Roy Eldridge 1986

Directed by Bruce Baillie

Not long after settling on Camano Island, Bruce Baillie began creating works on video. Many of these shorts and fragments were little-seen since Canyon Cinema, the distribution organization he co-founded in 1961, limited its efforts to film and declined to distribute Baillie's video pieces. Undeterred, this brevity of video feedback and suggestive text was distributed by the French film co-op Cinédoc and now appears here. Unlike a number of Baillie's later biographical video works which are titled after the individuals they profile, ROY ELDRIDGE takes its name from one of the jazz performers on the soundtrack.