Spectres of the Spectrum

That's how I was when I walked (staggered) out of this "film". I couldn't leave, because it was at a film festival and the cinema was full of people. I was stuck in the middle. Trapped.

The tiny fragment of original footage which attempted to bind this film together features some of the worst acting ever to grace the big screen. The daughter was a stand out performance - stand out in the bad sense.

Thge cinematography was hideous, consisting of disjointed framing and some of the oddest lighting I've witnessed.

As for the stock footage... well at first one...

Wait.

Why am I reviewing this film? Why do I acknowledge its existence? Please, don't watch it. Do something useful with two hours of your life and go watch some paint dry.

This is movie is a great example of psychedelic info-tainment. Obviously done on a negligible budget, the filmmaker pulls the viewer into the raw ether of this electromagnetic cinema verite. He puts forth an amazing amount of sonic and visual information with an emphasis on the synchronous relationships already connecting the subject matter(?) being dealt with. Plus, he ties it together with a super-rad sci-fi plot line. I really like the some of the acting as well. As strange and amusing(novel) as this movie seems, it also has a strong visual progression that keeps it rolling along nicely. A great ride! I enjoy this movie more each time I watch it. Take back the spectrum!

Loved the ideas of the film and how it was put together. Only negative aspect was there was so much information so tightly condensed, I wasn't able to absorb all of it. But after hearing Mr. Baldwin speak when he premiered it at my college, that was most likely a character trait of his. If you get the chance to see it, do so. If you get another, go again.

Mind-boggling, somewhat exhausting, but gorgeous, original, and totally vital, "Spectres of the Spectrum" is part practical joke, part hysterical paranoid rant, and part sci-fi film, wrapped in one glorious low-budget package.

I've never seen anything like it. Baldwin has taken a breath-taking amount of archival film footage (who knows where he got all of it) and chopped it into a fairly lean history lesson on the use and abuse of electricity and electromagnetic frequencies.

Some of it is true. Some of it isn't. Some you wonder about. All of it is fascinating. At first he gives you the information so fast you feel overwhelmed, but eventually a pattern starts to unfold.

It takes place in a parallel world where a man and his daughter are living in an airstream trailer in the desert. Some kind of apocalypse has occurred. The man and his daughter speak without talking. This original footage is a bit cheesy and involves time travel and some really bad f/x (they may be intentionally bad), but fortunately doesn't take up too much of the running time.

Anyway, see this if you have any interest in fringe art or cut-up technique or conspiracy theories. I found it a little overwhelming, but totally mesmerizing.

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 foreboding...

...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