Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film Page #2

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

films that still exist

were all made at the close of World

War I in 1919 and the early 20s.

Those artists,

frustrated by the war,

wanted the post-war world to be radically

different from the world before the war.

So they experimented in all forms:

cubism, Dadaism, surrealism.

This film was made

by Viking Eggeling,

also a Dadaist and close

colleague of Hans Richter.

He died one year after

this film was released.

The whole tradition of

avant-gardism of course

came out of rebellion against

the society, completely.

In 1914 the World War

I was such a drastic

disaster compared to previous wars,

which were jockeying of potentates,

but World War I was so destructive.

The little society of artists

were disgusted to such an extent

that they threw out art also.

Although the filmmakers were expressing

complete freedom and playfulness,

this was sometimes

misinterpreted as rebelliousness.

Between the two wars, some German

filmmakers got into trouble.

The Nazis banned this film

made by Hans Richter in 1927,

Ghosts Before Breakfast.

A friend of mine had suggested to make

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