Craig Baldwin
2021
Thunder Soul
Mark Landsman
Craig Baldwin, Craig Green
THUNDER SOUL tells the true story of Conrad O. Johnson and the legendary Kashmere Stage Band. It was afros, pleated pants and platform shoes; James Brown, Sly Stone and Bootsy Collins. It was the ’70s, and an inner-city Houston high school was about to make history. Charismatic band leader, Conrad “Prof” Johnson would turn the school’s mediocre jazz band into a legendary, world-class funk powerhouse. Now, 35 years later, his students prepare to pay tribute to the man who changed their lives, the 92-year-old Prof. Some haven’t played their horns in decades, still they dust off their instruments determined to retake the stage to show Prof and the world that they’ve still got it.
Thunder Soul
Sonic Outlaws
Craig Baldwin
Lloyd Dunn, Chris Grigg
Within days of the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music. Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.
Sonic Outlaws
Culture Jam: Hijacking Commercial Culture
Jill Sharpe
Craig Baldwin, Reverend Billy
A fascinating rap on the 20th Century movement called Culture Jamming. Pranksters and subversive artists are causing a bit of brand damage to corporate mindshare. Jammers, cultural commentators, a billboard advertiser and a constitutional lawyer take us on a wild roller coaster ride through the back streets of our mental environment. Stopping over in San Francisco, New York's Times Square, and Toronto, we catch the jamming in action with Batman-inspired Jack Napier of the Billboard Liberation Front, Disney arch-enemy Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping and Media Tigress Carly Stasko.
Culture Jam: Hijacking Commercial Culture
Mock Up on Mu
Craig Baldwin
Damon Packard, Michelle Silva
A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin's Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length "collage-narrative" based on (mostly) true stories of California's post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions, and Beat lifestyles. Pulp-serial snippets, industrial-film imagery, and B- (and Z-) fiction clips are intercut with newly shot live-action material, powering a playful, allegorical trajectory through the now-mythic occult matrix of Jack Parsons (Crowleyite founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab), L.Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult-leader), and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and "mother of the New Age movement"). Their intertwined tales spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space, and the corporate take-over of spiritual fulfillment and leisure-time.
Mock Up on Mu
Spectres of the Spectrum
Craig Baldwin
Sean Kilkoyne, Caroline Koebel
BooBoo, a young telepath, and her father, Yogi, are revolutionaries pitted against the "New Electromagnetic Order". Their story, set in the year 2007 in a blighted Nevada outpost, is interwoven with a history of the development of electromagnetic technologies, from X-rays to atom bombs, from television to the Internet.
Spectres of the Spectrum
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
Craig Baldwin
Sean Kilkoyne
Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate far-right conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
Stolen Movie
Craig Baldwin
Armed with S8 camera and sound-person, Craig Baldwin runs both recording devices continuously through single-take raids on a series of SF Market St. grindhouse theaters. Rushing past box offices and through front lobbies, he captures the chance scenes and sounds on screen at the time, then flees out the rear exit doors to reunite with the reality of the street.
Stolen Movie
Angels
Jim Granato
jeffrey alexander, Craig Baldwin
An innocent man walks through San Francisco clueless to the fact that the Blue Angels are in town practicing their air show. After several encounters with the city's more colorful characters, our hero snaps and runs amok, seeking shelter from the unknown terror above. The movies are just around the corner! Or in our hero's case, he's on their corner.
Angels
Aztec Baldwin Collage
Georg Koszulinski
Craig Baldwin
A meditation on the syncretic nature of art and culture in the 21st century, superimposing the of internal world Baldwin's subterranean film lab with a group of Mayan dancers during the Dia de los Muertos procession.
Aztec Baldwin Collage
