Chomsky Does Not Make Movies: an Interview with Filmmaker Craig Baldwin

One way to think about San Francisco-based filmmaker, archivist, and artist Craig Baldwin is as the dialectical result of a collision between the Dadaists, the Situationists, the Beats, and the punks. He exists today as a kind of figurehead, a holdover anarchist beatnik from the Bay Area’s pre-tech boom days.

“In the US, art is institutionalized and set apart from the daily life of the street,” Baldwin says. “It is mystified, like the church, and magically divorced from any embodied struggle to survive, any sense of personal risk, agency, bravery, and loss. Here it’s sentimental or romantic, in the case of the Hollywood narratives. In the art world, it’s formalistic or even worse, decorative. I want to step up to a material analysis of culture through cinematic means.”

Since the 1980s, Baldwin has been doing this through his essayistic collage (and more recently narrative) films that juxtapose discarded media flotsam and jetsam—old movie clips, industrial and educational films, early television shows, advertisements, infomercials, soundtracks, whatever he has at his disposal.

In Tribulation 99, Spectres of the Spectrum, and Mock Up on Mu Baldwin uses collage techniques to trace forgotten and often conspiratorial historical trajectories that involve everything from US foreign policy in Latin America to the unexpectedly interwoven evolutions of the space program and New Age philosophy in postwar California. Although Baldwin says he approaches each film with a solid idea—some historical vector full of possibilities as he scours his massive film archive for appropriate images—that original idea can head in unexpected directions.

“You’re looking at all this material and then suddenly an image will become a magnet. It’ll exert a field of force that pulls you in a different direction and opens things up,” he says.

For just a few brief seconds in Tribulation 99, for instance, we see an image that may seem incongruous at first—a man giving the thumbs-up sign while standing next to a (literal) magnet.

“With a magnet you have the north and south poles with different charges,” Baldwin explains. “You stand a magnet on its end and in science classes you’re taught to give a thumbs-up to indicate North. In an educational film that’s one thing, but you put it in a new context, and it changes the meaning. I put it in a discussion about Latin America and the man seems to be saying North America is superior. ”

After a few short collage essays like 1986’s RocketKitKongoKit, which explored the CIA’s role in establishing Mobutu Sese Seko’s brutal regime in Zaire as well as the German aerospace industry’s efforts to turn most of central Africa into a massive rocket facility, he pushed the style...