Len Lye Movies

BBC Four’s new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness...

Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of...

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.

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

Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of...

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...

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using...

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

Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to...

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...

This was another sample promotional film, which Lye offered to television stations. He scratched some dramatic black-and-white abstract images,...

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...

Correspondence between young lovers nearly ends in disaster through a mistake in postal district. Fortunately the GPO spots the error and all ends...

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

A perfect fusion of poetry and film, with dense layered imagery and music from electro pioneers Louise and Bebe Barron. The writer Anaïs Nin...

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.

Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their...

Surrealism, avant-garde sound montage, and irreverent wit might be the last thing you'd expect from a government-sponsored film about wartime...

In 1944 Lye moved to New York City, initially to direct for the documentary newsreel The March of Time. He settled in the West Village, where he...

For Kaleidoscope, which was sponsored by Churchman Cigarettes, Lye animated stenciled cigarette shapes and is said to have experimented by cutting...