[FREE RADICALS: A HISTORY OF
EXPERIMENTAL FILM screens
Wednesday January 9th at 7:00 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.]
Review
by Bob Ignizio
As with any art form, there is a
continuum of accessibility with film. Whether we like the movies or
not, just about all of us “get” STAR WARS
or THE GODFATHER. If
we start heading into Coen Brothers territory, though, we're going to
start losing a few people. Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, even more. By
the time we get to full-on “art” filmmakers like Guy Maddin or
Peter Greenaway, the audience is quite small indeed, and frankly it's
a wonder that such directors are able to get the money needed to
produce their features, let alone get them into a few actual movie
theaters. And yet compared to experimental filmmakers like Stan
Brakhage and Hans Richter, these guys are practically the mainstream.
FREE RADICALS: A HISTORY OF
EXPERIMENTAL FILM is an attempt
to offer an entry level look at these avant garde movie makers, and
to explain to the average person why their admittedly difficult works
are of merit. I remember reading an interview with a comic book
artist, Neal Adams, I believe, who said something to the effect that
the avant garde innovates, and commercial artists like himself then
take those innovations and adapt them for the mainstream. Certainly
when one is watching the examples of experimental film shown in FREE
RADICALS, it's not hard to see
how these once edgy and groundbreaking film techniques have been
co-opted by modern mainstream films and advertising, and of course
music videos.
Director
Pip Chodorov, an experimental filmmaker himself, utilizes the
connections he made from that world to secure interviews with many of
the important figures in the experimental film movement. Some of
these interviews, such as those with Brakhage, were captured just in
the nick of time before the subjects passed away, making this an
important time capsule.
For
those already steeped in an appreciation for this kind of film, FREE
RADICALS may be a bit too
lightweight. That's fine, they aren't the intended audience, anyway.
This is more for the average film fan who has a degree of curiosity
about the potential movies have beyond what comes out of Hollywood.
For some, this primer will likely be all they need to hear on the
subject. For those few others, however, it may well offer a path to
further discovery. 3 out of 4 stars.
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