Film director Craig Baldwin could be mistaken for a mad scientist from one of his surreal sci-fi movies: He lives in a grind-house theater on Market Street in San Francisco. When he speaks, a tiny triangular beard bobs up and down on his chin, promising some secret message. His eyes dart left and right, confirming his image as the foaming paranoiac behind the hysterical conspiracy pastiche, Tribulation 99.
Baldwin, who paid his way through college by mixing live, on-the-þy film collages for dance clubs, is an archivist of hidden history: he salvages forgotten film stock from Hollywood and propaganda ministries and rebuilds the footage into what Ed Wood Jr. would have called "more than a fact." Baldwin sutured together Tribulation 99 using his bottomless library of film stock from the Red Scare era.
By splicing together clips from hopelessly banal sci-fi movies and curiously benign military propaganda films, then adding his own narrative of spiraling paranoia, Baldwin unpacked more unintended meaning per frame than a French post-structuralist.
Baldwin became enamored of film early on, but not film as it is normally perceived. Unsatisfied by conventional narrative and Hollywood cliché, Baldwin would attend early multiplex theaters and wander in and out of movies in progress, savoring the violent decontextualization and merging the petty-crime thrill of the theater-crashing delinquent with the intentional disorientation of the situationist þâneur. Even today, he'd rather consume Hollywood product at the Spanish theater near his home, preferring the campy, deþating overdubs to the robotic recitations of overblown stars.
Baldwin's latest film, Sonic Outlaws, is a sprawling metadocumentary that corrals appropriation artists Negativland, the Tape-beatles, John Oswald, Emergency Broadcast Network, Douglas Kahn, the Barbie Liberation Organization, and crusading copyright lawyer Alan Korn into a self-referential exploration of copyright law and its discontents. Plumbing the secret history of artistic piracy, Baldwin's film demonstrates that appropriation is as old as Dada and as playfully innocent as taking Silly Putty to comic strips.
For Sonic Outlaws, Baldwin wanted to push his "collage essay" method to the limit and employ a wide spectrum of found footage to dramatize real events. During one scene about the Island Records lawsuit against Negativland (lodged after the band's controversial single release U2), Baldwin sews in a clip of a horrified Frankenstein's monster confronting his mirror image for the first time. To illustrate Island's "Hulk smash!" response, Baldwin weds War of the Colossal Beasts to battles from Village of the Giants.
Occasionally rambling but rarely dull, Sonic Outlaws sets a new standard for experimental documentary, replacing didactic rhetoric with self-conscious humor and dour politics with inspired lunacy.
For information on his latest antics or for videos of his films, write Craig Baldwin, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. For cogent essays and legal opinions by Negativland, John Oswald, Alan Korn, and others regarding the history of copyright law and its effects on artists, see the appendix of Negativland's recent book, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (Seeland, 1995).
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Filmic Outlaw
