Ephemera Unearthed! Anomalies from Baldwin’s Other Cinema @ SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive
Presented in association with SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive
Admission: FREE!
Since 1985, filmmaker, curator, underground archivist and radical cultural instigator Craig Baldwin has been presenting his curated Other Cinema screening series at San Francisco’s Artists’ Television Access. Presented on a schedule of thirty-six Saturdays annually, Baldwin’s OC constitutes one of the longest lasting and most influential microcinema series in the known universe. At its foundation, the stridently subcultural Other Cinema is built upon an ethos of uncompromising self-reliance, creative risk-taking and a vaudevillian approach to confounding the boundaries between high and low culture, leading, of course, to something only describable as “Other.” Like his films, Baldwin’s Other Cinema represents an unashamedly expansive approach to film exhibition, media consumption and cultural engagement in which abjected or otherwise ephemeral forms of film history coexist alongside expanded cinema performance, underground/experimental film fare, activist media, illustrated lectures, in-person artist presentations and more. In celebration of 40+ years of steadfast dedication—not to mention Baldwin’s recurring relationship as an SFAI adjunct (and his 1980 “performance art wedding” at the Institute’s koi pond)—San Francisco Cinematheque and the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive present Ephemera Unearthed! an exploded view of Other Cinema’s history, a sprawling wall-mounted display of countless calendars, fliers and ephemeral miscellany drawn from the personal archives of obsessive self-documenter Baldwin, curated by the artist and Cinematheque’s Steve Polta. (Text adapted from Craig Baldwin: Avant Savant by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, published 2023 in Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!)
Exhibition launches March 12 with an opening reception 5–7pm and will be on view through May 29; gallery hours9am–5pm, Monday–Friday (holidays excepted) at the SFAI Legacy Foundation, 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco. Free admission!
The voice of these communiqués is immediately recognizable: acidic yet affable; equally given to conspiracy and celebration, musings and militancy; informative, even learned in a kind of crank cabbalist fashion, but pitched with carney-barking vigor. If the exclamatory style is sometimes tongue-in-cheek, it’s also a way of keeping the faith with cinema’s earliest beginnings as an attraction […] The subject matter may lean esoteric, but Baldwin enjoys an adman’s knack for catchy alliterations. […] The playfulness of this phraseology should not obscure an earnest countercultural drive to develop new rituals and language. […] To be sure, the Other Cinema calendars tell you much more than what’s playing when. Baldwin’s is a riotous film history, thriving on scrappy insight and the accidental action of dérive. Hopscotching between different moments and modes of cinema, with the typically ignored hinterlands of industrial, educational and amateur film all given serious thought, the calendars reflect an incredible, almost lunatic dedication to discovery. Accordingly, they remain invitations long after going out of date. (Max Goldberg: “Time After Time: Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema Calendars. Published 2023 in Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!)