Rearranged footageA sequence in Craig Baldwin’s
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America(1992)
presents successive images of Mayan carvings [1], Lucha
Libre masked wrestlers [2], natives in ceremonial woven
suits [3], hooded prisoners [4], and nature footage of
snakes [5] to illustrate the narration’s breathless claim that
displaced aliens hiding below the earth’s surface have been
forced to mate with reptiles. The power of editing to create
meaning through juxtaposition allowed Baldwin to mutate
his seemingly random collection of images of wildly disparate
origins into a cohesive, if bizarre, story of the malevolent
aliens emerging from their subterranean lair to attempt
world domination.80 CHAPTER 3TYPES OF MOVIES
1 23 45and it remains the touchstone for those studying
avant-garde movies.
Concerned with the manipulation of space and
time, which, after all, is the essence of filmmaking,
Deren experimented with defying continuity, eras-
ing the line between dream and reality. She used
the cinematic equivalent of stream of conscious-
ness, a literary style that gained prominence in the
1920s in the hands of such writers as Marcel
Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Dorothy