Neither/Nor: Other Cinema as an Archives and an Anti-Archives

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema, specifically the 16mm film collection assembled in the basement of San Francisco’s Artists’ Television Access, as both an archives and an anti-archives. How does Baldwin’s interdisciplinary practice, which integrates film collecting, curating, production, and publishing, challenge and expand our understanding of archival activity and consciousness? Examining Baldwin’s accessioning, organizational, and custodial processes and attitudes provides insights into Other Cinema’s dual nature: as a corpus of distinctive postwar documents that evidence histories of political, cultural, social, and scientific endeavor (archives); and a debris bin to be mined for re-workable scraps, forgotten, marginal, or suppressed memories, and unclassifiable anomalies (anti-archives). This opposition is eventually dissolved with the proposition of Other Cinema as a workshop, straddling both functions: conservation through creative destruction.