Return to: ATA Film & Video Festival 2008: Opening Night

Mock Up On Mu

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.

Director/Writer/Producer: Craig Baldwin
Camera: Bill Daniel
Editor: Sylvia Schedelbauer
Music: Trip Tech
Cast: Damon Packard, Michelle Silva, Stoney Burke and Kal Spelletich

Born in Oakland, California, and a graduate of San Francisco State, underground artist Craig Baldwin is a filmmaker and the cuartor/force of nature behind San Francisco's legendary Other Cinema. His films include Tribulation 99, Spectres of the Spectrum, and the Negativland documentary Sonic Outlaws. Some of the seminal texts in the culture jamming" movement, all are concerned with seizing popular imagery, whether found in stock footage, advertising or other forms of expression, and manipulating them to other ends. His work has screened internationally.

Last updated 09/26/2008.