Bruce Baillie, who personified the Bay Area experimental cinema of the 1960s as an independent filmmaker and consummate 16-millimeter craftsman whose most extraordinary movie is a single panning shot, died on Friday at his home on Camano Island, Wash. He was 88.

His wife, Lorie Baillie, confirmed the death.

A catalytic figure in the development of West Coast avant-garde film, Mr. Baillie became known in the mid-1960s for his lyrical landscape films — one of which, “Castro Street” (1966), was selected for the National Film Registry in 1992 — as well as for his anguished considerations of the landscape’s despoliation in films like “Mass” (1964) and “Quixote” (1965).

Six of his movies, including those three, are regularly screened by Anthology Film Archives in New York as part of the institution’s “essential cinema.” Filmmakers as varied as George Lucas and the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul have cited Mr. Baillie’s work as an inspiration.