Close Up

15 November 2018: Spectres of the Spectrum

spectres-of-the-spectrum-craig-baldwin.jpg

"Baldwin's work draws on a history of underground film-making from Joseph Cornell to 1980s scratch video as well as today's climate of anti-corporate culture-jamming. Spectres of the Spectrum (SOS for short) is radical pop art, and head-spinningly entertaining storytelling, if you manage to keep up with it." – Jonathan Romney

Spectres of the Spectrum
Craig Baldwin
2000 | 94 min | Colour & B/W | Digital

Combining old “kinescopes” (filmed records of early TV broadcasts before the advent of videotape, mostly from the late Fifties' educational show called Science in Action) with 16mm footage shot by Baldwin, Spectres of the Spectrum follows a young telepath, BooBoo, as she travels back in time from the desolate future of 2007 to save the world from a threatening electromagnetic "pulse". Through an increasingly abstract montage of live-action, archival film, and broadcast video, the fantasy narrative warps into disjointed, abstracted, audio-visual phrases, suggesting the breakdown of personal ego/memory, historical representation, and even space-time itself.


Part of Francesco Maria Carreri's programme, Never Found: Alternate Histories of the 20th Century