Monday, May 11, 2026, 6:00 pm
Availablism & Artifactuality: A Craig Baldwin Cinematic Sampler
Craig Baldwin in person!
Presented in association with the Roxie Theater
Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets *coming soon*
For nearly 50 years, the Bay Area filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin has been an inspiring figure in contemporary media arts. His acerbic, densely-packed found footage films have traveled the globe, encouraging scores of nascent collage-essayists, culture jammers, and mockumentarians to action. […] Ever seeking to revise and hybridize existing modes and genres, and invent and name new ones, Baldwin’s filmmaking amalgamates cinephilic literacy and voraciousness, a sharp understanding of political and cultural history, and a sly critical polemics. His films are further energized by an encyclopedic knowledge of his own sprawling collection of cast-off educational films and B-grade features and a perverse proclivity for sourcing surreally sublime moments from industrial film effluvia. Informed by left politics, cult cinemas, agit-prop activism, structural film, the Situationists, the Yippies, Arte Povera, media archeology, compilation documentary, and other found footage forms, Baldwin’s praxis is bound by a dual commitment to materiality and aesthetics on the one hand, and disruptive action and fervent, antagonal rhetoric on the other; all the while articulating a contrarian (and at times utopian) sense of apocalyptic historiography. (Craig Baldwin: Avant Savant by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, published 2023 in Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!)
Resonating with Craig Baldwin: Ephemera Unearthed!—on view at the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive through May 29—Cinematheque, the Roxie and the SFAI Legacy Foundation welcome King of Found Footage Craig Baldwin to present a personal guided tour through fifty years of radical filmmaking, from the mid-70s/mid-Market San Francisco cinema-scape Stolen Movie (1976) to the recent 3-D short Communique for the Cube (2023) and points in between. More than just a movie show, this evening’s overview will present highlights of the maestro’s oeuvre replete with personal reminisces and war stories with Baldwin in conversation with long-time collaborator Bill Daniel and filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
SCREENING: Stolen Movie (1976, excerpt); Wild Gunman (1978) RocketKitKongoKit (1986, excerpt); Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991, excerpt); ¡O No Coronado! (1992) Sonic Outlaws (1995, excerpt); Spectres of the Spectrum (1999, excerpt); Mock Up On Mu (2008, excerpt); Bulletin (2015); Communique for the Cube (2023)
Baldwin’s radical fusion of form and content is on display throughout his body of work, and is unified by an unabashed embrace of marginality and cultural abjection, and by his faithful adherence to the twin tenets of “availablism” and “artifactuality.” Availablism, simply put, is the edict that the artist make do with what is at hand and not let the lack of resources—lack of “perfect” footage, lack of filmmaking equipment, or lack of funding— stand in the way of completing a project. Artifactuality, a related idea, rests in the belief that archival source materials are permeated with industrial and cultural histories which invariably contribute meaning. Part of Baldwinian filmmaking is to allow these meanings to resonate as part of the completed work. This latter concept also applies to Baldwin’s use, in his “collage-narrative” films, of underground and B-movie filmmaking methods which, in the spirit of Jack Smith, George and Mike Kuchar, Doris Wishman, and Ed Wood, revel in their poverty, placing their bargain basement budgets proudly on display, and thereby allow their “amateurish” appearances to manifest as inspirational art. (Craig Baldwin: Avant Savant by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, published 2023 in Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!)