ICA Cinematheque: Mock Up on Mu

'...absorbing, confounding, exhausting and altogether stranger and more rib-ticklingly funny than most fiction, Mock Up on Mu comes close to defying categorization' New York Times 

Oh Liberty! commences with this rare UK screening of Mock Up on Mu, the latest feature-length work from San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin, who also serves as curator of the infamous Mission District underground film night ‘Other Cinema'.    

A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western and even horror genres, Mock Up on Mu cobbles together a feature-length collage-narrative based on (mostly) true stories of California's post-War subcultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions and Beat lifestyles.

Pulp-serial snippets, industrial-film imagery and B-movie clips are intercut with newly shot 16mm  live-action footage, powering a playful trajectory through the now-mythic occult matrix of Jack Parsons (Crowleyite founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab), L. Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult leader) and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and "mother of the New Age movement"). Their intertwined tales spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space and the corporate take-over of leisure-time and spiritual fulfilment.

'Mock Up on Mu is a modern American myth fashioned from all manner of cultural detritus' - J. Hoberman, Village Voice

'... this new work hits your synapses like a cluster bomb, assailing your tremulous gray matter with a barrage of cinematic fragments (most recycled, some newly shot), miscellaneous rants and ruminations' - Manohla Dargis, New York Times

'In Mock Up on Mu Baldwin may have found a new method of cinematic storytelling. Don't expect Hollywood to pick it up soon.' - David Bordwell