Movies: Len Lye

For Kaleidoscope, which was sponsored by Churchman Cigarettes, Lye animated stenciled cigarette shapes and is said to have experimented by cutting out some of the shapes so that the light of the projector hit the screen directly. As in Colour Box Lye...

BBC Four’s new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness of some of the great animation pioneers who have worked in Britain – trailblazing talents such as Len Lye,...

A tribute to the cameramen of the newsreel companies and the service film units, in the form of a compilation of film of the cameramen themselves, their training and some of their most dramatic film....

Intended as a publicity film for Chrysler, Rhythm uses rapid editing to speed up the assembly of a car, synchronizing it to African drum music. The sponsor was horrified by the music and suspicious of the way a worker was shown winking at the camera;...

Lye completed his last great film a few months before his death at the age of 78. The film returned to the black-and-white techniques of Free Radicals. Lye created what he called “vibrant little images” or “zig-zags” with a sense of “zizz”. The clust...

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at...

While stocking the shelves at work late at night, Mike finds a mysterious tape that calls upon The Peanut Vendor....

This documentary, made seven years after the death of legendary filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye, tells Lye's story: from being a young boy staring at the sun, to travels around the Pacific and life in New York. It includes excerpts from many of ...

Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film....

Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of outtakes from GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Night Mail. Lye transformed this footage in what has...

Lye created a series of scratched images in the 1950s – more regular or geometric than his usual style – to accompany Rock ‘n’ Rye, a track by jazz guitarist Tal Farlow, but he did not get far with the editing. He returned to the material in 1980 but...

The story of how newspapers were distributed during the Blitz, stressing the importance of an accurate and objective press on the home front....

Len Lye made this experiment in animating poetry circa 1953 utilising a clip of Sir John Gielgud reciting a passage from The Tempest....

Rainbow Dance is a 1936 British animated film released by the GPO Film Unit. This is Lye's second film. It uses the Gasparcolor process....

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts. Th...

Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of filmmakers that included Stan Brakhage (working under the pseudonym James Stanley), Weegee, Len Lye, and Stan Vande...

This was another sample promotional film, which Lye offered to television stations. He scratched some dramatic black-and-white abstract images, hand-coloured them, and combined them with African drum music. The film gives us a taste of what Free Rad...

Documentary about women factory workers....

Len Lye made Pictures for Percussion as a sample for television stations while living in the United States....

This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many European filmmakers turned to puppets as an alternative, and Lye enlisted the help of avant-garde friends such as Hum...