avant to live! (2023)

Available now: Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! ed. Brett Kashmere (Incite, Canyon Cinema) & Steve Polta (San Francisco Cinematheque)

“Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun: Boo Boo’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable”: my creative text exploring the narrative recesses of ‘Spectres of the Spectrum’ (1999), featured in the first major publication on the life and work of West Coast experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin. 'Nearly five years in the making and clocking in at 508 pages’ (SF Cinemtheque) this book charts his phenomenal contribution to filmmaking, curating and creative communities in the Bay Area and beyond.

Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) is not a film. It is a no-film. Past and present, documentary and fiction, the real and the virtual, are compressed into an intensely disorienting audio-visual barrage-assemblage. Suturing together an extraordinary array of obscure archival footage, interspliced with self-shot film and video, Craig Baldwin bombards us with endlessly proliferating truths, fictions, conspiracies, and psychedelic flights of fantasy, coalescing around alternate meta-his-stories of the 20th century American techno-military industrial complex. All of this is somehow condensed into a 90-minute fin-de-millénaire cyberpunk B-movie set in a post-apocalyptic near-future-now-past, which revels in sci-fi cliché, ironic humor, and lo-fi special effects. 

Most analyses of Spectres focus on Baldwin’s use of found footage to create subversive, discursive, meta-docu-fiction. But like craters on the dark side of the moon, the narrative recesses of the film have not yet been fully explored. Probing deeper, we might find a further radical philosophy at play in the assemblage, lurking in the oh so convenient illusion of empty space, in the no-thing of the film. Moments where the narrative takes flight, taking us with it. From the murky margins of his-story, from the no-space of the narrative, from the fade-to-black; the violent rupture of the cut, erupts BooBoo. And she is angry…

Stills from Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) by Craig Baldwin: courtesy the artist.