In 1938, Time magazine proclaimed filmmaker, sculptor and writer Len Lye to be the English Walt Disney. History had other plans - despite being a huge influence on the animators of Fantasia (1940), Len never became a Walt. Although acknowledged as a seminal filmmaker, his work has largely been relegated to the footnotes of film history. With only a handful of exhibitions and a next to no bibliography to his name, 20 years after his death his work is often mistaken for that of his friend Norman McClaren and his pioneering techniques mis-credited to later filmmakers such as Harry Smith and Stan Brakhage. This screening of seven of Lye's films came as a welcome reappraisal.
Born in New Zealand in 1901, Lye lived in Australia and a remote Samoan island before stowing away on a ship to England. In London he became friends with Ben Nicholson and the Seven and Five Society, but finally settled in New York. Fascinated by movement and kinetics, a near Damascan revelation one morning set Lye on his lifelong project to try and create a language by which he could 'compose motion'. Influenced by Polynesian art and dance, and the anthropological films of Frank Hurley, he developed a complex and often oblique iconography in order to express his holistic vision of a timeless organic life - 'old brain' art, as he called it.
Tusalava, made in black and white in 1929, was to be the last conventional cell animation Lye produced. Graphically flat, it unfolds according to Lye's own discrete narrative system, juddering and wobbling like early Felix The Cat films - as if the screen were about to hatch.
With A Colour Box (1935), Lye seemed to have found his voice. Born out of financial difficulties, yet distributed as an advertisement under the auspices of John Grierson's General Post Office Film Unit, it is the first example of Lye's technique of 'direct filmmaking' - side-stepping the photographic process by etching and painting directly onto the celluloid. Archetypal tribal forms are gone, replaced by a Formalist Modernist aesthetic - more Maholy-Nagy than Maori. Geometric grids and squares in luminous, saturated reds and blues shimmy to and fro to the accompaniment of 'beguine' dance music performed by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra. Towards the end, the only advertising reference in the film flies across the screen: the slogan 'Cheaper Parcel Post'.
Baretto's soundtracks to A Colour Box, Kaleidoscope (1935) and Colour Flight (1938) keep the tone light and humorous - hardly the cinematic scream Lye was aiming for. His films possess a precision and lightness of touch that at times undermines his claims to have discovered an ancient, primal mode of expression - yet the same elegance also makes the kinetic, Expressionist, action painting films of, say, Brakhage seem over-
wrought and heavy-handed. In Colour Cry (1952), however, Sonny Terry's pained cries and haunting, locomotive harmonica riff lends the film an aural punch missing from earlier works. Sumptuously coloured grids move in and out of registration, whilst vertical and horizontal lines, edited with astonishing rhythmic precision, perform a bizarre reciprocal square dance. It's like watching Barnett Newman wired up to the National Grid.
Lye saw his work as a kind of extended 'doodle', accessing the unconscious banks of knowledge held in the 'old brain'. Free Radicals (1958 reworked 1979) and Particles In Space (1957 reworked 1979) are stark successes, films that look as though they're still towelling off the primordial soup. Edited to a roaring soundtrack of distorted tribal drums, blank, white, vertical lines are cut through by violent, angular scratches and dots that dance across the screen with scatological ferocity. The quality of the lines is rough - they were made with hat-pins, needles, thumbtacks, burins and saw blades. You can see where the emulsion hasn't quite flaked off and where Lye has occasionally ripped through the filmstrips in order to bring a line crashing across the plane of the screen. Myth has it that they were made when Lye was on his deathbed (like Proust), as Brakhage points out in the accompanying documentary, 'carving his own death testament'. You can imagine him, body hunched and tensed, dredging up the last reserves of his 'old brain' wellspring, before savaging the celluloid. The screening conditions at Camden (soft volume, ordered rows of neat foldaway chairs) seemed almost too polite: the films almost demanded that the volume be cranked up and the chairs chucked out.
