Mock up on Mu

Years after the masterful films Spectres of the Spectrum and Sonic Outlaws, there's another new found-footage spectacle film by the master of the narrative collage, Craig Baldwin. For those not familiar with his approach, he constructs his films using an extensive collection of found film material from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s from various scientific, informative and obscure Hollywood films. Scenes and fragments that reflect the paranoia of that age are combined with fiction shot in a matching style in order to create a hybrid film universe of science fiction, pulp and underground culture.
In Mock up on Mu, several real figures from the American West Coast subculture play the leading roles: Jack Parsons, prototype crazy scientist and inventor of rocket fuel, L. Ron Hubbard, SF writer and later founder of Scientology, and Marjorie Cameron, beatnik artist and mother of the new-age movement, with in the background their shared relationship with the occultism of Aleister Crowley. Baldwin forges all these mainly true stories into a hyperbolic allegory about increasing militarism in space and the commercial sell-out of the personal yearning for interpretation and leisure. (EvtH)