Hallucinogenic California
LA experimental film denizens have longed envied San Francisco for being home to the wild-haired filmmaker Craig Baldwin, who is the unrivaled champion of underground found footage filmmaking, leader of the notorious Other Cinema screening space located in the basement of Artists' Television Access, and maker of some of our era's most insane collage narratives.
The energetic Baldwin almost always talks with a furious intensity, the words coming fast, especially when he's describing his particular kind of filmmaking, which is at once oddly poetic and entirely political. Working in his basement archive piled high with literally hundreds of film cans, Baldwin slams together diverse snippets of footage culled from esoteric sources to craft what he calls "collage essays" and "exploded narratives." They're vast. They're vertiginous. And they're brilliant.
Recently, Baldwin turned his attention to Los Angeles to create his new film, described as a "not untrue saga," the 109-minute Mock Up on Mu. The film revels in the blurry line between fact and fiction, assembling hundreds of old found footage clips, bits of newly shot live action and a voice-over narration to tell a story concerning three Los Angeles characters from the past. Here's the (his)story: Jack Parsons, who lived in Pasadena and by day worked on making jets go faster as the founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab in the '30s and '40s, was by night apparently an avid follower of occultist Aleister Crowley. He fell in love with Marjorie Cameron, who lived in Malibu and hung around with experimental filmmakers and artists, playing both the starring role in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome in 1954 and the provocative sea sorceress in Curtis Harrington's haunting 1960 film Night and Tide.
The third member of the film's antic trio is L. Ron Hubbard, sci-fi writer and founder of Scientology who was embroiled in a long-term soap opera with Parsons, running off with his wife - not once but twice - while forming an unlikely business with his rival selling boats in Florida.
This is all to say that you simply can't write this stuff. Nor could you film it. But Baldwin did. His chaotic assemblage matches the bizarre but somewhat true storyline, weaving a semblance of history out of old sci fi films, wacky TV shows, '50s science documentaries, B movies and so on. Baldwin structures the chaos into 13 chapters, each detailing a particular aspect of the story; taken together, the saga is history as remixed roller-coaster ride, telling its crazy tale while suggesting alternative modes of recalling the past. Indeed, the title references Hubbard's theory about memory, which says that while everything experienced is recorded on the brain, nothing is ever truly fixed. As older memories are brought to the surface, there is flexibility; memories get recomposed and revised in what's known as the "mock up." And Mu? That would be the Empire of Mu, also known as the moon, ruled over by Hubbard in the movie.
LA residents will have a chance to meet Baldwin when he presents his new film at 7 Dudley Cinema in Venice this Monday. Ask him about copyright or the politics of appropriation if you dare!
the details:
Mock Up on Mu screening
Monday, November 3, 8:00 p.m.
7 Dudley Cinema
Sponto Gallery
7 Dudley Avenue, Venice
free admission
Info: 310-306-7330