There's a science-fiction narrative embedded here somewhere: A telepathic woman named BooBoo wanders around an old bomb site piecing together her relationship to the history of telecommunications while her father, Yogi, broadcasts anti-tech messages over the radio. Operating on the theory that the voices and images sent out so many decades ago must still be floating around in one form or another, BooBoo becomes a kind of video astronaut, flying into the ether to save the world. Although Baldwin uses actors to play the cartoon-named father and daughter, most of Spectres of the Spectrum consists of stray bits and pieces of film assembled according to the filmmaker's own junk-shop logic, allowing both historical and fictional figures to share the frame. Viewers are left on their own to determine which is which.
Baldwin, a San Francisco-based media programmer and political activist, has been working with collage forms and found footage for many years (his earlier Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, which zooms through everything from flying saucers to Mexican wrestling films, is an underground classic), but Spectres of the Spectrum is harsher and more politically challenging than his previous work. The director's political discourse proves to be as much a disadvantage as it is a blessing; it's not always clear where the ranting stops and the history begins. The constant flow of images, the rapid changes in film stock and image quality, and the barrage of kitschy pop-culture antiques take on a hypnotic life of their own, making the film stronger in its lack of convention than in the lucidity of its argument. As in Tribulation 99, Baldwin pokes so many holes in the logical walls of the media that there's no place left to post a message.
