Made using found footage from newsreels, sci-fi B-movies and anthropology films, all strung together with a manic voice-over – ‘REPORTED BY BALDWIN’, as the opening credits state – Tribulation 99 is a sharp critique of US political intervention in Latin America smuggled inside a witty parody of the conspiracy theories that have come to infect public discourse today. The programme also included Baldwin’s classic ‘pseudo-documentary’ Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991). Metrograph cinema in Manhattan presented a selection of Baldwin’s shorts, along with his three feature films: Sonic Outlaws (1995), Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) and Mock-Up on Mu (2008).

Two events at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art showcased Baldwin’s activities as the impresario of Other Cinema, the influential film programme that has run in San Francisco’s Mission District since the late 1980s – a miracle of survival in a city twice-over asphyxiated by tech money. It did, however, give the East Coast a rare opportunity to come face-to-face with this major West Coast figure of American underground cinema. In New York earlier this month, a week-long celebration of Baldwin’s work failed to provide any answers about dead US presidents, although the assassinations of both Kennedy and William McKinley were covered in the screenings. Not only that: Baldwin saw today’s debates around creative copyright hurtling down the pike long before social media bit artists, filmmakers and musicians on the backside, and he was exploring the impact of broadcast technology and the internet on human consciousness when most of us still thought an email address looked like something the cat might accidentally type when it sat on your keyboard. Which, as colossal overstatements go, I’d argue is perfectly appropriate, given that the veteran Bay Area filmmaker began exploring the paranoid American imaginary in his work decades ago, back in the days when – imagine! – it was unacceptable to argue in public that the Earth was flat or that high school shootings were ‘false flag’ conspiracies of the deep state. Kennedy, why the crew of the Mary Celeste vanished or for what purpose Stonehenge was built. It’s one as stubborn as who actually murdered John F. Why Craig Baldwin’s contributions to cinema continue to be undervalued – at least outside of specialist film circles – is a mystery.

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