The films of Craig Baldwin
Friday, Oct 20th
doors at 7pm, films at 7:30
No Name Cinema
2013 Pinon Street
Santa Fe, NM USA
nonamecinema.org
Presented on 16mm film!!!
$5 - 15 suggested donation
Free popcorn!
For nearly 50 years, the Bay Area filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin has been an inspiring figure in contemporary media arts. His acerbic, densely-packed found footage films have traveled the globe, encouraging scores of nascent collage-essayists, culture jammers, and mockumentarians to action. A welcoming presence and steadfast fixture of San Francisco’s Mission District, Baldwin has been holding it down at 992 Valencia Street for decades, in defiance of sweeping gentrification, presenting his Other Cinema microcinema screenings in its street-level storefront theater while maintaining his legendary film archive/hoarder cave/work studio in the building’s basement. Ever seeking to revise and hybridize existing modes and genres, and invent and name new ones, Baldwin’s filmmaking amalgamates cinephilic literacy and voraciousness, a sharp understanding of political and cultural history, and a sly critical polemics.
His films are further energized by an encyclopedic knowledge of his own sprawling collection of cast-off educational films and B-grade features and a perverse proclivity for sourcing surreally sublime moments from industrial film effluvia. Informed by left politics, cult cinemas, agit-prop activism, structural film, the Situationists, the Yippies, Arte Povera, media archeology, compilation documentary, and other found footage forms, Baldwin’s praxis is bound by a dual commitment to materiality and aesthetics on the one hand, and disruptive action and fervent, antagonal rhetoric on the other; all the while articulating a contrarian (and at times utopian) sense of apocalyptic historiography. He is the recipient of several grants, including those from the Rockefeller Foundation, Alpert Award, Creative Capital, Phelan, AFI, FAF, and California Arts Council. Baldwin is widely regarded as an underground American treasure for both his filmmaking and eclectic curatorial practice.
Program:
STOLEN MOVIE
1976 / 9 min / color / sound / super-8mm
Armed with a Super-8mm camera and sound-person, Baldwin runs both recording devices continously through single-take raids on a series of San Francisco Market Street grindhouse theaters. Rushing past box offices and through front lobbies, he captures the chance scenes and sounds on screen at the time, then flees out the rear exit doors to re-unite with the reality of the street.
WILD GUNMAN
1978 / 19 min / color / sound / 16mm
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. Considered the first "machinima".
BULLET·IN
2015 / 6 min / b&w / sound / 16mm
An exploded view of a ballistic issue. With Big Pharma and the NRA lurking just outside the frame, a mid-century media-archeological marvel unpacks the triangulated discourse of familial patriarchy. “Strong medicine for sensitive people”.
TRIBULATION 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
1991 / 48 min / color and b&w / sound / 16mm
Unrelentingly lurid and equally hilarious, this film might be an X-ray of a rabid slacker's seething brain. This "pseudo-pseudo-documentary" is a skewed history of US intervention in Latin America AND a hysterical satire of conspiracy theory. With a sci-fi plot suggesting that current unrest can be blamed on space aliens who live under atomic test sites, the film illustrates its argument with images culled from newsreels, horror flicks, and everything in between. The film may induce in some the symptoms of information overload, brought on by the flashing graphics, manic gestures, and cheesy special effects.
"One of the most exhilarating underground movies" -Premiere Magazine
"An unparalleled achievement in wicked social satire." -Film Comment
"Like speed spiked with an LSD chaser!" -Village Voice