Out-of- town series feature Craig Baldwin,
one of the most well known avant-garde and experimental
filmmakers from the Bay Area who works with the appropriated
footage.
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"Spectres
of the Spectrum" is a feature-length 16mm film
utilizing old 'kinescopes' (filmed records of early
TV broadcasts before the advent of videotape, mostly
from the late Fifties' educational show called 'Science
in Action') to create an eerie, haunted "media-archaeology"
zone for a sci-fi time-travel tale, wherein live-action
actors search for a hidden electromagnetic secret to
save the planet from a futuristic war-machine, inspired
by HAARP the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research
Program. (Though fictionalized for Baldwin's film, HAARP
is, in fact, a very real phenomenon. On the surface,
it is a data-gathering tool to explore the Aurora Borealis
in detail. But in fact, HAARP doubles as one of the
most sophisticated components of the Star Wars weapons
arsenal, a particle beam device that can be accurately
targeted on specific sites in the ionosphere.
Set
in the year 2007 in the blighted desert outpost of Las
Vegas, a young telepathic woman ("BooBoo") scavenges
for survival on an old bombing range with her father
("Yogi") who is holed up in a cinder-block pirate-TV
station, broadcasting rambling diatribes on the impending
global electromagnetic 'Pulse'. A solar eclipse gives
BooBoo a cosmic opportunity to save the world, through
a superluminal voyage back into time to retrieve a secret
message left on the airwaves by her scientist grandmother.
With
their Airstream trailer converted into a spaceship,
the amazed BooBoo is able to catch up with outwardly
propagating Fifties' educational-TV broadcasts, affording
an accelerated review of mid-century science and science-fiction
cinema; and narrating a loose and collage-happy history
of heroes and martyrs of the electromagnetic revolution.
Commentary on Mesmer, Morse, Bell, Tesla, Farnsworth,
and others comes from Yogi and his 'TV Tesla' correspondents,
in a playfully speculative effort to trace the growth
of corporate hegemony over the electromagnetic spectrum.
Through an increasingly abstract montage of live-action,
archival film, broadcast video, and 'exploded' interviews,
the fantasy narrative warps into disjointed, abstracted,
audio-visual phrases, suggesting the breakdown of personal
ego/memory, historical representation, and, yes, of
spacetime itself. (http://www.othercinema.com/sosframe.html)
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