Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film

These were our home movies.

Until one day, my dog peed on them.

I thought it looked cool!

It was the 60s:

peace, love, rock

'n' roll, hippies,

and experimental home movies.

I grew up watching films,

showing films, making films!

My dad worked for television,

his dad worked for Hollywood,

my mom painted every day...

My parents screened films

at home for their friends.

I saw all sorts of films.

My dad invited experimental

filmmakers onto his television show,

and he invited them and

their films into our home.

These days, most of my friends

and colleagues are filmmakers.

I wanted to shoot in the streets,

and I wanted a camera

that could take a knock.

You can do all kinds of

things with the Bolex,

but the Bell & Howell,

let's just push film through it.

Art has only one function

as far as the artist

himself is concerned:

that is to follow his visions.

I'm trying to paint the images

that flash through my mind,

that spark in my

hypnogogic vision...

Art can be anything,

and that's what produced

the "avant-garde".

I never made compromises and

really already a long time ago,

I didn't care anymore if

anyone likes it or not.

We did not think about history,

we were in the present, and we

were doing what we wanted to do.

We were friends, and we

were all crazy about cinema.

I filmed every day. I filmed

with friends, in school.

There were no rules.

We were totally free.

Images were everywhere.

Images were my life.

Images are still my life. And

my life is images, images...

Nobody's going to close

us, because we're crazy!

Arguably the greatest

city in the world...

Whether it's the greatest city

for experimental filmmakers

remains to be seen.

There were much better experiments being

done in Prague, in Paris, in Berlin,

long before there were

great filmmakers here.

But a half century ago, just

about a half century ago,

I started working in New

York for an arts series

where we did everything

we wanted to, every week.

We were in pre-production, production

and post-production every day.

It was difficult to put

experimental artists on television,

because television doesn't

like experimental film.

It's unpredictable;

sometimes it's a little edgy;

sometimes the filmmaker

obviously has something in mind

that the studio executives would rather

not be shown to an all-family public.

We were always told:

children are watching!

Be careful of what you

do! Children are watching!

He was right, I was watching!

This one fascinated me.

The screen was no longer a window

into a world but a flat surface,

and yet the squares seemed to

recede into a third dimension.

This is one of the first abstract

films ever made by Hans Richter in 1921.

I used to have pieces of

film of different formats,

just as a kind of a souvenir from

different film shoots that we did,

and I would bring them home and

you saw what film was all about.

It was like pieces of paper.

You had to work on it. I remember

you used to draw on film leader,

and scratch on film,

and paint on film.

A lot of other filmmakers have done this,

but you didn't know that at the time.

I was eight years old

when I met Hans Richter.

He lived not far from our house.

He was a painter but he

also played with film.

He was 85 when we

filmed him in 1973,

and I had the distinct feeling that he

was preparing himself for a summing up.

I just improvised, as I do in...

I give chance a chance, as I

do in painting, as I do in film.

That was the main credo of Dada:

the discovery of chance as

a possibility of expression.

I didn't know anything

about filmmaking,

I had just a table,

on both sides light,

on top the camera which

couldn't move up and down,

so I cut cardboard,

small very thin cardboard,

squares and rectangles,

I think 40 or 50,

from very small to big, and

white, light grey and dark grey.

And later on when I needed

black I just used the negative.

Richter wanted to

go beyond the frame,

so he started painting

variations of forms on scrolls.

The filmstrip was also a scroll,

and allowed him to paint in time.

Time was becoming a new

dimension for the artist.

Rhythm in my opinion is

the essence of filmmaking,

because it's the conscious

articulation of time.

And if anything is at

the bottom of filmmaking

it is the articulation

of time, of movement.

You had never seen an abstract

film before making Rhythmus 21.

There wasn't any.

So there was no example

I could relate to.

This was so as if you

stepped into an empty room

where there is no space.

It was really an eerie

experience which I loved.

I must have been

influenced by Richter,

because years later I also made

a film with receding rectangles.

And this film got me into

a filmmakers' cooperative

and there I met many more filmmakers,

some of whom also became friends.

Then I realized I had become

an experimental filmmaker.

I didn't even know what that meant!

But there I found myself on

the wrong side of the tracks

with dozens of other poet

filmmakers, free radicals.

They were totally free,

and they pushed film into

radical new directions.

I grew up making films

and I'm still making films.

In this film I'd like you to meet

my friends and see their films.

Let's watch one, a four-minute film

from 1958 made without a camera,

what we call "direct animation"

just by scratching with a

needle onto black film stock.

It's not as easy as it looks.

Len Lye scratched for weeks,

an hour of film stock, just

to get four good minutes.

You know that film, Free Radicals,

well it was made 15 years ago.

And when I see it now, I

think it still holds up.

But I'm into a different

type of kinetic art.

I'm composing figures of motion.

This I'm showing to represent

a person, that's the scale.

He is six foot high,

and they go through this arrangement

here which I call the Universe.

And sixty foot above

them then is the Universe,

and in they go to see a most

amazing kind of grouping,

a grouping which

symbolizes nature, energy...

Lye experimented in sculpture too.

Now you wouldn't call a painter

or a sculptor experimental,

but that's the word that

stuck for film artists.

I understood the promise and I

got fascinated by film itself,

and I made quite a number

of experimental films,

but only experimental films in

the proper sense of the word.

I got into making abstract films from

Hans Richter and seeing his things,

Leger for instance, you

know, where he plays...

but none of them did

this kind of thing.

But the idea of experimental

film turned me on certainly.

I suddenly found that

everything was permitted.

You could go anywhere

with any material.

You should not hold back.

Your whole unconscious, your whole belief

should sputter out, should come out.

It was really trying to find

a new form of expression.

Experimental film has been around

as long as film has been around.

But all the early

works are now lost.

The earliest experimental

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