a shared experience. Conversely, choosing the wrong image creates an unfavorable sort of distance, and a sense of frustration can arise that causes the audience to mistrust the story.

Blake is literally awesome for his facility with distance, creating just enough room to invite a deeply imaginative journey. My own percentage of success is more humbling. But getting it wrong deepens my resolve to get it right. Failure is part of the habit of art.

Here is the pitch I made for the film The Legacy of an Outsider: This is a story about Mr. Lucubratis, a writer and filmmaker who left public life for the privacy of a small town. Over the course of his long silence, his work and influence were mostly forgotten. But Mr. Lucubratis maintained a vivid inner life, right up until the end. Perhaps the relevant inquiry of his legacy is this: does the unfinished work of self creation end when we do, or does that little universe of self somehow continue to expand through the consequences that we leave behind?

It’s a complex idea, the story of a life. Not even a real life but one that’s been made up. Several themes are presented: selfhood, lifespan; privacy; and art. A lot of thought went into how to address these themes pictorially while also getting the audience invested in the character, to feel some kinship for him. What got worked out was a blend of techniques: voiceover narration; cinéma vérité; portraiture; the insertion of other films into this film; and adopting a rapid pace in order to suggest the velocity of Mr. L’s robust inner life.

There are very few occasions in The Legacy of an Outsider where the picture on screen serves as a direct illustration of the thing being said in narration. Mostly, the image is emblematic of the thing being said. I was thinking about Blake’s use of distance from the moment I began writing the screenplay to the final moment of editing. In the pragmatic sense, employing an artful distance between word and image made the film possible to achieve. It would require a budget I do not have access to in order to film full illustrations of everything the narrator talks about. But in terms of art, I find great satisfaction in the work of coming up with emblematic images, whether writing them out or finding them through improvisation on the set. All my collaborators were on the lookout for images or vignettes that would make a proper emotional correlative for the narrator’s words. These collaborator are: actor Van Quattro; cinematographer Jay Flowers; producer Paul Bryan; producer Sandra Pierce; producer Charles Dunnahoe; production assistant and actor Quentin Irey; and aerial photographer Brad Weatheread.

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Richard Bailey’s feature film A Ship of Human Skin will be available for digital rental through Gravitas Ventures in June. His films have shown at Alchemy Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, Arizona Underground, AVIFF Cannes, Berlin Revolution, Black Maria, Blow-Up (Chicago Art House), Dallas VideoFest, Transparent, and many other festivals.

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