Early activities (1976–1990) Baldwin made his
Super 8 film Stolen Movie in 1976 by running into movie theaters and filming the screen. He made his next short film,
Flick Skin, while working at porn theaters. Baldwin made his 1978 film
Wild Gunman, a critical look at the figure of the
Marlboro Man, using clips from the
1974 Nintendo arcade game of the same name, as well as B-movies and advertisements obtained from
grindhouses. In 1984, Baldwin moved to
San Francisco's Mission District and contributed to the founding of
Artists' Television Access In 1987, he started his long-running Other Cinema series at the space. In 1986, Baldwin earned an M.A. from
San Francisco State University. He drew from this collection for his 1986 film
RocketKitKongoKit, which narrates the
CIA's role in establishing
Mobutu Sese Seko's
military dictatorship in
Zaire (now the
DR Congo) and the history of rocket testing there by a German weapons manufacturer. It often visually re-enacts the story with loosely associated footage, such as cartoons,
industrial films, or
science fiction films. Like many of Baldwin's later works,
RocketKitKongoKit used documentary techniques not to present an authoritative history but to counter official histories by presenting alternative histories and blurring the boundaries between them. An early proponent of
culture jamming, Baldwin has altered billboards with political messages and has documented the work of the
Billboard Liberation Front through the 1990s.
Mid-career work (1991–2000) Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991) is an account of CIA intervention in developing countries (as well as a critique of paranoid conspiracy theories) presented in the form of a
pseudo-documentary that recounts the history of an alien occupation of
Latin America in 99 brief ramblings.
J. Hoberman put
Tribulation 99 as #3 on his list of the ten best films 1991–2000. Baldwin's
¡O No Coronado! (1992) is a retelling of the invasion of the American southwest by
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in the mid-16th century. It was his first film to include original live-action footage. His next film,
Sonic Outlaws, spotlights the
Concord-based band
Negativland, which was sued in 1991 by
U2 over a parody
sound collage it had made. Baldwin's film chronicles that case along with various activist groups working for
copyright reform.
Later work (2001–present) Baldwin established Other Cinema Digital in 2003 to provide distribution for films by independent, underground, and experimental filmmakers. In 2005 the label partnered with
Facets Video to distribute a series of works on DVD. In 2008, Baldwin created
Mock Up on Mu, a fictional story based heavily on real facts of the lives of
L. Ron Hubbard,
Marjorie Cameron,
Aleister Crowley, and
Jack Parsons. Mostly assembled from found footage,
Mock Up on Mu includes more original live-action footage than in earlier projects. Baldwin has taught at UC Davis and
UC Berkeley. ==Filmography==