The less formal summing up of Baldwin I prefer though was by Joan DArc for Paranoia magazine describing him as is he "a foraging film-maker of the new recyclable generation, master of plastic pastiche, art brute and jujitsu maximalism. He is an obsessive collector of old "found footage" an allegorical revisionist, a semiotic guttersnipe with a mean coffee habit".
University educated it was during his M.A. at San Francisco State University in 1986, that he first became interested in collage film. During his studies he worked under Bruce Conner a filmmaker famous for his artwork of scraps, which extend beyond film into traditional collage, sculpture, and photography. Baldwin was influenced by lots of other factors too. These included the Situationist International (SI), a neo-Marxist group influential in 1960s and '70s Europe. Their view was the dissolution of catagory art and the diffusion of art into everyday life, and a profound skepticism about the idea of originality and a commitment to attack and provoke. Baldwin also explored DIY art operating on the fringes of society and was occurring outside of the traditional and more socially acceptable forms of high art, such as zines, mail art and altered billboards. He is a real magpie in terms of his interests as well as materials for his films.
He is quite radical and his piece Stolen Movie is an excellent example of this. It was a mix of performance art or guerilla theatre created by sneaking into cinemas filming the images off the screen, and then quickly ran out the back with his footage to use it in his work. Stolen Movie.
I really empathise with Baldwins ethos trying to knock down the borderlines between fine and popular art, public and private imagery, the political and the purely aesthetic in his film and photo-essay projects. It reflects my interest in appropriated art on my Amen Brother piece and also working with news clips and footage for my Global Warming pieces I am developing. It is like a form of AV sampling and creating a message out of found footage perhaps the ultimate in Eisensteins montage theory of the collision of images to create anew meaning.
I particularly like his technique of utilising of clips from the mainstream media to reveal the truth behind their cultivated spectacle using their own footage to parody the implicit message, unseating the common notions associated with the imagery. This could easily be applied to my own work and is certainly worth experimenting with.
Baldwin called this way of working with found footage often thrown out and discarded films and material as"cinema pauvere" (the cinema of poverty). In an interview entitled Craig Baldwin: Sonic Outlaws (1995) for the book A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers he elaborates. "I think a lot of material from pop culture is archival material: it represents a certain sensibility characteristic of the middle part of the century. I do collect stuff but my "archive comes mostly from dumpsters. Refuse is the archive of our times and the resource for what I call cinema pauvere, those people who are impoverished but still want to make films. I think we live in a post Hollywood, post industrial society. There is so much material there in the trash and it is a test of our ingenuity to take that material and redeem it, so to speak: to project new meanings into it."
However the footage used must not be mistaken as being random. In his book "The Culture Jammers Strike Back" David Cox gives an overview of the working methods of cut up film-making. He states "The footage is painstakingly watched and material is taken based on its a) Visual Strength, b) narrative context and c) its potential part of a mosaic. Few shots taken from an old reel of film can find their way into the montage unless they in some way bolster the argument of the filmmaker".
This could also be working with small projects with tiny budgets and crews and having to beg, borrow and steal and utilize and adapt whatever happens to create his work. He sums the philosophy up as This method of working began with his teacher, Conner, and continues with him and others, including Bill Daniel, Greta Snider, Eric Saks and Lori Surfer. It is not all that far removed from some of the pieces I have been woking on shooting on a shoestring budget, often with borrowed kit, friends as actors and re-appropriating existing footage to use within my work. I also love the idea of being greener and promoting ways to prevent global warming the use of recycled footage seems a great fit.
Baldwin calls his working methods now "surfing the wave of obsolescence" with film disappearing due to a format changes to digital so he is collecting and recycling physical 35mm films that would otherwise be disposed of and using them in his work. He also practices what he preaches and supports his craft and those working in it. He helped found Other Cinema, a film program series that promotes the work of both emerging and established artists working in the style of cinema povera. Other Cinema Digital was established in 2003 to provide distribution for films by independent, underground and experimental filmmakers.
Baldwin has continually been an activist for the re-evaluation of copyright and intellectual property laws. He said that: "Collage is the contemporary art. It is the most definitive. Yet it runs absolutely against copyright laws. There are certain assumptions about the usage of other people’s material in order to make money from it. Collage artists take a tiny bit of something from your piece and put it together with a lot of other pieces too and make a distinct whole. We’re not trying to steal your audience. The copyright laws need to be updated in order to deal with this art form."
KEY SELECTED WORKS
Flick Skin (1977).
This was a really early Super-8 film that Baldwin made while living in the projectionist booth at a porn theater. It is the forerunner to his style and working methods made from pieced together from the scraps of film that were left lying around the theatre. It was with this film that Baldwin began to really develop his style of rebranding, re-using, re-interpreting and subverting messages from other sources to create his own messages and ideologies images.
Wild Gunman (1978)
The youtube details describe it excellently as "The mythic nature of cowboy masculinity is deconstructed in this scathing montage of re-contextualized sounds and images culled from advertising, television, arcade game footage and other pop culture iconography." The images are played, repeated the sound almost creating a rhythmn, they are super imposed over one another and at times jarring at others flow seamlessly from one to the next. It is the ultimate AV sampling and his use of sources whilst appearing random do build in mood and tone and make a comment on the American dream, Mythology of the cowboy and wild west, consumerism and media messages all at the same time. For all its randomness it is amazingly coherent as a body of work and I can certainly learn from it. in my own work.
Tribulation 99 (1992)
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America,Baldwin weaves together another collection of found footage to critique American attitudes and foreign policy. Keith McCrea describes it like this "a riot of conspiracy theories to build the ultimate right-wing nightmare: an evil alliance of communists, aliens, and various non-white folks committed to destroying Norteamérica. By using stock footage, In Search of… b-roll, and creepy theremin sounds, Baldwin evokes a familiar and spooky world of ‘70s paranormality, ‘50s anti-communist loopiness, and ‘80s reactionary politics. It is dizzying, fascinating, and sometimes hilarious as it critiques the US’ often absurd colonial depredations in Central and South America."
The film is a layer upon layer and a crazy, stew of ideas, clips and off kilter storytelling. As usual the images are exceptionally well chosen but unlike his earlier work there is more storytelling happening and less of a collision of images as they often harmoniously work together in something less frenetic. I like the progression of this work from his earlier pieces and the stronger narrative feel which it more in tune with the way I like to work. There is still the multitude of images but a stronger narrative thread running through them. I will look to develop my work this way and look to source and even greater variety of clips and sources to build the awareness of climate change to my audience.
Communique for the Cube
This piece is really interesting for me as it is set up as a kind of secret experiment that has been stolen. The piece is a warning about some government (CIA) stereoscopic mind control tests that have been going on . The narrator alludes that he has stolen the tests and is bringing it to the public notice and he went into hiding. The visuals are very un-Baldwin although I assume he may have found these somewhere and is actually re-purposing them but it is very simple with a VO and old stereoscopic images on the screen far removed from his collage work.
I really like the idea of the piece and I have been toying with developing a narrative piece of work in my body of Global Warming projects and this has inspired me. Perhaps I could develop a conspiracy theory narrative and characters around the global warming theme. Stolen documents that the powers that be do not want us to see or something like that. The simplicity of the piece running at only just over one minute is also really interesting and shows that snippets of narrative from a bigger story can work and that stories can be told quickly and effectively.
Sonic Outlaws 1995
Sonic Outlaws is a documentary and certainly not a typical example of Baldwins work stylistically as it is a doco but it does draw on lots of archive footage re-appropriating it to his arguments. However thematically and ideologically it deals with his themes of appropriation that are embedded into his work. It deals with a USA Bay Area recording and performance group Negativland who got themselves into trouble by by using a pirated audiotape of Casey Kasem, DJ and radio personality, as he cursed a blue streak while trying to record a spot about the band U2. Negativland then appropriated these mutterings and combined them with samples from a U2 song, then put out a 1991 single on the SST label with a picture of the U-2 spy plane on its cover. Sonic Outlaws covers the legal nightmare that ensued from Negativland's little joke. U2's label Island records then sues them for the use of the letetr U and the number 2 which crazily the band had approprated from the CIA.
The film is not just about this case though but expands to the bigger discussion about copyright and appropriation themes that Baldwin knows only too well.
I really enjoyed The Other Cinemas review of the film which captures it perfectly" "What Sonic Outlaws makes intriguingly clear is that it's a free-for-all out there on the airwaves, as piracy becomes increasingly easy and the law remains vague. Ranging from a discussion of the Fair Use concept to illicily monitoring a gay lovers' quarrel conducted by cellular phone, the film presents a provocative range of image-tampering possibilities. And it makes clear that Negativland is hardly alone in wanting to exploit those possibilities in both reckless and esthetically daring ways. Baldwin deftly cannibalizes anything that'll help get his point across, whether it's a caveman pic, the Lone Ranger, Gulliver's Travels, or Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum. In addition, to being a sly commentary on bone-dry educational films, Craig also makes it all relevant to current day events by comparing Coronado's bloodthirsty legacy to today's nuclear waste industry and its similar disregard for those very same lands. But don't get the wrong idea about this bleak look at man's arrogance and lust for conquest--believe it or not, it's also funny as hell!"
The film is really interesting and a great example of right story finding the right director as it is ideally suited to Baldwins philosophy and ideology regarding copyright. I liked the very rough and ready nature of the film and as usual Baldwin really nails the archive footage managing to extend the argument, highlight it and poke fun at it all at the same time with his wry subversive sense of humour. This is what I will take from the piece a montage of clips can build an argument really well and the humour is all important for sometimes highlighting the idiocracy of corporations, copyrights and who actually owns an idea.
Craig Baldwin In Interview talking about his work, ethos, ideologies and techniques.
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