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Cameraless Films
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.
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