Mock Up on Mu

Colour, DIGIBETA
USA, 2009, 110 min
Section: 2010: A Musical Odyssey

Synopsis

Radical filmmaker Craig Baldwin has long been intrigued by the idea of the "collage- narrative” as a free genre with strong subversive potential. In his film Sonic Outlaws (screened at KVIFF in 2003) he was already allowing musicians/artists to express their views on the controversial nature of collage in an era of digital copying. Mock Up on Mu is an extreme hybrid of spy, sci-fi, western and even horror genres, based on (mostly) true stories of California’s post-war sub-cultures: rocket pioneers, alternative religions and Beat lifestyles. Pulp-serial snippets, industrial film imagery and B- (sometimes even Z-) movie clips are intercut with newly shot live-action footage. Some of the characters to appear along this allegorical trajectory are L. Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult leader) and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and "mother of the New Age movement”). Baldwin makes masterful use of period utopias to present intertwined tales which spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space and the corporate takeover of spiritual fulfilment and leisure.

About the director

Craig Baldwin is an independent filmmaker and media archeologist whose wild visual style paraphrases and satirises documentary films. Baldwin feeds his works with shots loaned from film productions and American media sources, especially television. Whether he’s making an issue out of American history or the sci-fi genre, his movies are always entertaining and intellectually incisive. Selected films: RocketKitKongoKit (1986), Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991), Sonic Outlaws (1995), Spectres of the Spectrum (1997). He has also won various awards, including Oberhausen 1988, San Francisco 1991, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, 1996.