Once upon a time independent filmmakers tried be subversive. Nowadays, most just want to have their films screen at Sundance and get a contract with Miramax. San Francisco avant-gardist Craig Baldwin still believes that movies can undermine the powers that be. Sly and anarchic, composed of archival and found footage cut together with frenetic wit and a sardonic soundtrack, the two films he will be presenting this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts are a brash reminder of the medium’s revolutionary potential.

Napster aficionados might be intrigued by his Sonic Outlaws (1995), a jagged, jazzed-up documentary about Negativland, a guerrilla collage band sued by Island Records for violation of copyright. Their crime: releasing a single called " U2 " that borrowed a little too earnestly from the original. As the Negativland band members point out and Baldwin illustrates with his kaleidoscopically edited montages, such parodies are one way of resisting the media onslaught and reclaiming popular culture.

The more narratively inclined Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) is an alternative history of the near future. The year is 2007 and the world has been laid waste, spiritually and physically, by corporate greed. The soulless moguls are about to deliver the coup de grâce with an ionosphere-busting electromagnetic pulse that will homogenize everyone’s imagination. Countering them are the father-and-daughter team of Yogi and Booboo, psychic geniuses who plot to go back in time through " the graveyard of dead media " to recover a message encrypted in a ’50s science TV show and save the world. Along the way Baldwin indulges in endless conspiracy theories involving Wilhelm Reich, Benjamin Franklin, David Sarnoff, and Bill Gates that are depicted by a quaint and jarring array of old footage. Dense if a little heavy on the voiceover explication, Spectres is grim, seditious fun. At the Museum of Fine Arts.