If you like Next to Heaven, Rob Parrish’s found-footage noir web series that we talked about a couple of weeks ago on FilmCouch, chances are good that you’d probably get a kick out of Craig Baldwin. He’s probably best known for his 1995 film, Sonic Outlaws, an documentary which merged form and content by using montages rife with pop culture appropriations to tell the story of Negativland, who were essentially the first band to cause an internationally-publicized legal incident by creating a mash-up. All of the issues that intersect in Sonic Outlaws–piracy, fair use, underground artists vs. corporate interests–are totally current today, and yet Sonic Outlaws documents a world that’s entirely pre-digital.
There are tons of clips from the film on Google Video, or you can buy a DVD directly from Baldwin’s DVD label, Other Cinema Digital.
Or, if you’re in San Francisco, you can also show up tomorrow night at Artists’ Television Access, where Baldwin’s weekly Other Cinema series will include a”sneak preview” of his latest film, Mu. According to Independent Exposure, the still-unfinished film can be described as “a sci-fi espionage compilation narrative that traces the rise and convergence of New Age religous cults, the military/aerospace industrial complex, and modern-day myths from Disney to certain sci-fi overlords.” If that didn’t sound cool enough, there are at least five other titles on tomorrow night’s program, including a film about Nikola Tesla directed by Buffalo ‘66 and Marie Antoinette cinematographer Lance Accord. More info at the Other Cinema site.
[Via Bad Lit]
With this week’s installment of FilmCouch dedicated in part to Rob Parrish’s Next to Heaven, I thought it would be appropriate to embed an episode here for those who haven’t seen it. This is episode 52, the finale of Season One. It’s kind of the ultimate specimen of the series thus far: the narrator, “Frank”, describes the orgy he envisions in lieu of his own funeral, which he imagines watching while “floating next to heaven, one foot in my old life, one foot in my new.” At the risk of sounding brain-numbingly literal, but that’s basically what Heaven is––imagery from an old world, passing into the technological realm of a new world. It’s also a “big-ass fucking party,” where everyone gets to put a little stardust into their martinis.I wrote a bit more about Heaven a couple of months back, here.
What’s truly interesting in the film world this week are the 52 episodes of Next to Heaven Rob Parrish created over the last year. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic and always bizarre–Next to Heaven is an experimental series that simply would not have existed, much less been seen, pre-Internet.
The freedom Parrish had was to define his own limitations, like working from archival footage and producing an episode a week–as opposed to a network or studio defining the limitations–and, in doing so, he’s created his own aesthetic. Karina is covering the New York Film Festival and she shares her personal best of the fest, Silent Light (but to Kevin’s chagrin, not I’m Not There).
FilmCouch 41
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Silent Light, I’m Not There
