A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up On Mu 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. Pulp-serial snippets, industrial-film imagery, and B- (and Z-) fiction clips are intercut with newly shot live-action material, powering a playful, allegorical trajectory through the now-mythic occult matrix of Jack Parsons (Crowleyite founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab), L.Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult-leader), and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and “mother of the New Age movement”). Their intertwined tales spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space, and the corporate take-over of spiritual fulfillment and leisure-time.

“…this new work hits your synapses like a cluster bomb, assailing your tremulous gray matter with a barrage of cinematic fragments (most recycled, some newly shot), miscellaneous rants and ruminations”––Manohla Dargis of the New York Times

“…Mock Up on Mu is a modern American myth fashioned from all manner of cultural detritus”––Jim Hoberman of the Village Voice

Boško Blagojevic will join Craig in a discussion following  the screening. Boško lives in New York and exhibited last fall at NYU’s Kimmel gallery. His writing has most recently appeared in Anton Vidokle: Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat edited by Brian Sholis and published by Sternberg Press. He has lectured at the Parsons School of Design and is co-founder of Platform for Pedagogy.

Acclaimed documentary on Santiago Alvarez, an unashamedly didactic, partisan portrait in its subject’s own style: brash intertitles, involving music, stark images.

• Thad Povey: Thine Inward-Looking Eyes. Relax; Take a deep breath.  (1993, 2 min)
• Sarah Christman: Dear Bill Gates; A simple correspondence evolves into a poetic visual essay exploring the ownership of our visual history and culture. Combining original and archival film, video and images from the internet, “Dear Bill Gates” draws unexpected connections among mining, memory and Microsoft. (2006, 17min)
• Sylvia Schedelbauer: Remote Intimacy; Stream of consciousness with fictitious and found stories and a personal reference. (2008, 14 min)
• Davis Sherman: Tuning the Sleep Machine; “TUNING THE SLEEPING MACHINE maintains a dreamy oscillation between visual abstraction and a disjointedly submerged narrative of sexual menace. … [It] recalls our shared experience of late-night television in which lambent images emerge from the screen and turn strange as they percolate through our half-conscious thoughts and reveries.” – Paul Arthur, Film Comment (1996, 13 min)
• Kelly Sears: Voice on the Line; Voice on the Line is a collage animation made from figures cut out of archival ephemeral films from the late 1950s. This animation mixes the history of these films with events of this era which results in a large scale secret operation that veers bizarrely off course. The film also reflects on current and troubled relationships between the areas of national security, civil liberties and telephone companies. Voice on the Line explores how technology can be used to shape our fears, desires and how we feel connected. (2009, 7 min)
• Damon Packard: Tom Jones
• Tony Gault: TBD

Craig Baldwin is an American experimental filmmaker. He uses “found” footage from the fringes of popular consciousness as well as images from the mass media to undermine and transform the traditional documentary, infusing it with the energy of high-speed montage and a provocative commentary that targets subjects from intellectual property rights to rampant consumerism. He is the founder of Other Cinema, a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco’s Mission District.