Customer Reviews

Spectres of the Spectrum

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a collage of archival media, mostly from 1950s TV shows and discarded clippings from Z-budget science fiction movies, interlaced with original film footage shot to match the grainy, desaturated color of the old media. An ongoing voice-over ties all the old clips together into a sort of trippy paranoid fable. This film is a true delight for the eyes. It reminded me a lot of "The Atomic Cafe," but where "Cafe" simply juxtaposed archival clips to create ironic humor out of historic fact, "Spectres" completely recontextualises its collage of images into a fictional story. The second half feels more like a documentary on the history of broadcast communications, and on first viewing I felt it slowed down a bit and lost track of the "plot" which had been set up in the first half. But with subsequent viewings everything becomes more clear. This is one of those movies you can watch over and over again and it just keeps getting better.

"Nothing in this film is science fiction," is the tagline of mad scientist/media archeologist Craig Baldwin's SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM, a film that picks up where his previous works have left off. In SONIC OUTLAWS (a documentary about culture-jammers), Baldwin explored the ownership of the airwaves. In TRIBULATION 99 (which Baldwin considers a quasi-prequel to SPECTRES, starring the same actor, Sean Kilooyne), he explored conspiracy theories. SPECTRES further explores and updates similar themes, using Baldwin's signature manipulation of found footage mixed with newly shot live-action to tell a futuristic David & Goliath narrative.

Kilooyne stars as Yogi, a telepathic holdout from the age before the New Electromagnetic Order (NEO)--a vertically integrated company that sounds eerily familiar in the wake of the AOL/Time Warner merger. Yogi is one of the few free thinkers left and, holed up in his radioactive wasteland, he broadcasts his views and news to other members of "TV Tesla." With Yogi is his mutant daughter, Boo Boo (Caroline Koebel as voiced by Beth Lisick), an obstreperous telepath with little love of the world that NEO has helped create. When the NEO threatens to use the earth's magnetosphere to "bulk erase" the brains of every human on the planet, the only way to save humanity is for Boo Boo to travel out into space, following the history of television broadcasts back in time, to uncover a secret her grandmother lodged in an old episode of the 1950s series, "Science In Action."

Dealing this time with the topic of the transference of energy through broadcasting, Baldwin demonstrates that there have been countless fringe dwellers that history has cast aside or relegated to footnotes. Nikola Tesla, Philo T. Farnsworth, and Edwin Armstrong are a handful of inventors who have been forgotten or overshadowed by fabricated tales of greatness about innovators such as Thomas Edison, David Sarnoff or Alexander Graham Bell. In essence, SPECTRES can be viewed as a much-needed documentary about broadcast history. Along with presenting an alternate history about the pioneers of spectral exploration, Baldwin's film is an obsessive, densely layered, and intellectually challenging vision of technology gone awry. A wildly energetic blend of science fiction and science fact, rifling through the trash bins of our image-obsessed culture, piecing together a dossier on our love affair with technology and projecting it into a dystopic future.

This is a colourful and original attempt to present the history of the development of mass communication in the twentieth century as a series of competing narratives.

There are two basic threads. The first is a comically paranoid, alternative "history" of the development of mass media, weaved out of footage of real twentieth century events. It's very well done, mining imagery from hundreds of old movies, airforce footage, cheesy old 50's science programs, and is also amusingly outrageous. I have to credit Baldwin for working the relationship between rocket pioneer Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard into the story, which, despite appearing in the fantasy part, is almost entirely true!

The second thread consists of interviews with serious commentators, or "activists", as they tend to describe themselves, who provide insights into the real development of the communications industry. This is also illlustrated by archival footage but in this case the clips often playfully or ironically underline the narratives of the commentators.

There are two criticisms I'd make, though.

The first part is somewhat let down by average script writing and very amateurish acting. I found the acting in particular quite grating at first, although I found that eventually I could accept it as part of the joke, in an Ed Woodish sort of way.

The second half is rather too bogged down with the commentators, who tend to overstate their own importance. Beyond some interesting facts about the relationship between early media experiments and mysticism, most of what they say tends to be fairly conventional, and was familiar territory, at least for me. And other than the observation that owners of communications companies have lots of power and money, and like having even more power and money, they don't have many insights of any real originality to contribute, and seem hamstrung by the lack of any coherent theoretical perspectives.

Perhaps one interesting point is that some of the schemes of pioneers like Tesla now strike us as just as bizarre as the fictional strand presented by the film. Indeed, in the case of Tesla, the fictional and real narratives come dangerously close to overlapping.

So overall, despite the film's eagerness to represent itself as an exercise in culture jamming, the final effect is ultimately rather benign.

All the same, it's well conceived and executed, is a lot of fun, and well worth watching.

Words fail me in describing why you should IMMEDIATELY buy this film, but I will try nonetheless. Think of it as the movie Ed Wood tried to make, resurrecting stock footage and fragments from the cutting room floor as a compelling, if low budget, SF headtrip adventure. The dark, grainy collage of surrealistic cinematic scraps is mated to a dense archeaological narrative told by two voices, a man's and a woman's. They relay a paranoid, if accurate, history of the mass media and of "electronic domination" and then go back in time to do something about it.

To be honest, the film's special effects are terrible, yet it doesn't matter, and not because of irony or kitsch either as in the case of Wood, but because their DIY aesthetic is integral to the film's critique of mass media and mass culture.

As a bonus, this is a perfect DVD for the Baked Potato in your life.

This movie seems very interesting in concept. Unfortunately, the plot and narration is so annoyingly dumb it draws attention away from the film clips and 'ficto-historical' information. What could have been a cool bit of agitprop becomes something that seems as if it were written by a freshman sociology major. Sadly, I suggest you don't waste your time with this one.

Initially, this film is very hard to take seriously, both for its relatively heavy use of noise-imagery and static which remind me strongly of experimental films (some of which I've made), and secondly because of an odd voice-over claiming doom and gloom in a way that calls back images of terrible sci-fi shows from the fifties and sixties with people running around in plastic suits.

Very soon afterwards, the film takes a turn for the serious, but still holds on to both the headache-causing flashings of distorted images with a couple of characters (ironically, both are epileptic) who often quote those same bad sci-fi features.

However, in order to add a certain element of the profound, the film takes images from our entire history of filmed and televised images and combines them together into a story of the world's slow suffering from the over-abuse of wavelengths by humanity. This abuse is reflected in everything imaginable, from religious ideologies of tapping into the meaning of the Universe, to scientific endeavors to gain free energy from all the Earth, to economic globalization and multimedia conglomeration. All sent with various examples and historical contexts to remind me of the advice, "If you're going to lie, provide as much truth as you can in the midst." Moments in the movie occur that, almost, touch upon a documentary-like air that makes the entire movie very forboding...

...and yet then the characters come in and construct cheesy time-travel devices and run around the Universe yelling and being annoying and talking about "hidden messages" and "saving the spectrum" and it all kind of falls apart.

All in all, because I'm very interested in avant-garde styles of cinema, it's not a bad try. It's just that it is very overstimulating (I wouldn't be surprised if everyone else in the audience got the same headache I received from it, and it's ironic that there's no way an epileptic could watch this) and eventually disappointing. A good start, but could have used a bit of rewriting to give it a much more serious tone.

--PolarisDiB