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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.
Baldwin attended college at University of California at Davis. There, he took film classes through the theatre department and began collecting films. He was also politically active as a student. Baldwin left UC Davis in the early 1970s and later attended the University of California at Santa Barbara.
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. It was there that he first became interested in collage film during his studies with Bruce Conner.
It was during this period that Baldwin started amassing a large collection of film works, many of which were discarded by institutions moving over to VHS. 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, , 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. (2025). 9780822348221, Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822348221
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.
Baldwin's 1999 film Spectres of the Spectrum is a science fiction allegory that tells the story of a young woman with telepathic powers who travels back in time to save the world from an electro-magnetic pulse. The film takes a cautionary stance against the media outlets in charge of creating and perpetuating the popular mainstream, and in doing so, follows the trajectory, through collage, of media from its beginnings to the present. In 2000 Baldwin received the Moving Image Creative Capital Award.
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. Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!, a 2023 book published by San Francisco Cinematheque and INCITE, surveys his work and career.
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