Week 4 (July 12 – 18) – Roots of the Underground: Film-makers’ Coop
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is a non-profit dedicated to experimental and avant-garde cinema; almost all of the most well-known American experimental filmmakers have had works in their catalogue at some point.
Craig Baldwin is a master of the cinematic cut-up, and with 2008’s Mock Up on Mu, he takes the already bizarre, interconnected histories of L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron and blasts them off into a fever-dream version of 2019 that feels more real than the nightly news.
The film operates on a wild, speculative premise: it’s the future, and L. Ron Hubbard has established Mu, a combination of a Scientology theme park and rehab facility, on the moon. From this lunar base, he dispatches Agent C to Las Vegas on a mission to infiltrate the lives of defense contractor Lockheed Martin and a man named Richard Carlson. As the plot unfurls, it is revealed that Carlson is actually the legendary rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons, suffering from amnesia since his supposed death in 1952. Throw in an appearance by the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, hiding out in a cavern, and you have a narrative that weaves rocket science, black magic and space-age paranoia into a singular, dense tapestry.
Damon Packard—a cult hero of indie cinema and a director in his own right, known for his obsession with the lost essence of 1970s filmmaking—is perfectly cast as the megalomaniacal Hubbard. He is joined by Kal Spelletich as the tragic, searching Jack Parsons, and Michelle Silva as the ethereal, powerful Marjorie Cameron. Stoney Burke is at Lockheed Martin, grounding the film’s high-concept sci-fi absurdity in the grit of the Nevada desert.
What makes Mock Up on Mu truly special is Baldwin’s availabilism technique. He’s not out there trying to find the perfect shot; he’s taking the history of the industrial, educational and training film—the discarded ephemera of the American century—and stitching it together with his own live-action footage. He treats the footage with tints, distortions, and intentionally asynchronous sound, creating a tactile, flickering experience that feels like watching a transmission from a parallel timeline.
This is a film that refuses to be passive. It is dense, it is confounding, and it is absolutely brilliant. Baldwin saw the official Church of Scientology accounts of Hubbard’s time in Pasadena and correctly deduced that the truth was already stranger than anything he could script, so he let the history speak, filtered through his own chaotic, brilliant lens.
As Michael A Hoffman wrote in an article about James Shelby Downard’s King-Kill 33, “The groundwork for the moon flights was laid by Dr. John Whiteside Parsons, a brilliant rocket fuel researcher at the California Institute of Technology who had a lunar crater named in his honor. He also happened to be one of Aleister Crowley’s more fanatical and literal followers. Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (0.T.0.) was devoted to the theory and practice of magica scxualis and what more mind-blowing fuck can anyone imagine than the one the Masonic astronauts accomplished between the sun and moon? The O.T.O. established a temple on Pilioma Mountain, decades before supposedly “dispassionate scientists” chose it as the site for the world’s Big Eye on the universe. The O.T.O. believed that Palomar was the sexual chakra of the earth, and Parsons apparently commuted between Palomar and his sex magick temples in Pasadena. In 1952, Parsons was blown up in what is officially described as an accident with rocket fuel, but which others have said was a homunculus experiment that went bananas. A similar experiment centering on the animation of a homunculus (a tiny manikin much written about in medieval alchemy) was supposed to have taken place using the radiation produced during the first atomic bomb blast.“
These are the characters behind history, and it’s high time you experienced them.
