Spectres of the Spectrum (2000)

The greatest movie ever made..!

One of my all time favorites.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

it is perhaps ironic that i found this film on VHS, in a pile of forgotten movies being sold off to make room for an influx of DVDs at my favorite video store. it is a credit to the store that they stocked this film at all, and while i was sad to see many such films go the way of extra copies of Kangaroo Jack i was happy to snap it up for a measly fiver.Spectres of the Spectrum is a masterwork of what the Subgenii call "bulldada," mixing conspiracy theories, lost history, and fiction to create a story that works without an excess of linear events or character development. if you're a fan of cut-up, collage, and creative copyright infringement, this is up your alley. and since it's on DVD now, it should be easier to find.the source material draws largely from kine-scopes, video records of live television. Baldwin thus uses snippets of the peek into the Cold War mindset of the 50s to create a backdrop for a Brain War set in 2007. the use of obsolete technology by the resistance forces in the film mirrors the use of garbage footage by the filmmaker to create his work. in between the lines are bits of real history, and the entire thing is woven in such a way as to make one actually think while watching a film. outlaw stuff, these days.i can see how someone more accustomed to traditional films would complain a little about the cheese factor of the story, but in the context of this film it fits well and keeps you from taking it too seriously.see it, think about it, and see it again. it opens up a world of fascinating topics to explore.

Initially, this film is very hard to take seriously, both for its relatively heavy use of noise-imagery and static which remind me strongly of experimental films (some of which I've made), and secondly because of an odd voice-over claiming doom and gloom in a way that calls back images of terrible sci-fi shows from the fifties and sixties with people running around in plastic suits.Very soon afterwards, the film takes a turn for the serious, but still holds on to both the headache-causing flashings of distorted images with a couple of characters (ironically, both are epileptic) who often quote those same bad sci-fi features.However, in order to add a certain element of the profound, the film takes images from our entire history of filmed and televised images and combines them together into a story of the world's slow suffering from the over-abuse of wavelengths by humanity. This abuse is reflected in everything imaginable, from religious ideologies of tapping into the meaning of the Universe, to scientific endeavors to gain free energy from all the Earth, to economic globalization and multimedia conglomeration. All sent with various examples and historical contexts to remind me of the advice, "If you're going to lie, provide as much truth as you can in the midst." Moments in the movie occur that, almost, touch upon a documentary-like air that makes the entire movie very foreboding......and yet then the characters come in and construct cheesy time-travel devices and run around the Universe yelling and being annoying and talking about "hidden messages" and "saving the spectrum" and it all kind of falls apart.All in all, because I'm very interested in avant-garde styles of cinema, it's not a bad try. It's just that it is very overstimulating (I wouldn't be surprised if everyone else in the audience got the same headache I received from it, and it's ironic that there's no way an epileptic could watch this) and eventually disappointing. A good start, but could have used a bit of rewriting to give it a much more serious tone.--PolarisDiB

That's how I was when I walked (staggered) out of this "film". I couldn't leave, because it was at a film festival and the cinema was full of people. I was stuck in the middle. Trapped.The tiny fragment of original footage which attempted to bind this film together features some of the worst acting ever to grace the big screen. The daughter was a stand out performance - stand out in the bad sense.Thge cinematography was hideous, consisting of disjointed framing and some of the oddest lighting I've witnessed.As for the stock footage... well at first one...Wait.Why am I reviewing this film? Why do I acknowledge its existence? Please, don't watch it. Do something useful with two hours of your life and go watch some paint dry.

Spectres of the Spectrum can't be described in words, it has to be seen on the screen. This film is comprised of original material, stock footage and public domain film clips to give the history of electric media and how it will change the future of life on Earth forever. It is a non-stop barrage of sights and sounds that will leave the audience gasping for breath in the end. Make sure not to miss this film, it will change the way you look at the way we communicate and who does the talking for us.