In our ongoing efforts to present the community with alternative visions and voices about the State of our Nation and the World, this program reflects upon current predicaments from political, historical, artistic and humanitarian perspectives. Among the filmmakers featured are Craig Baldwin, LEV, Peter Watkins, Bruce Spangler, James Schneider.

Public Service Announcement 1min, video, 2001
Director: LEV

http://ingredientx.com/

New World Murder 9min, 16mm, 1992
Director: Bruce Spangler

New World Murder is about the Gulf War, the media, and collateral brain damage. It attempts to expose the jingoism and pro-war propaganda which guided mainstream U.S. media coverage of the Gulf War. In a loosely structured linear progression, the film chronicles the media's demonization of Saddam Hussein, the marketing and fetishization of U.S. military hardware, the use of abstractions (the destruction of "targets") to censor news about the human casualties involved, and the celebration of super-nationalism in the face of immense suffering by the Iraqi people. The method used to pursue these themes is a combination of highly manipulated and rephotographed video footage of the Gulf War, war-related text, and original footage of actors who lipsync to well-known media "sound bites," while images of the war are projected on to their faces. Awards: Best Noncommercial Experimental Film, Montana Film Festival; Best Experimental Film, Phila Film Festival

Bruce Spangler, a Vancouver based filmmaker, received a BA in art and communications from Andrews University in Michigan in 1985, and a BFA in film production from Simon Fraser University in 1995. He has produced and directed four short films: Tele-Geist (1990), Head Lights Fade (1991), New World Murder (1992), and Warm Gun (1994). Prior to his career as a filmmaker, Bruce was a child protection social worker. He worked for the Ministry of Children and Families as social worker in the city of Surrey, British Columbia for over five years.

World's Fair World 9min, video, 2002
Special Report 4min, video, 1999
Director: Bryan Boyce

World's Fair World: "There’s nothing funny about the tools of capitalism." Agree or disagree? In World’s Fair World, Bryan Boyce subjects a Westinghouse-sponsored TV movie to his own patented brand of narrative deconstruction and evisceration. With special appearance by "Electro."

Special Report: What if TV news wasn't merely horrifying but literally came from horror movies? Bryan Boyce puts terrifying words in the mouths of America's top-rated merchants of terror.

San Francisco native Bryan Boyce is a film and video artist whose work has been shown at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam International Film Festival, NY Expo of Short Film and Video, NY Underground, Chicago Underground, Cinematexas, RESFest and the Pacific Film Archive.

The Forgotten Faces 16min, super8mm on video, 1961
Director: Peter Watkins

The Forgotten Faces won an ‘Amateur Oscar’ and attracted the attention, firstly of Granada Television. So convincing was this reconstruction of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, shot in the back streets of Canterbury, that Granada Vice Chairman Cecil Bernstein, on first seeing the film, announced, ‘We can’t show this otherwise people will never believe our newsreels". Huw Wheldon, the legendary Head of Documentaries at BBC TV, also saw the film and recognised at once the genius of Watkins and employed him as one of the first recruits to BBC 2.

“Most of my feelings about this kind of what I would call documentary or reconstruction of reality came from studying photographs. I think that's where my feelings about grain and people looking into the camera came from ... especially those very strong photographs taken in the streets of Budapest and published in Paris Match and Life. That was my first in-depth encounter with an actual situation ...” - PW

"Distinguished filmmaker Peter Watkins is best remembered for his powerful look at the potential horrors of nuclear war in The War Game. Originally made for the BBC television network, one of two he was commissioned to make between 1964-1965, the film was considered too disturbing to air. Later it was released in theaters and in 1966 it was awarded the Oscar for Best Documentary. Before becoming a director, Watkins was educated at Christ College, Cambridge, and at the London Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Before joining the film industry, he worked as an assistant producer in advertising. In the late '50s he began making amateur films. Following the success of The War Game, Watkins made the mainstream feature film Privilege (1967). The film met with a lukewarm reception and Watkins returned to making documentaries in Sweden and the United States." ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Wild Gunman20min, 16mm, 1978
Director: Craig Baldwin

Mobilizing wildly diverse found-footage fragments, obsessive optical printing, and a dense musique concrete soundtrack, a manic montage of pop-cultural amusements, cowboy iconography, and advertising imagery is re-contextualized within the contemporary geopolitical crisis in a scathing critique of US cultural and political imperialism.

A San Franscisco based filmmaker Craig Baldwin is well known both as a filmmaker and a curator of The other Cinema (http://www.othercinema.com/sosframe.html ). His films have screened all over the world, including The Roxie (San Francisco), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Rotterdam, Deep Dish TV, Film Forum (New York), William Paterson College (New Jersey), Austin Film Society, London Filmmakers Co-op, Marin County Film Festival and Coolidge Corner Cinema in Boston. He received his Master of Arts from San Francisco State University.

His interest in the recontextualization of appropriated imagery led him to the theories of the Situationist International, and to various practices of mail art, 'zines, altered billboards, and other creative initiatives beyond the fringe of the traditional fine-arts curriculum.

"... I'm interested in black-comic social critique, and also in graphic montage, rhythm, and acceleration; but above it all, I'm interested in the mobilization and manipulation and manic play with old and new meanings, as "found" footage is recontextualized with newly-produced sound and imagery, documentary testimony and collateral text. This polymorphous collage-essay form represents an effort to create an audio-visual language that has the same metaphoric and punning qualities as spoken language; clusters of signifiers in provisional constructs cobbled together. The flotsam and jetsam of film culture can serve to stage a review of the carnival acts of history." - Craig Baldwin

Median Strip 9min, 16mm, 1999
Director: James Schneider

"Through the metaphor of the American freeway and the use of found footage, we sense how mobility and freedom of movement are kept in check by a booming incarceration business." Festival International du Film Indépendant, Brussels, Belgium (with the voices of Angela Davis, Mumia-Abu Jamal, Jerry Brown, Bob Dole, ex-cons, various government officials and radio and television newscasters...).

Fragmentary style, atypical structures, and a nod towards social criticism characterize the films of James Schneider. Born in Washington D.C. where he started as a musician and photographer, he had his first gallery show at the age of 18. He was drawn to filmmaking while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he made the first of nine films, Alive in the Land of the Ladies (1993). Schneider has since collaborated with many musicians, doing live projections, music videos, and casting them in various roles such as the vocal members of Combustible Edison who play a variant of a Greek chorus in his film Oasis. In 1997, with the group The Make*Up, he made Blue is Beautiful, recently described by a French critic as "Situationism meets Foucault while taking a ride in the Scooby Doo van". In addition to collaborations in the realm of music, Schneider worked with the Monadic Institute to create The Staticose Chamber in 1996.
The most travelled of his films are the three shorts which comprise the Dystop ian Trilogy : Faerie-Monition, Oasis, and Median Strip. They are condensed surreal impressions of three distinct sites; the prison industrial complex, a corporate planned community, and Euro-Disney. To date, Schnieder describes his films as "experiments, mobile pieces of a developing whole." Schneider has toured extensively with his films to dozens of festivals and to odd screening spaces across Europe and the U.S.. His acitivities also have included the programming screenings in the U.S. and abroad as well as writing for periodicals and museums such as the National Gallery of Art. Currently residing in France, Schneider is researching and preparing his next film. http://www.insound.com/cinema/directorstand/index.cfm?id=364