Directing

Len Lye

Born July 5, 1901 · Christchurch, New Zealand

Died May 15, 1980 · aged 78

Leonard Charles Huia "Len" Lye (5 July 1901 – 15 May 1980), was a Christchurch, New Zealand-born artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley.

Known For

Newspaper Train

Newspaper Train · 1942

Newspaper Train

MovieDocumentaryWar

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

Peanuts

Peanuts · 2023

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

Hoch der Lambeth Valk

Hoch der Lambeth Valk · 1941

Hoch der Lambeth Valk

MovieMusicComedy

A 1941 Ministry of Information propaganda film set to the tune of The Lambeth Walk, a popular song from the musical Me and My Girl.

Rainbow Dance

Rainbow Dance · 1936

MovieMusicAnimation

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.

Bells of Atlantis

Bells of Atlantis · 1952

Bells of Atlantis

A perfect fusion of poetry and film, with dense layered imagery and music from electro pioneers Louise and Bebe Barron. The writer Anaïs Nin provides dialogue from her novella “House of Incest” and appears adrift in the undersea realm of Atlantis before ascending to dry land.

N or NW

N or NW · 1938

MovieComedyRomance

Correspondence between young lovers nearly ends in disaster through a mistake in postal district. Fortunately the GPO spots the error and all ends well, but with the moral that correspondents should get the address right.

A Colour Box

A Colour Box · 1935

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

Trade Tattoo

Trade Tattoo · 1937

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 been described as the most intricate job of film printing and color grading ever attempted. Animated words and patterns combine with the live-action footage to create images as complex and multi-layered as a Cubist painting. Music was provided by the Cuban Lecuona Band. With its dynamic rhythms, the film seeks (in Lye’s words) to convey “a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life."

Filmography

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Newspaper Train

Newspaper Train · 1942

Newspaper Train

MovieDocumentaryWar

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

Director

Peanuts

Peanuts · 2023

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

Animation

Hoch der Lambeth Valk

Hoch der Lambeth Valk · 1941

Hoch der Lambeth Valk

MovieMusicComedy

A 1941 Ministry of Information propaganda film set to the tune of The Lambeth Walk, a popular song from the musical Me and My Girl.

Animation

Rainbow Dance

Rainbow Dance · 1936

MovieMusicAnimation

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.

Director

Bells of Atlantis

Bells of Atlantis · 1952

Bells of Atlantis

A perfect fusion of poetry and film, with dense layered imagery and music from electro pioneers Louise and Bebe Barron. The writer Anaïs Nin provides dialogue from her novella “House of Incest” and appears adrift in the undersea realm of Atlantis before ascending to dry land.

Assistant Director

N or NW

N or NW · 1938

MovieComedyRomance

Correspondence between young lovers nearly ends in disaster through a mistake in postal district. Fortunately the GPO spots the error and all ends well, but with the moral that correspondents should get the address right.

Director

A Colour Box

A Colour Box · 1935

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

Director

Trade Tattoo

Trade Tattoo · 1937

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 been described as the most intricate job of film printing and color grading ever attempted. Animated words and patterns combine with the live-action footage to create images as complex and multi-layered as a Cubist painting. Music was provided by the Cuban Lecuona Band. With its dynamic rhythms, the film seeks (in Lye’s words) to convey “a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life."

Director

Fountain of Hope/Peace

Fountain of Hope/Peace · 1959

Fountain of Hope/Peace

In 1959 the United Nations commissioned Lye to make this one-minute film, “Fountain of Hope,” to publicize United Nations Day (24th October). The film was screened worldwide in cinemas and on television. Lye superimposed the word for “peace” in many different languages over some of his kinetic sculptures, while a United Nations choir sang related music by Henry Brant that combined many national styles. Lye’s work was selected because the United Nations wanted to overcome language barriers, using visual images with a strong emotional impact and “universal appeal”. Lye was delighted to be associated with a message of world peace.

Director

When the Pie Was Opened

When the Pie Was Opened · 1941

When the Pie Was Opened

MovieDocumentaryWar

Surrealism, avant-garde sound montage, and irreverent wit might be the last thing you'd expect from a government-sponsored film about wartime cookery. But director, artist, animator and all-round firework of a man Len Lye specialised in the unexpected. A simple tale of a mother cheering up her daughter with a pie from her rationing-stricken pantry (interestingly the war is never directly referred to) is skilfully crafted into a work of real artistic depth, while retaining an unpretentious charm.

Director

Kill or Be Killed

Kill or Be Killed · 1942

Kill or Be Killed

MovieDocumentaryWar

A fictional enactment of the deadly contest between a British soldier and a German sniper hiding in a tree. Kill or Be Killed differs from most army instructional films because of its powerful dramatization.

Director

Experimental Animation

Experimental Animation · 1933

Experimental Animation

MovieMusicAnimation

Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to 'Peanut Vendor', a 1931 jazz hit for Red Nichols. The two foot high monkey had bolted, moveable joints and some 50 interchangeable mouths to convey the singing. To get the movements right, Lye filmed his new wife, Jane, a prize-winning rumba dancer.

Director

Cameramen at War

Cameramen at War · 1943

Cameramen at War

MovieDocumentaryWar

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.

Director

The Birth of the Robot

The Birth of the Robot · 1936

The Birth of the Robot

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 Humphrey Jennings and John Banting to make the amusing puppets. Exploring the still-complex color process, which involved the combination of three separate images, Lye creates such a vivid storm scene that reviewers hailed it as “proof that the color film has entered a new stage.” The music is Holst’s The Planets. - Harvard Film Archive

Director

Tal Farlow

Tal Farlow · 1981

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 died before it was completed. His assistant Steven Jones finished the film under the supervision of Lye’s widow Ann, who had been closely involved with all of Lye’s American films. - Harvard Film Archive

Director

Free Radicals

Free Radicals · 1958

MovieAnimationMusic

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leather, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at the International Experimental Film Festival Held in Brussels in 1958 in association with the World's Fair. Stan Brakhage described the film as "an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece".

Director

Tusalava

Tusalava · 1929

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. The images react, interpenetrate, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis (or redemption?) is achieved.

Director

Pictures for Percussion

Pictures for Percussion · 1958

Pictures for Percussion

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

Director

All Souls Carnival

All Souls Carnival · 1957

All Souls Carnival

MovieMusicAnimation

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented with a new Direct Film technique, drenching the filmstrip in colourful paint and marker pen.

Director

Ariel’s Song / Full Fathom Five

Ariel’s Song / Full Fathom Five · 1953

Ariel’s Song / Full Fathom Five

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

Director

Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope · 1935

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 uses music by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra. - Harvard Film Archive

Director

Work Party

Work Party · 1942

MovieDocumentary

Documentary about women factory workers.

Director

Art of the Sixties

Art of the Sixties · 1967

Art of the Sixties

MovieDocumentary

This film documents the major directions in modern American art during the first seven years of the 1960s. The keynote is that the artist has expanded his realm from the two-dimentional picture frame, climaxed by the artists of the 40s and early 50s, merged color with sculpture, and sought out modern media to express himself. This has produced the characteristic wide spectrum of interest, ideas, and products in contemporary art.

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh · 1959

MovieDocumentaryAnimation

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 Vanderbeek, and photographers W. Eugene Smith and Willard Van Dyke. Brakhage called it “weirdly interesting, but a monstrosity.”

Cinematography

Crusade in Europe

Crusade in Europe · 1949

Crusade in Europe

SeriesDocumentaryWar & Politics

Director