Craig Baldwin: surf the wave of obsolescence, redeeming trash(ed) videos

May 24, 2016 11:00 AM

Craig Baldwin creates "collage essay" films, redeeming or taking revenge on the trash(ed) videos of the past, and making movies on the cheap (YT interview). The work of this culture jammer, media appropriator, director and documentarian (Sonic Outlaws, Archive.org) stretches back to his short student films in the 1970s, and often includes political commentary, usually concerning the exploitation of countries and people under imperialism, capitalist or otherwise. But you might have to look beyond the chaos on the surface, as found in the ultimate conspiracy theory film, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991 - 48 minutes, Vimeo).

Full films and clips, with descriptions pulled from this dated filmography through 1995, then other sources as linked:

• 1974/8 - Wild Gunmen (short excerpt, YT)

  Mobilizing wildly diverse found-footage fragments, obsessive optical printing, and a dense "musique concrete" soundtrack, a maniac montage of pop-cultural amusements, cowboy iconography, and advertising imagery is re-contextualized within the contemporary geopolitical crisis in a scathing critique of U.S. cultural and political imperialism.

• 1991 - Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (full film, Vimeo)

  A pseudo pseudo-documentary, obsessively organized into 99 paranoid rants, parlaying every imaginable scrap of "found" footage, re-filmed TV, and industrial sound into a revisionist history of alien intervention in Latin America. A melange of satire, political fantasy, and black comedy, the film takes on crack-pot paranoid theories, environmental deconstruction, and CIA intervention -- and more -- all in one shot.

• 1992 - ¡O No Coronado! (full film, American Indian Film Gallery, University of Arizona)

  Nao Bustamante, Matthew Day and Gina Pacaldo star in Baldwin's aggressively reconstructed Conquistador chronicle. Baldwin collages the black-comic restaging of the 1540 European invasion of those lands now known as the American Southwest with wildly diverse "found" imagery, video-to-film FX, and a time-warped musical mix, to critique not only the genocidal Spanish soldiers-of-fortune but also documentary conventions of historical representation. 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.

• 1995 - Sonic Outlaws (full documentary, Internet Archive)

  An energized discourse on contemporary controversies concerning copyright infringement, "fair use," and culture-jamming. Stemming from an investigation into the infamous Negativland-U2 suit, this dense montage of interview, music, and stock footage spirals out into the similarly inspired activities of John Oswald, the Tape-beatles, the Emergency Broadcast Network, the Barbie Liberation Organization, the Situationists, and a multitude of others now working with "found" sound. Practices of phone-pranking, billboard alteration, media-hoaxing, and the digitalization of intellectual property, seen in light of the law in a period of rapid artistic and technological change, foreground emerging tensions between imagination, authorship, autonomy, and the marketplace.

• 1999 - Spectres of the Spectrum (short clips, YT)

  Spectres resembles Coronado much more than Sonic Outlaws in part because Baldwin brings back the manic fusion of alternative history and paranoid imagery; what he calls “the funkiness and honesty of the materials.” Spectres is not only a history of broadcasting and the use of the electromagnetic spectrum, but an alternate history of the twentieth century. This includes the development of modern weaponry as well as an inclusion of the fringe elements: Jack Parsons, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, the U2 incident, UFOs, Mind Control, Weather Control, Wilhelm Reich, Korla Pandit, and Baldwin’s many other obsessions.

• 2008 - Mock Up on Mu (excerpt and short commentary clip, YT)

  A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, [which] cobbles together a feature-length "collage-narrative" based on (mostly) true stories of California's post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions, and Beat lifestyles.

posted by filthy light thief (14 comments total)

More from Craig Baldwin: From Junk to Funk to Punk to Link - A survey of the found-footage film in the San Francisco Bay Area (2011)
posted by filthy light thief at 11:03 AM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Tribulation 99 blew my friggin' mind when it came out.
posted by ph00dz at 12:52 PM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I thought that name looked familiar...

Craig Baldwin taught a couple of my Technocultural Studies classes at UC Davis - "Technoculture and the Popular Imagination" and a "Media Subcultures" colloquium on Avant-Garde film. He is a fascinating teacher, invariably enthusiastic about the material, always showing up to class with a stack of books and VHS tapes and papers sticking out at all angles.

I'm pretty he showed excerpts from Sonic Outlaws, if not the whole film, and definitely covered many of the same topics in lectures. It includes some really great examples of culture jamming

In retrospect, majoring in Technocultural Studies was even weirder and more awesome than I realized at the time.
posted by sibilatorix at 1:04 PM on May 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

I read it first as 'college essay' films. Different animal.
posted by grounded at 1:31 PM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I met him some years back after a screening of Sonic Outlaws. A very serious man.
posted by philip-random at 1:58 PM on May 24, 2016

Oh man, I loved his work so much. I'm not really sure I have the patience for it anymore. I feel like that says something bad about me.
posted by lumpenprole at 3:13 PM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Excellent post filthy light thief! Mock up on mu is one of my favorites.
posted by Ashwagandha at 3:51 PM on May 24, 2016

If you're in San Francisco, check out Artist Television Access on Valencia. The Other Cinema Series is curated by Craig.
posted by njohnson23 at 3:52 PM on May 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

^ATA is thankfully still holding out in SF. It's incredible. Some of the craziest movie-going /art chaos experiences I've gone to have been at ATA. I love Spectres too. Baldwin is a treasure. It's always great when he introduces shows because he's this hyperkinetic brilliant spazz and I love him. So glad he & ATA are still floating in Broville.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 4:02 PM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Awesome post on probably my favorite San Franciscan (and one of the most inspiring professors I've been lucky enough to study under)! Craig is an unbelievable speaker if you have the bandwidth to keep up with him; he seems to mentally catalog every single piece of cultural production since basically the beginning of film, with a special emphasis on who's-who in San Francisco. Incredibly entertaining, rigorously counter-cultural... that interview video is bringing back very fond memories.
posted by AndNeverWell at 4:50 PM on May 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

Many years ago, I got to interview Craig Baldwin for the entertainment section of my college newspaper at about the time that O No Coronado came out. He was incredibly engaging and full of great quotes. I still remember how he told me how his films were propaganda in reverse: "You get the truth backwards."

Tribulation 99 is amazing in how it gently smuggles in a Chomskyite anti-imperialist critique in the guise of a paranoid right-winger's rants about aliens. One of my friends, who was relatively socially and economically conservative, thought the film was hilarious and may have been more receptive to Baldwin's message in a way that he wouldn't have if Baldwin had been a more traditional didactic "political" filmmaker.
posted by jonp72 at 8:02 PM on May 24, 2016

He's basically a living, breathing William Gibson character right?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:35 PM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I sat down to watch a little bit of Tribulation 99 last night, and I ended up sitting through the whole thing. Thanks for this post!
posted by vibrotronica at 10:21 AM on May 25, 2016

Despite the upheaval of gentrification on Valencia Street in SF, ATA managed to renew their lease for 5 years last fall.
posted by larrybob at 5:28 PM on May 25, 2016