The films of Craig Baldwin and Jon Mortisugu

When you hear the phrase "independent filmmaker," what do you think it means? I've heard it defined as a filmmaker who raises money and makes movies outside the established channels, or a filmmaker who works inside the system (such as it is) yet still insists on creative autonomy. Craig Baldwin and Jon Mortisugu, two cult figures from San Francisco whose work will be playing this week at Anthology Film Archives, suggest a third definition: filmmakers whose work is so unclassifiable, uncompromising and flat-out weird that it's hard to imagine them fitting into any niche.

Baldwin is probably the better known of the two, but in this world such labels are relative and probably useless to the filmmakers. He makes free-associative shorts and features that interweave stock footage from a dazzling array of sources?industrial films, corporate training videos, tv commercials, old movies, anything. They might be pretentious or insufferable were it not for two factors: Baldwin's George Carlin-ish sense of the absurd and his supple cutting, which marks him as one of the most skilled and surprising editors in American cinema. Many of his movies have no actors, no sets and no "plot points," and much of the material seems to have been borrowed from any source that struck Baldwin's fancy, lawsuits be damned. They're slipstreams of pure sound and image?clever, funny, worst-case-scenario ravings which, like parts of Oliver Stone's JFK and Nixon, suggest that the political and economic reality of modern American life is so creepy, destructive and unknowable that a crazy man's darkest imaginings could scarcely be worse.

The quintessential Baldwin movie is the 1991 featurette Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, a 48-minute burst of insanity that sets 99 compact verbal rants (on everything from Fidel Castro and UFOs to the CIA and nuclear testing) to pictures that confirm, enlarge, critique or mock the rants. Different but equally curious is ¡O No Coronado!, which retells the story of the European conquest of the Americans with stock footage from silent westerns, swashbucklers, educational films and images from paintings and engravings. The title character?a compacted, cartoon version of the Spanish explorer?is comically linked with different literary figures and pop icons, including the Lone Ranger and Gulliver, and depicted, in ironically heroic terms, as the original master of genocide and despoiler of the environment. (Baldwin's politically charged imagery is so exaggerated, that it almost seems like a right-wing satire of left-wing cliches. But that's one of the hallmarks of really memorable pop art: You can never be entirely sure if the artist is kidding.) The movie pokes fun at both imperialism and the traditions of middlebrow historical documentaries; the wholly absurd "narrative" is illustrated with clunky dramatizations and interviews with average people rather than historians.

Baldwin's 2000 opus Spectres of the Spectrum injects imperialism and conspiracy theory with a dose of big media panic. It depicts an alternate universe disquietingly similar to this one, in which a single megacorporation controls all communication on Earth and is eroding the ionosphere with electronic and ideological poisons. Only the revolutionary army known as Kamikaze Counterforce?a band of rebels who communicate via pirate frequencies?can stop them. A nutty movie with a serious agenda, Spectres points out that each time a new, potentially liberating form of communication was invented, it was quickly absorbed by the Powers That Be, who used it to reproduce messages that kept average folks in a state of mental slavery. The film's tagline is both ridiculous and chilling: "Nothing in this film is fiction."

Spectres is a fitting, if unofficial, companion piece to 1995's Sonic Outlaws, Baldwin's most straightforwardly political (and self-interested) film. It's built around an incident from the early 1990s when the Bay Area band Negativland put out a prankish single that used snippets of a profane Casey Kasem outtake and samples from U2 music. Despite mounting a plausible First Amendment defense of their borrowings, the band was forced to withdraw the record and then legally harassed into poverty by U2's record label. Baldwin interweaves Negative land's struggle with accounts of other practioners of sampling, appropriation and culture jamming, from the early 20th-century pioneers of the Dada movement up through The Tape Beatles and John Oswald.

In retrospect, it seems amazing that this documentary would have been released almost 10 years ago?before the internet had become as familiar a thoroughfare as the interstate, before downloading, hacking and open-source programming had made their way from college dorms to cable talk shows. Baldwin insists that copyright law has become so restrictive that it amounts to a form of thought control. This argument once seemed like tilting at windmills, but as the media has grown more concentrated, it now sounds like a prophecy of the next great cultural battle.

If Baldwin is the Don Quixote of American independent film, Jon Mortisugu is Sancho Panza?a droll clown whose unaffected goofiness marks him as an unlikely voice of reason. Like Baldwin, he finds life in the modern media age absurd and revolting, but unlike Baldwin, he's more amused than alarmed. His microbudget, low-tech comedies are artfully artless?like Andy Warhol's Factory efforts, they have more in common with home movies than Hollywood product.

Their deliberately unpretty, even amateurish style?interrogation-room lighting, fuzzy sound, obvious dubbing?is a rebuke to mainstream entertainment. But their humor is sophisticated and mocking?a sendup of urban, college-educated bohos and artist-wannabes who can't decide whether to rebel against the corruption and dishonesty of modern American life or just smoke a bowl and watch tv. The very structure of Mortisugu's movies is stoner-funny. There's rarely any real narrative, just an assortment of disconnected episodes in which endearingly clueless people sit around doing nothing. Yet the episodes are sometimes marked up with super-specific time stamps ("1:13 p.m") better suited to a suspense picture built around the detonation of a nuclear bomb.

Mortisugu's newest feature, Scumrock follows giant-afro'd art filmmaker Miles Morgan as he tries to fund and produce his dream feature, Death. He doesn't get very far because he has no money, no ambition, no ideas and no sense. "Nietzsche said in life there is death, just as in death there is life," Miles tells a friend, adding, "He really hit the nail on the head with that one." Miles seems less excited by his art than by his collection of obscure seven-inch vinyl records. "If you see a record and on the jacket it's got a red dot right here," he explains to his drug-addled friend, "that translates as, 'Don't play me, I'm too rare.'"

Like Warhol, Mortisugu's favorite subject is fame?and the damaged mentality of people who crave it. His point of view is summarized in 1997's Fame Whore. "I ain't got money and I ain't got style!" screeches the title track, "But if there's a camera around, then I got the smile!" Antihero Jody George, a rich, bullying, number-one-ranked tennis pro, epitomizes Mortisugu's understanding that fame doesn't change a person's character; if anything, it magnifies their flaws. "What do you have to say to your fans?" a reporter asks Jody. "Where the fuck were you when I was number one?" Jody bellows, then corrects himself. "I mean, I'm number one now? Where the fuck were you before that?"

Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave. (2nd St.), 212-505-5181, call for times & dates, $8.