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.
