Len Lye is a Nice Guy (OUAN405)

I have developed some recent enthusiasm for Len Lye's films. He was a New Zealand animator who lived from 1901 to 1980 and looked to make art a full body experience that tingles and stimulates the senses with oscillating shapes and bright flashing lights and stuff like that.

His style was modernism, and I find it really transfixing.

In 1928 he joined the Seven And Five Society, Britain's most prominent group of avant-garde artists including the likes of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and some other people I assume. The society lasted 16 years before being disbanded in 1935, which is a shame because I am something of an avant-garde artist myself and I was interested in joining. I'd love to hang out with the corpse of Henry Moore.

I made this avant-garde sculpture thing

ANYWAY, Len Lye had a really awesome career that took him around the globe. He first came to be sort of successful when his movie "Tusalava" was premiered by the London Film Society in 1929. I say "sort of" successful because while he DID get to be premiered at the London Film Society, many critics of the time were unimpressed because they preferred films with more literal narratives and meanings.

Tusalava (1929)

I think that this film is bloody amazing. It's ten minutes long and uses 4400 individually drawn frames. Cel animation like in Tusalava was a process that Lye wouldn't really go on to use again.

Later on, Len Lye carved out an identity as somebody who drew directly onto the film cels, a technique known as "drawn-on-film animation".  It was a pioneering style that achieved some really cool visual effects.

A Colour Box (1935)

Kaleidoscope (1935)

Drawing on the physical film reel gave Lye's later films less of the thought-out elegance that "Tusalava" has, but the films had a tonne of frenetic, fast paced energy. To return to whatever I was saying at the top of this blog post about whatever it is I'm writing about, Len Lye sought to make art a full body experience, and I admire the way that he carved out such a unique approach to it.

There were artists before and after Lye who drew and applied effects directly onto the film reel, such as the American filmmaker Man Ray, who's movie "Emik Bakia" included sequences where the film reel was exposed to direct light for a certain aesthetic.

Emik Bakia (1925)

Also, there was Stan Brakhage, who's film "Mothlight" involved placing moth wings and bits of leaf onto the cels.

But, considering all the modernist abstract animators of the 20th century, I think it's pretty indisputable that Len Lye definitely was a man who made animated films and that he existed. That I will say for certain.

Mothlight (1963)