Craig Baldwin
Born in Oakland, California, Craig Baldwin attended the University of
California at Santa Barbara and San Francisco State University (MA,
1986). In the Department of Cinema there, he became increasingly
drawn to the collage film form. His interest in the
recontextualization of "found" imagery led him to the theories of the
Situationist International and to various practices of mail art,
'zines, altered billboards and other creative initiatives beyond the
fringe of the traditional fine-arts curriculum.
After several photo-essay, installation, video and Super 8 projects,
he produced his first 16mm production, WILD GUNMAN (20m, 1978), a
dense montage of cowboy iconography, advertising campaigns and
geo-political conflicts that featured playful optical-printing of an
interactive penny-arcade game. Baldwin's audio-visual argument
against neo-colonialist ideology was further developed in
ROCKETKITKONGOKIT (30m, 1986), which utilized several narrative
voices in an accelerating cinematic broadside.
TRIBULATION 99 (48m, 1991) unspooled a satiric psycho-political rant
on millenarianism, xenophobia and CIA covert-action in Latin America,
with flying saucer simulations and the hypnotic music of Yma Sumac. A
picture-book version of the work was published by Ediciones la
Calavera. OH NO CORONADO! (40m, 1992) inter-cut live-action
Conquistador vignettes with archival footage, video-to-film FX, and a
time-warped musical mix in a black-comic critique of the Conquest.
The SF Foundation recognized the effort with the 1992 Phelan Award in
Film Art.
As a new generation of "media savages," our cargo-cult can sift
through the debris left by the corporate producers, to construct a
playful and ingenious bricolage that re-invests the older
material with new, critical meanings. ... For the marginalized
practitioners of this cinema povera, the appropriation and
detournement of "found" pop-cultural imagery towards
oppositional ends serves to render some overdue satisfaction,
perverse yet just. ...
... I'm interested in black-comic social critique, and also in
graphic montage, rhythm, and acceleration; but above it all, I'm
interested in the mobilization and manipulation and manic play with
old and new meanings, as "found" footage is recontextualized with
newly-produced sound and imagery, documentary testimony and
collateral text. This polymorphous collage-essay form represents an
effort to create an audio-visual language that has the same
metaphoric and punning qualities as spoken language; clusters of
signifiers in provisional constructs cobbled together. The flotsam
and jetsam of film culture can serve to stage a review of the
carnival acts of history.
Craig Baldwin's website: www.othercinema.com
Craig Baldwin's email: othercine@hotmail.com
Wild Gunman
Mobilizing wildly diverse found-footage fragments, obsessive optical
printing, and a dense musique concrete soundtrack, a manic
montage of pop-cultural amusements, cowboy iconography, and
advertising imagery is re-contextualized within the contemporary
geopolitical crisis in a scathing critique of US cultural and
political imperialism.
1978, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
RocketKitKongoKit
Focusing on Southern Africa, several narrative voices expose both
neo-colonial military adventurism and its ideological underpinnings
in a radically mediated found-footage collage.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 30m, $90
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
Every imaginable scrap of found footage, re-filmed TV and industrial
sound is obsessively organized into 99 paranoid rants, together
constituting a psychotronic pseudo-pseudo-documentary that
desperately details the hidden history of alien intervention in Latin
America.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 48m, $135
¡O No Coronado!
This black-comic Conquistador chronicle aggressively reconstructs the
1540 Spanish invasion of those Pueblo Indian lands now known as the
American Southwest through a multifarious, mixed-tense montage.
Live-action vignettes are densely woven into wildly diverse "found"
footage, video-to-film FX, and a time-warped musical mix, to create
not only a sensual cinematographic fabric of allusion, gesture and
landscape, but also a polysemic, post-colonial pastiche of critical
perspectives on the Conquest outside of any one discourse. Animated
graphics, collateral material and multiple voices interpenetrate the
epic collage, conjugating a delirious, open-ended historiography that
updates issues of imperialism, tourism, treaty rights and
environmental protection from the 16th century to the present, and
beyond.
1992, 16mm, color/so, 40m, $120
Sonic Outlaws
This energized experimental essay on copyright-infringement, "fair
use," and culture-jamming stems from an investigation into the
infamous Negativland-U2 suit, then spirals out through the similarly
inspired activities of John Oswald, the Tape-beatles, the Emergency
Broadcast Network, the Barbie Liberation Organization, and other
artists now working with "appropriated" sound. Amidst a dense montage
of provocative interviews, electronic music, and found footage,
contemporary practices of audio-collage, phone-pranking, billboard
alteration and media-hoaxing emerge to challenge conventional
relations between authorship, criticism, parody and the marketplace.
The comical compilation doc hopefully serves to suggest methods of
creative resistance and perhaps a sense of an "electronic folk
culture" - against the all-consuming corporate-media offensive.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 87m, $150
DVD sale $25 (home), $75 (institutional)
Spectres of the Spectrum
Spectres of the Spectrum is a feature-length 16mm film utilizing old
'kinescopes' (filmed records of early TV broadcasts before the advent
of videotape, mostly from the late Fifties' educational show called
'Science in Action') to create an eerie, haunted "media-archaeology"
zone for a sci-fi time-travel tale, wherein live-action actors search
for a hidden electromagnetic secret to save the planet from a
futuristic war-machine, inspired by HAARP the High-Frequency Active
Auroral Research Program. (Though fictionalized for Baldwin's film,
HAARP is, in fact, a very real phenomenon. On the surface, it is a
data-gathering tool to explore the Aurora Borealis in detail. But in
fact, HAARP doubles as one of the most sophisticated components of
the Star Wars weapons arsenal, a particle beam device that can be
accurately targeted on specific sites in the ionosphere.
Set in the year 2007 in the blighted desert outpost of Las
Vegas, a young telepathic woman ("BooBoo") scavenges for survival on
an old bombing range with her father ("Yogi") who is holed up in a
cinder-block pirate-TV station, broadcasting rambling diatribes on
the impending global electromagnetic 'Pulse'. A solar eclipse gives
BooBoo a cosmic opportunity to save the world, through a superluminal
voyage back into time to retrieve a secret message left on the
airwaves by her scientist grandmother.
With their Airstream trailer converted into a spaceship, the amazed
BooBoo is able to catch up with outwardly propagating Fifties'
educational-TV broadcasts, affording an accelerated review of
mid-century science and science-fiction cinema; and narrating a loose
and collage-happy history of heroes and martyrs of the
electromagnetic revolution. Commentary on Mesmer, Morse, Bell, Tesla,
Farnsworth, and others comes from Yogi and his 'TV Tesla'
correspondents, in a playfully speculative effort to trace the growth
of corporate hegemony over the electromagnetic spectrum. Through an
increasingly abstract montage of live-action, archival film,
broadcast video, and 'exploded' interviews, the fantasy narrative
warps into disjointed, abstracted, audio-visual phrases, suggesting
the breakdown of personal ego/memory, historical representation, and,
yes, of spacetime itself.
This science-fiction allegory about 'electromagnetic autonomy' in
opposition to the hegemony of the culture-management industry,
tracing a history of media technology from its early days to a 21st
century "New Electromagnetic Order" that threatens to take total
control of our lives.
2000, bw&co/so, 93m, 16mm rental $150
DVD sale $25 (home), $75 (institutional)