Cosmic politics: the sci-fi oddities of cinematic experimenter Craig Baldwin
Aside from the superhero sub-genre, which has begun to die a slow death, sci-fi dominates the landscape of contemporary cinema, with such films as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, George Miller’s Furiosa and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis seizing the discourse. Yet, while these films operate on a fairly linear form of filmmaking based on decades of Hollywood cinema, there are few directors who can claim to be quite as radical as the cinematic experimenter Craig Baldwin, who treats science fiction as his own personal playground.
Like an archaeologist of the moving image, Baldwin digs out old footage from the most obscure sources and uses these celluloid oddities as the basis for his next project. Certainly not working in the same epic cinematic space as the likes of Villeneuve and Miller, Baldwin’s work is the exact opposite, being bizarro cosmic treats that appear to be unearthed from beneath the sands of Mars.
Prodding and probing modern culture by attacking consumerism with provocation, Baldwin is a Beatnik at heart, with much of his energy coming from his own desire to upend the humdrum and oppose materialism. Inspired by the sub-culture throughout his youth, the director soon found his home in the realm of underground cinema, where he quickly fell for its quirky charm.
“I will never forget the first movie,” he told Incite, recalling one of his most formative trips into the darkness of the picturehouse. “It was by Peter Watkins, the one where the Nuclear war is about to happen. I just sat through the whole thing without moving. I went to the early show, then I just sat and waited for the next show to start and saw it again. I was so bowled over. The War Game!”.
Somehow winning the Academy Award in 1966 for ‘Best Documentary’, despite not actually being a factual film, The War Game was a celebrated drama that told of the brutal consequences a community would face if a nuclear bomb were dropped in their area. Indeed, much can be said of Baldwin’s love of this film, too, with a similar fictionalisation of reality being copied by the American in his later work.
First, though, he set out on becoming cinema’s latest rebel, running into cinemas to capture parts of films for his Super 8 short Stolen Movie before taking a critical stance against the advertising figure of the Marlboro Man in 1978’s Wild Gunman. Making short films from 1976-1986, it wasn’t until 1992 that Baldwin made his first foray into the realms of feature filmmaking, directing Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America.
Playing out almost like a 50-minute-long conspiracy movie, Tribulation 99 was a bizarre comedy film that took place in the 1950s when a race of aliens, who were previously living under the Earth’s crust, were awoken by nuclear activity. Itself a protest against the use of nuclear weapons, each of Baldwin’s films is spiked with real-world truth, with the director exclaiming: “I never separated pop and subculture from political activism. They were always married in my mind”.
Obsessed with the nuclear age and the potential impact of its creation, Baldwin later explored this area further with 1999’s Spectres of the Spectrum, an allegorical film that attacked the modern reality of media conglomerates controlling the news. Also rooted in the 1950s, the film tells the story of a father and daughter who go on an odyssey to discover exactly how the planet has become so corrupt.
While Baldwin’s films speak to a very urgent reality, they feel like messages from distant planets or ancient civilisations, with his approach to filmmaking no doubt inspiring envy in such other sci-fi visionaries as George Miller, Guy Maddin and Terry Gilliam. Creating a new science fiction language, the films of Craig Baldwin are the kind of oddities that might be taken as gospel by those who stumble over his DVDs in millennia to come.
