Crazy Notions

The Dardennes' drama of drugs addicts and sham marriages "Lorna's Silence" comes to DVD.

Craig Baldwin’s new, handmade “Mock Up on Mu,” released on his own Other Cinema label, is on another planet altogether — or moon, or space station, and actually you can never be sure it is anywhere at all. Baldwin, whose 1991 masterpiece “Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America” set the high bar, still untouched, for Pynchonian-satire found-footage features, has since moved into incorporating new footage into his free-associative mix of old pulp, educational film, government footage and other outrageous moments of ephemeral cinema, all of it emerging from his Frankenstein surgery with a boggled head of Freudian free-associations, a lust for forgotten history, and an insurrectionary temper.

A “not untrue saga” according to its proliferating titles and non-stop, multi-voice narrations, which as usual make Baldwin’s movie as much of a written text as it is a film, “Mock Up on Mu” wormholes through the origins of Scientology, bopping back and forth from the postwar past and the indeterminately cosmic future, as both are — I think, and I’ve seen it twice — affected or determined by the pentagrammatical influence of, in turn, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, Jet Propulsion Lab co-founder and occult wingnut Jack Parsons, aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin (here personified by a person named “Lockheed Martin”), and New Age progenitor Marjorie Cameron.

Like much of Baldwin’s work, it turns out to be partially a true story: the sexual/mystical/financial history of Parsons, Cameron (both Crowley devotees) and Hubbard in the 1940s makes for stampede reading wherever you find it, but of course, Baldwin fictionalizes the characters’ wacko ambitions into “reality,” cheesily invoking Hubbard’s blowhard pseudo-ideas about the future of the human race. (You’d have to study the film’s nonexistent bibliography to figure out how much of “Mock Up on Mu” is true, though it is the second film from last year to consider the moon’s very real deposits of Helium 3 as an energy source.)

At its least a fugue of speculations voiced by psychotic characters and illustrated by hunks of “Star Trek,” “Things to Come,” “Logan’s Run,” “THX 1138,” industrial project films, real news footage, NASA clips, Kenneth Anger images (borrowed and recreated, including shots of Cameron from “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome”), and an uncatalogueable river of other materials, the movie often succumbs to megalomaniacal confusion, befitting its subject.

Texturally, if I prefer Baldwin’s metaphoric use of age-old images to his new, deliberately ill-dubbed scenes, it’s because found footage naturally comes bearing the fruit of political outrage and conflicted meanings. But it’s a quibble, when “Mock Up on Mu” is actually less a movie than a farcical jet stream of all-American utopianism that makes about as much sense as the past itself.

“Lorna’s Silence” (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) and “Mock Up on Mu” (Other Cinema) are now available on DVD.

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