It was really trying to find a new form of expression.
A few weeks back, concurrent with the end of Daylight Savings Time, the TCM Underground lived up to its name by airing the 2012 documentary Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film. Directed by Pip Chodorov, who concedes that he barely scratches the surface (there's a reason why it's subtitled A History, not The History), Free Radicals incorporates archival interviews with such seminal figures as Hans Richter (maker of one of the world's first abstract films), Len Lye (whose titular 1958 short is shown in full), and Andy Warhol (but of course), plus Stan Brakhage (who gave Chodorov his final interview just before his death in 2003), animator Robert Breer, diary filmmaker Ken Jacobs, writer/filmmaker Jonas Mekas, and a few others. The 90-year-old Mekas was an especially important get since his Village Voice column gave some much-needed attention to those working on the margins of the industry, as did the screenings he organized and the distribution system he helped set up, culminating in the formation of Anthology Film Archives, which is home to all alternative forms of cinema. The film world will be much poorer when he leaves it.
Len Lye's four-minute-long Free Radicals aside, we have to make do with clips of the other films that Chodorov highlights, so I chose to pair up the documentary with Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, which was made between 1961 and 1964. Comprised of a 25-minute prelude and four parts ranging from five to 31 minutes, Dog Star Man finds a long-haired, bearded Brakhage tromping around a wintry landscape with naught but a dog and an axe for company, overlaid with abstracted images of birth, sex and (probably) death. It's the kind of film that resists interpretation, easy or otherwise, so I'll leave that to others to attempt. Me, I'm content to simply let Brakhage's imagery wash over me. I suspect that would have met with his approval.