Free Radicals (1958) A FILM BY LEN LYE. 5 mins, 16mm B & W, Sound. Music by: The Bagirmi Tribe of Africa

Created in 1958, Free Radicals is arguably one of American avant-garde artist Len Lye’s greatest film works. ‘Every film [I made], I tried to interest myself in it by doing something not previously done in film technique’, said Lye. Working across the mediums of painting, poetry, and film, Lye was a prolific and important kinetic artist. With a maverick character and obsession with movement, Lye pioneered experimental film and animation techniques with his influential invention of direct (camera-less) film-making as early as the 1930s. Though never associated solely with one movement, Lye’s work merged aspects of Surrealism, Futurism, Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism into his own breed of moving art.

Shot in stark black and white, Free Radicals is a free form film, reduced to rhythmic movements of flickering, dancing and gyrating figures, punctuating the beats of traditional African drumming and singing by the The Bagirimi Tribe of Africa. Attacking and scratching the celluloid with scribers such as needles, dental tools and a Native American arrowhead,  Lye described his anarchic mark-making on celluloid as ‘white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches in quite doodling fashion’. The film tributes Lye’s inspiration of Aboriginal indigenous culture, with the organic marks reminiscent of Pacific tapa designs and Aboriginal body paint. Having been expelled by the New Zealand colonial administration for living within an indigenous community, Len Lye spent much of his early years in Australia, and Samoa. From the art of the Māori, the Australian Aboriginals, to the Pacific Island and African cultures, Lye’s integration of indigenous art forms is most celebrated in this film. Visually dramatic and abstract, Free Radicals materialises a unique sensation of vital life energy.

I, myself, eventually came to look at the way things moved mainly to try to feel movement, and only feel it. This is what dancers do; but instead, I wanted to put the feeling of a figure of motion outside of myself to see what I’d got. … I didn’t know the term ‘empathy’ – that is, the psychological trick of unconsciously feeling oneself into the shoes of another person – but I was certainly practising it. I got so that I could feel myself into the shoes of anything that moved, from a grasshopper to a hawk, a fish to a yacht, from a cloud to the shimmering rustle of ivy leaves on a brick wall. Such shoes were around in profusion. …

– Len Lye, in Art that Moves: The World of Len Lye (2009)

Text by Sophie Pinchetti