Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.
Illustration: Ivana Miloš, All My Life (2021), monotype, collage and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cm
It never will rain roses: when we want To have more roses we must plant more trees.
—George Eliot, "The Spanish Gypsy"
A pan, a landscape, a song: this is all cinema needs. At least one is inclined to believe in such an assessment when confronted with the lush beauty of Bruce Baillie’s All My Life (1966). Recorded in a rush of inspiration at the side of a road in Caspar, California, the short consists of one continuous moving shot accompanied by Ella Fitzgerald singing “All My Life” on the soundtrack.
As the camera pans along an abandoned and damaged picket fence overgrown with weeds and wildflowers, two blooming and thorny rose bushes appear. They grow along the fence, climb into its holes and transform the remains of a garden into a daydream or, as Samuel Coleridge wrote: “A wild rose roofs the ruined shed, And that and summer well agree.“ It’s rather unlikely that the rose in question is a real prairie rose. It looks more like a garden rose bush gone wild. Its effect remains the same.
Climbing roses can reach a height of anywhere between eight and twenty feet. Usually they continue to grow even if no one takes care of them, which means that gardeners have to monitor the direction of their growth and stabilize them. Most rose bushes prefer the sun. They bloom best if they get sun all day. They also serve as bee magnets, a factor of growing importance. The rose bushes in All My Life are sun-drenched. One can almost smell them and imagine caterpillars feasting on the leaves protected by the shadow of the fence.
The film has been hailed by film lovers for its apparent simplicity. Baillie himself declared he wanted to create a “joyous event,“ and who wouldn’t agree that he succeeded? The light of the Northern California coastline, the focus on a beautiful moment, the music, the final pan to the blue sky, it all creates a sensation of being there and being elsewhere at the same time. Film scholar David Sterritt once declared: “It’s as if you’re passing into eternity but pausing just one moment as there’s this last remnant of the material world.“
The speed of the pan as well as its duration is defined by Fitzgerald’s song. The great jazz singer has an incredible repertoire of songs about roses and gardens: “A flower is a lovesome thing / A luscious living lovesome thing / A daffodil, a rose, no matter where it grows/is such a lovely lovesome thing.“ Her voice seems to merge with the light, the movement, the laid-back perception of a peaceful day. Baillie finds a connection between cinema, men and nature and he perceives it in a non-place, a forgotten place which lives and blooms precisely because it is forgotten. The rose bushes seem to conquer the fence and the image. “No, I cannot turn my back on this,” said Baillie, allegedly, and took out his camera.
However, a rose is not always a rose. What appears simple is, like so often, very complicated. Like our false perception of flowers as something innocent and plain, All My Life reveals to be much more complex when it comes to the relation between camera and reality. How else would a continuous lateral tracking shot make a fence appear equidistant during the whole film? As P. Adams Sitney observed, there is a right-angle corner concealed by a rose bush. It’s very hard to notice and tells as much about Baillie’s understanding of space and film as it does about the power of illusion connected to flowers. It’s rather fitting that Jonas Mekas labeled the film a “koan“ which refers to a Zen Buddhist riddle without a solution which provokes enlightenment precisely because logical reasoning fails.
Roses conceal. They keep secrets. They cover with scents and colors. A whole language is connected to their colors and shapes. At a certain point it became so difficult to keep track of its vagaries that Umberto Eco, when asked why he named his most famous novel after a rose, declared: "because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left.“ Still, roses remain the most popular garden flowers and the beauty patrons of an excessive culture related to aristocratic desires for perfection and sublimity.
The real rose, of course, is much more beautiful, rich and resistant than that. The oldest fossil of a rose, approximately 55 million years old, has been found in what is today Colorado. Over millions of years the rose has proven itself a master of transformation and survival. It also knows how to defend itself. Falling into a bed of roses isn’t really like falling into a bed of roses. One will be badly hurt by the thorns, which are actually prickles. Roses are also healthy. Rose hips have both antibacterial and antimicrobial properties. Native American tribes collected roses, used them as food, or stored them away for consumption in winter.
Even if there are many traces of symbolism in Baillie’s works, here it doesn’t seem to be so relevant. He films the roses for what they are and not for what they mean. If there is one symbol to be found in those rose bushes, it relates to Baillie himself and something Scott MacDonald has written about him and his film Castro Street (1966): “As filmmaker, Baillie stands in relation to the film industry as the flowers growing between the industrial structures in Castro Street stand to the Castro Street industrial zone.“ It’s true, flowers don’t always grow where and because we want them to. Sometimes, they find their secret spots, migrate, hide, and survive the turmoil of time.