Len Lye Movies

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.

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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...

Documentary about the Kiwi artist Len Lye and his legacy.

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

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.

Lye edited together “swing” versions of the popular Lambeth Walk (including Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stephane Grapelli on violin),...

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

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...

Short comedic documentary about crops.

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

A British WWII propaganda short warning citizens that Nazi sympathizers could be listening to their everyday conversations to discover important...

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into...

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