Cameraless Film

Moritz, William

Len Lye, deeply impressed by the aboriginal ceremonial art of Australia and his native New Zealand, regarded moving images and sound as his art form, which sometimes meant kinetic sculpture and sometimes meant animated films.

He experimented with painting directly on film in 1921 in Australia, but found the (silent) results quite unsatisfactory. In London, where he had joined up with Surrealists, he made an impressive ten-minute film based on a dream he had of aboriginal symbols, recreating the imagery with drawings and cut-outs. TUSALAVA was funded by the London Film Society, which claimed to own the film, so Lye was never able to show it after 1929.

Lye went to work for the government film office in London, making advertising films for the Post Office and other public services. Since they gave him a free hand artistically, he was able to paint directly on film in the 1936 COLOUR BOX with brilliant results. Some images were “batiked” so that one shape was taped off and others were painted around it, while other images were “doodled,” drawn spontaneously with no pre-planning so that the subconscious (or Old Brain, as Lye called it) could speak directly.

In RAINBOW DANCE and TRADE TATTOO Lye also exploited the possibilities of color printing, using the three-color-separations of Gasparcolor and Technicolor to assign separate images to each color, thus making complex layered images in which live-action figures could move through painted backgrounds or fields of drawn-on-film abstractions, prefiguring the complex optical printing of Hy Hirsh and Pat O’Neill.

When Lye moved to America in 1944, he had much less opportunity to make films because they were expensive, even those made without a camera by painting directly on the film. He concentrated increasingly on making kinetic sculpture, in which mechanized metal parts twisted, flipped and vibrated to produce a refined musical voice simultaneously with a supple visual choreography.

In 1957 he created an exquisite film, FREE RADICALS, by scratching images on black film with a variety of tools, including a saw blade, to make parallel lines. The rough white lines dance in synchronization with ceremonial music of the African Bagirmi people, often in an uncanny visual approximation of bodily movements or tribal decorative designs, especially in the closing moments when broader scratches seem like swirled fly-whisks or head-dresses.

FREE RADICALS won a major prize at the Brussels Festival in 1958. Lye’s last two films, PARTICLES IN SPACE and TAL FARLOW are also scratched directly on black film.