The cinematic equivalent of John Oswald's plunderphonics which takes as its theme the demented paranoia of Cold-War militarism and fleshes it out with an ultra-critical pastiche of found-footage, comprising SF and black ops imagery amonst other stock sources, to launch a sustained attack on US intervention against the self determination movements of Latin America. Baldwin has called it a "pseudo pseudo documentary," a film that tells the truth about American imperialism and anti-socialist countersubversion through the faux documentary genre. At a formal level, Baldwin's film is an exercise in Brechtian postmodernism in which techniques of defamiliarization, verfremdungseffect, and cognitive shock tactics are exploited to produce a work of political art that is at once incisive and baffling. Ostensibly, the film claims to reveal an ancient conspiracy in which a race of aliens, originating, appropriately, from the planet Quetzalcoatl, have infiltrated South America and are waging a clandestine war with the United States. However, through its formal techniques and diacritical strategies, Tribulation 99 is simultaneously engaged in a damning indictment of the US government's historically tenured policy of political destabilisation throughout the Americas.
