All My Life (1966)

Powerful

From my favorite movies..

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

"All My Life" is an American 3-minute short film from 50 years ago directed by Bruce Baillie during the most prolific phase of his life. Unfortunately, he was a lot about quantity back then and not about quality. What we see in here is completely boring and could have been made by every non-professional filmmaker as well. The only reason why I do not give this one just a */***** is Ella Fitzgerald's decent singing that totally elevates the material. Luckily for her, the film only runs for such a short time, otherwise I may not have been so generous. From the filmmaking effort, this movie here is a definite contender for Baillie's weakest. Do not watch. Just listen to a Fotzgerald record instead, I guess.

And it's one of the most intense, compacted moments of joy in the cinema. I must have watched this minimalist music video-- Teddy Wilson's orchestra with the young Ella Fitzgerald delivering a ballroom swing number of the late 1930s, scratchily recorded-- fifty times... and never failed to be uplifted, and never known quite why.It's a continuous take, panning west, of a broken-down old clifftop fence-cum-hedge, sometimes floral, sometimes bare. At the end (as the vocal refrain ends and the orchestra slides into the final recapitulatory chorus) the camera eye soars calmly up into the wide blue yonder, crossing a telephone wire, and fades. And that's it.Sheer magic, a visual haiku. One hates to be at a loss for critical words, but 'All My Life' defies them. Just see it.

This film was perfectly beautiful. Before viewing this film, I was told that this film was the "most perfect movie ever made". While I don't know if I can completely agree with that, I can understand the argument. The film was just three minutes long but it impressed me with the depth of effects that were added. The effects created on an optical printer, a painstaking way to mesh the film together, created fades, dissolves, and other special effects that are truly breathtaking. The music that was laid underneath the footage, All My Life by Ella Fitzgerald, added a depth to the film that personally kept me intrigued. While watching the film I was unaware as to where the story was going, what would happen next, but in the end I realized that the film was simply about the movement of the camera, the effects, colors, lines, and most importantly for me, the music.

After accidently stumbling across the entry for Bruce Baillie's marvellous ALL MY LIFE, I was amazed to see that it had yet to receive even five votes. Well, not amazed exactly -- it is after all a three minute long avant-garde movie set to the Ella Fitzgerald song ALL MY LIFE -- but a little disappointed nonetheless. For those of you who haven't read the plot summary (so to speak), ALL MY LIFE is a movie about a fence. A three minute pan left of a fence. To spice things up, there are even a few rose bushes and a final tilt up to the sky as the song comes to an end.But why is this movie so good? I think one reason is perhaps the calmness that comes from its minimalism. It was made in the mid-sixties at a time when the American avant-garde movement was really booming: Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, et al. That was also a boom period for the drug scene (just listen to The Beatles!), and you can see a definite shift toward psychedelia and sensory overload. Even Warhol, for all his banality, was still in yer face. ALL MY LIFE, with its pared down mise-en-scene and music track that recalls an earlier era, seems to play in the other direction. An analogy might be the Talking Heads movie STOP MAKING SENSE, which adopted a very classical style in favour of the rock razzledazzle and MTV aesthetic that one associates with the mid-1980s.But ALL MY LIFE is deceptively simple and unassuming. There isn't room to do it justice here, but the implications of the pan left or the tilt to the sky seem quite profound -- even transcendental, as we observe the seemly banal and look up towards the heavens. It also quite simply reminds you that there's more to cinema than hyperfast cutting (stand up Mr Michael Bay) or supposedly breathtaking special effects (Mr Lucas). And, hey, if Bruce Baillie can do it with a fence, why can't you?!