Free Radicals

“Lye stated that he approached every film project trying to do ‘something not previously done in film technique'; with a focus on physical sensation and non-rational experience he strove to create a new language of the medium. His sense of movement was always kinaesthetic and physical. He was not interested in moving objects or in visual patterns, but in what he called ‘pure figures of motion’.

Free Radicals (1958) and Particles in Space (1966) are maybe the films in which he comes closest to this idea. In making them Lye reduced the medium to its most basic elements, scratching marks onto the black film using a variety of scribers ranging from dental tools to an ancient Native American arrowhead. In Free Radicals the result is a dancing pattern of flashing lines and zigzags, creating equal associations to microscopic movements and gigantic lightning bolts in the night sky. Synchronised with the sounds of rhythmic drumming and singing by the African Bagirmi tribe, these pure figures of motion become hypnotic.”

http://www.betweenbridges.net/lenlye.html