THE SAVAGE EYE a film by BEN MADDOW, SIDNEY MEYERS & JOSEPH STRICK. 1959. USA. 68 min. A recent divorcée wanders around LA in this lesser-known and biting modernist marvel.

In 1959, after filming over weekends for four years, filmmakers Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick completed The Savage Eye. Part vérité portrait of Los Angeles, part modernist delirium, their film represented a genuinely new (and still inimitable) kind of film for the United States. Its detached ethnographic gaze spooked Jonas Mekas, who claimed its cynicism could only be explained by “the fact that it was shot in California,” and its puzzle-like narrative agreed with European audiences, who applauded its verve and received it as a welcome example of the fact that similar experiments to those of the Nouvelle Vague in France and Free Cinema in the United Kingdom were taking place at the doorsteps of Hollywood.