Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2012/Kino Lorber DVD)
Picture: B
Sound: B Extras: D Film: B
It’s an impossible task to tackle the entirety of
experimental film in 82 minutes, the runtime of Pip Chodorov’s documentary Free
Radicals: A History of Experimental Film. Experimental film has so many guises – art
film, avant-garde, the underground, and on and on – and so many personalities –
Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Maya Deren, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and on and
on – that it would require 82 films of 82 minutes a piece to do the subject
anything close to justice.
With that said, it’s important to make clear that
Free Radicals has no aspiration to be a definitive document on a
subsection of film that many mainstream viewers have little to no experience
with. Rather, Chodorov crafts his film
as a sort of guidebook to the major landmarks of the avant-garde film. We spend some time with this filmmaker and
that, ruminating on film while taking no more than a cursory glance at
another. For newcomers to film, this
approach will do fine, but for anyone familiar with the avant-garde, this can
be both exhilarating and maddening.
On the one hand, Chodorov allows his film to be
taken over at points by the films he’s documenting. For example, near the start of Free
Radicals, we’re treated to the original Free Radicals, a four-minute
extraterrestrial animated film set to tribal drumming, directed by Len Lye in
1958. This seminal work, created by
scratching directly onto the emulsion, is something like a big bang in
Chodorov’s film. Other filmmakers had
been tweaking cinema and experimenting with form and function before Free Radicals, but Lye’s willingness to
marry abstract expressionism with cinema through utter minimalism was
revelatory. From it came a new form of
cinematic possibility, seized upon most notably by Brakhage.
Giving up four minutes of an 82-minute runtime to
watching someone else’s film could be interpreted as laziness, even
dishonesty. Not so here. It’s important for us to see this film in
total: It provides a frame of reference for
Chodorov’s excellent biographical sketch of Lye and for other filmmakers’
discussion of Lye’s film’s impact on them, while also allowing the film to work
its magic on us. Lye’s Free Radicals
is readily available on YouTube, but seeing it in the context of Chodorov’s
film, where it feels as immediate and relevant now as it did more than 50 years
ago, is the superior experience.
Chodorov presents a couple other works in this
manner, but most others are given a kind of highlight-reel
treatment. That’s understandable, given
the constraints of his film. What’s more
frustrating, though, is the imbalance in how much time the documentary spends
with one filmmaker versus another.
Chodorov rightly lavishes a great amount of attention on Hans Richter,
perhaps the first experimental filmmaker as we understand the term, as well as
on Mekas, the person most responsible for allowing avant-garde and underground
film to develop in America to the point that it bred what we now term
independent cinema. Yet when we get to
Brakhage, one of the undisputed heavyweights of the experimental film, only
five minutes is dedicated to his life and work (and a little more than a minute
of that is his beautiful film existence is song). Granted, there are plenty of other places to
go for insight into Brakhage (Criterion’s two volumes of his work are
undeniably the place to start). But I
can’t help feel that, in the context of this film, a few more minutes about who
Brakhage was and why he was important would be helpful to viewers –
especially those who have never seen any of Brakhage’s major works (like Dog
Star Man).
Ultimately, it feels like the amount of time
spent on this filmmaker or that came down to what and who was accessible. Chodorov uses a fair amount of archival
footage, which is fantastic when it comes to hearing from Richter or Stan
Vanderbeek. The rest of the film is made
up of contemporary interviews with Mekas, Jacobs, Kubelka, and a few
others. If nothing else, Free
Radicals is an important film because it captures
these artists’ stories and insights while they can still share them. But at times it feels like too much of the
film is crafted around these personalities – the guidebook given over to a few
charismatic tour guides. That’s only
partly a complaint. You could do much,
much worse than having Mekas and Kubelka walking you through the history of
experimental film. Yet it’s hard to
shake the feeling that Chodorov needs to ditch the hero worship and exercise a
bit more editorial control.
All that said, though, the whole is more than its
parts. When Free Radicals ends, you walk away with a solid foundation in experimental
film. It can be a bit of a soft sell on the genre, but Chodorov is deft in
sowing the seeds of curiosity in a vibrant, all-too-often maligned style of
filmmaking. He hits all the important
films and highlights the most important artists to give viewers a functional
understanding of the contours and structure of the avant-garde cinema – and a
hunger to dive deeper into it.
A documentary like Free Radicals isn’t
going to stretch the capabilities of your home theater. In fact, if I were to guess, I’d bet Chodorov
expects this film to be seen on basic home setups, laptops, and classroom
projectors.
With that in mind, the 16 X 9/1.78 X 1 anamorphic
presentation is excellent, jumping between formats (8mm, 16mm, video) and color
and black-and-white without compromising quality. The footage shot by Chodorov,
as you would expect, looks great, but so does the archival footage and short
films that are run in their entirety. Similarly, the sound, while only stereo,
manages the various pieces that comprise the film well. There are very few
instances of clicks and hissing on old footage, but the levels on some of the
archival footage could be higher and there are a few moments in the
contemporary footage where background noise is a little louder than it should
be.
Those are trivial, though, when compared to the
extras on the disc. There are none. If anything, some extra interview footage or
shorts highlighted in the documentary presented as stand-alone films would have
been great. Even some sort of text-based
primer on experimental film would be welcome.
But alas.
- Dante
A. Ciampaglia
