inappropriate material
Green Cine has a long interview with one of my favorite filmmakers, Craig Baldwin. I’d put his Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America in my top five movies to recommend to others except that the film has been unavailable on DVD, until now. The film uses archival footage to tell a non-linear tale of an alien invasion of the U.S. that implicates a variety of groups including the CIA and killer bees. While I first read the film a highly political science-fiction reverie, Baldwin considers Tribulation 99 to be based in reality.
Really, the CIA was way more imaginative than any Hollywood writer. What they were doing for political purposes, not just in Nicaragua but also Cuba, had much more of an imaginative punch than any tame little yuppie in Hollywood who is writing a romantic comedy. What they were doing was taking fantasy and fiction and turning that into political tactics. So, God, just turn it around! I was thinking, just turn it one more time.
Baldwin makes a good point. I think of the revelations that the CIA condoned the Nicaraguan Contras’s fund-raising efforts, which included smuggling cocaine into the US during the 1990s. While killer bee invasions may be a metaphorical device in Tribulation 99, like Alex Cox’s Walker it uses history and magic realism to comment on US intervention in Nicaragua.
Perhaps Baldwin’s best-known film is Sonic Outlaws a 1996 documentary about the band Negativland and intellectual property issues. Much of the film focuses on the Negativland’s cover of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” (which you can download here) and the ensuing legal battles between the band and Island Records. At one point, a Negativland member interviews U2 guitarist The Edge, leading to a confrontation over artistic freedom. It’s a very analog take on issues that we’re now confronted with in the digital age. When asked about the future of copyright, Baldwin’s outlook is dismal.
They’re moving in on us, that’s for sure. They’re closing the public commons. I feel on the defensive. That could be one good sound bite. I feel restricted. I just hope there’s enlightened souls and forces and maybe institutions that could maybe hold them back from totally eating up everything that is due us, or our common cultural legacies, our libraries, our archives.
Like Negativland, Baldwin’s work relies on appropriating from other texts, so the efforts by the content industries to restrict fair use not only threaten the rights of consumers, but the ability for artists to do their work.
