San Francisco International Film Fest World Premiere

Mock Up on Mu

Director: Craig Baldwin

Review By Max Burke

Seeing three or four films a day while in full-on festival mode can oftentimes be numbing. Some films require time and deep reflection to set in, others can seem promising but end up amateurish and predictable, and still others fail to connect at all. Then there's a film like  Mock Up On Mu, the kind of discovery that makes the whole festival-going experience worthwhile.

Mock Up on Mu is the latest missive from director Craig Baldwin, an (in)famous fixture of the Bay Area underground film scene whose previous projects have included Sonic Outlaws, a chronicle on Fair Use of copyrighted material and long-running culture-jammers Negativland. Mu is set in the near future, when L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, now living in exile on a moon colony, recruits a brainwashed worker to travel to earth and secure support for his moon colonization efforts from Lockheed Martin, the giant aeronautics-cum-military firm and Jack Parsons, the erstwhile Jet Propulsion Lab scientist.

That's about as lucid and in-depth an explanation of the plot of Mock Up on Mu that any journalist can hope to attempt, and as much of one as is necessary. Any more would spoil some of the film's many pleasures. The style of Mu takes the form of short, original sequences shot for the film, which further the story and characters, interspersed with a dazzling array of pieces of found footage, ranging from archival film of NASA rocket tests to scenes from North by Northwest. The clips are cut together in rapid succession, creating what Baldwin himself describes as a “collage narrative.” Baldwin has transformed the simplest definition of film editing – cutting together two separate pieces of footage to create a third, distinct meaning – in to a concrete style and the results are as hilarious as they are profound.

Mock Up on Mu is so crammed with provocative choices of found footage, bizarre digressions into the subterranean history of the 20th Century, staggeringly involved conspiracy theories, Black Magick, space travel, nostalgic reminiscences of beatnik history, and any number of other cultural touchstones that, on a certain level, it defies criticism. Mu is the work of an overactive mind and overactive imagination, but one that is so well-versed in the overground and underground history of American technological, artistic, and spiritual accomplishments since World War II – as well as the means to deploy any number of inventive formal techniques to deliver this singular message - that it cannot be ignored. Adventurous filmgoers everywhere are urged to seek out Mock Up on Mu