Craig Baldwin

Craig Baldwin
Born	1952 (age 64–65) Oakland, California
Occupation	Filmmaker

Craig Baldwin (born 1952) is an American experimental filmmaker. He uses “found” footage from the fringes of popular consciousness as well as images from the mass media to undermine and transform the traditional documentary, infusing it with the energy of high-speed montage and a provocative commentary that targets subjects from intellectual property rights to rampant consumerism.

Craig Baldwin was born in Oakland, California and grew up in nearby Sacramento. He attended college at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of California at Davis. He later earned an M.A. from San Francisco State University in 1986. It was there, in San Francisco State’s Cinema Department, that he first became interested in collage film during his studies under Bruce Conner, a filmmaker famous for his artwork of scraps, which extend beyond film into traditional collage, sculpture, and photography. He is also a professor at the University of California at Davis. In 2000 Baldwin received the Moving Image Creative Capital Award.

As Baldwin developed his use of found imagery, he came across the theories of the Situationist International (SI), a neo-Marxist group influential in 1960s and '70s Europe. Baldwin was also exploring art that was occurring outside of the traditional and more socially acceptable forms of high art, such as zines, mail art and altered billboards. Though he finished his first 16mm film, Wild Gunman, in 1978, he had explored his (rather Situationist) desires to eradicate the borderlines between fine and popular art, public and private imagery, the political and the purely aesthetic in several film and photo-essay projects, notably Flick Skin (1977), a Super-8 film that Baldwin made while living in the projectionist booth at a porn theater. Pieced together from the scraps of film that were left lying around the theater, it was with this film that Baldwin began to really develop his style of rebranding images.

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