Len Lye Movies

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

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...

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

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

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 experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many...

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked...

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...

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

This riot of color was a showcase for Lye’s hand-painted and stenciled imagery. Sponsored by Imperial Airways, it incorporates the...

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

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.

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

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

Documentary about the Kiwi artist Len Lye and his legacy.

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

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

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...

Lye created a series of scratched images in the 1950s – more regular or geometric than his usual style – to accompany Rock...

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.