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Craig Baldwin | |
|---|---|
 Craig Baldwin in 2015 | |
| Born | 1952 (age 73–74) |
| Occupation | Filmmaker |
| Notable work | Tribulation 99,Mock Up on Mu |
Craig Baldwin (born 1952) is an Americanexperimental filmmaker. He usesfound footage from the fringes of popular consciousness as well as images from themass media to undermine and transform the traditional documentary, infusing it with the energy of high-speed montage and a provocative commentary that targets subjects fromintellectual property rights to rampantconsumerism.
Craig Gartrel Baldwin was born inOakland, California.[1] He grew up the youngest child in a middle-class family inCarmichael.[1] During high school, he became interested inBeatnik culture. He went tounderground film screenings and started filming with aSuper 8 camera.[2][3]
Baldwin attended college atUniversity of California at Davis. There, he took film classes through the theatre department and began collecting films. He was also politically active as a student. Baldwin left UC Davis in the early 1970s and later attended theUniversity of California at Santa Barbara.[2]
Baldwin made hisSuper 8 filmStolen Movie in 1976 by running into movie theaters and filming the screen. He made his next short film,Flick Skin, while working at porn theaters. Baldwin made his 1978 filmWild Gunman, a critical look at the figure of theMarlboro Man, using clips from the1974 Nintendo arcade game of the same name, as well as B-movies and advertisements obtained fromgrindhouses.[2][4]
In 1984, Baldwin moved toSan Francisco's Mission District and contributed to the founding ofArtists' Television Access[5][6] In 1987, he started his long-running Other Cinema series at the space.[7] In 1986, Baldwin earned an M.A. fromSan Francisco State University.[1] It was there that he first became interested incollage film during his studies withBruce Conner.[2]
It was during this period that Baldwin started amassing a large collection of film works, many of which were discarded by institutions moving over toVHS.[8] He drew from this collection for his 1986 filmRocketKitKongoKit, which narrates theCIA's role in establishingMobutu Sese Seko'smilitary dictatorship inZaire (now theDR Congo) and the history of rocket testing there by a German weapons manufacturer. It often visually re-enacts the story with loosely associated footage, such as cartoons,industrial films, orscience fiction films. Like many of Baldwin's later works,RocketKitKongoKit used documentary techniques not to present an authoritative history but to counter official histories by presenting alternative histories and blurring the boundaries between them.[2][9]
An early proponent ofculture jamming, Baldwin has altered billboards with political messages and has documented the work of theBillboard Liberation Front through the 1990s.[10]
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991) is an account of CIA intervention in developing countries (as well as a critique of paranoid conspiracy theories) presented in the form of apseudo-documentary that recounts the history of an alien occupation ofLatin America in 99 brief ramblings.[11]J. Hoberman putTribulation 99 as #3 on his list of the ten best films 1991–2000.[12]
Baldwin's¡O No Coronado! (1992) is a retelling of the invasion of the American southwest byFrancisco Vázquez de Coronado in the mid-16th century. It was his first film to include original live-action footage. His next film,Sonic Outlaws, spotlights theConcord-based bandNegativland, which was sued in 1991 byU2 over a parodysound collage it had made. Baldwin's film chronicles that case along with various activist groups working forcopyright reform.[2]
Baldwin's 1999 filmSpectres of the Spectrum is a science fiction allegory that tells the story of a young woman with telepathic powers who travels back in time to save the world from an electro-magnetic pulse. The film takes a cautionary stance against the media outlets in charge of creating and perpetuating the popular mainstream, and in doing so, follows the trajectory, through collage, of media from its beginnings to the present. In 2000 Baldwin received the Moving ImageCreative Capital Award.[13]
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Baldwin established Other Cinema Digital in 2003 to provide distribution for films by independent, underground, and experimental filmmakers. In 2005 the label partnered withFacets Video to distribute a series of works on DVD.[14]
In 2008, Baldwin createdMock Up on Mu, a fictional story based heavily on real facts of the lives ofL. Ron Hubbard,Marjorie Cameron,Aleister Crowley, andJack Parsons. Mostly assembled from found footage,Mock Up on Mu includes more original live-action footage than in earlier projects.
Baldwin has taught at UC Davis andUC Berkeley.[6]Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!, a 2023 book published bySan Francisco Cinematheque and INCITE, surveys his work and career.[15]
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