Len Lye: Master of Motion TrailerSecrets of British Animation TrailerFlip & Two Twisters Trailer
Leonard Charles Huia "Len" Lye (5 July 1901 – 15 May 1980), was a Christchurch, New Zealand-born artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley.
Total trailers found: 40
24 June 1993
Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their own experiments in the field of visionary filmmaking.
01 January 1967
This film documents the major directions in modern American art during the first seven years of the 1960s.
01 January 1987
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 staring at the sun, to travels around the Pacific and life in New York.
15 November 1942
The story of how newspapers were distributed during the Blitz, stressing the importance of an accurate and objective press on the home front.
19 November 2018
BBC Four’s new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness of some of the great animation pioneers who have worked in Britain – trailblazing talents such as Len Lye, John Halas and Joy Batchelor, Joanna Quinn, and Bristol’s world-conquering Aardman Animations.
01 October 1936
Rainbow Dance is a 1936 British animated film released by the GPO Film Unit. This is Lye's second film.
01 September 1937
Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of outtakes from GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Night Mail.
03 March 1957
Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance.
01 January 1933
Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to 'Peanut Vendor', a 1931 jazz hit for Red Nichols.
01 January 1935
For Kaleidoscope, which was sponsored by Churchman Cigarettes, Lye animated stenciled cigarette shapes and is said to have experimented by cutting out some of the shapes so that the light of the projector hit the screen directly.
01 June 1995
Documentary about the Kiwi artist Len Lye and his legacy.
01 September 1952
A perfect fusion of poetry and film, with dense layered imagery and music from electro pioneers Louise and Bebe Barron.
01 January 1953
Life’s Musical Minute, recently re-discovered, is a short promotional film of this kind, based on Gene Krupa’s drum solo from “Golden Wedding” by the Woody Herman jazz band.
01 January 1941
Surrealism, avant-garde sound montage, and irreverent wit might be the last thing you'd expect from a government-sponsored film about wartime cookery.
01 January 1981
Lye created a series of scratched images in the 1950s – more regular or geometric than his usual style – to accompany Rock ‘n’ Rye, a track by jazz guitarist Tal Farlow, but he did not get far with the editing.
01 January 1957
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.
01 January 1953
Len Lye made this experiment in animating poetry circa 1953 utilising a clip of Sir John Gielgud reciting a passage from The Tempest.
01 January 1980
Lye completed his last great film a few months before his death at the age of 78. The film returned to the black-and-white techniques of Free Radicals.
25 December 1941
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.
04 April 1959
Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of filmmakers that included Stan Brakhage (working under the pseudonym James Stanley), Weegee, Len Lye, and Stan Vanderbeek, and photographers W.
23 April 1958
In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads.
01 January 1942
A fictional enactment of the deadly contest between a British soldier and a German sniper hiding in a tree.
01 February 1940
Len Lye’s camera-less film animates “swing” versions of the popular Lambeth Walk—featuring Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stéphane Grappelli on violin—through scratched and painted imagery directly on celluloid.
01 October 1936
This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many European filmmakers turned to puppets as an alternative, and Lye enlisted the help of avant-garde friends such as Humphrey Jennings and John Banting to make the amusing puppets.
05 October 1942
A British WWII propaganda short warning citizens that Nazi sympathizers could be listening to their everyday conversations to discover important information about the war effort.
07 November 1952
In 1944 Lye moved to New York City, initially to direct for the documentary newsreel The March of Time.
05 February 1938
Correspondence between young lovers nearly ends in disaster through a mistake in postal district. Fortunately the GPO spots the error and all ends well, but with the moral that correspondents should get the address right.
01 January 2022
Master of Motion follows Len Lye, New Zealand's greatest international artist, and showcases his visionary work in film and sculpture and his monumental ambitions for his work beyond his own life.
01 January 1943
A tribute to the cameramen of the newsreel companies and the service film units, in the form of a compilation of film of the cameramen themselves, their training and some of their most dramatic film.
01 December 1929
With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts.
06 September 1935
Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film.
01 January 1959
In 1959 the United Nations commissioned Lye to make this one-minute film, “Fountain of Hope,” to publicize United Nations Day (24th October).
13 October 2023
While stocking the shelves at work late at night, Mike finds a mysterious tape that calls upon The Peanut Vendor.
01 January 1958
Len Lye made Pictures for Percussion as a sample for television stations while living in the United States.
01 January 1937
This riot of color was a showcase for Lye’s hand-painted and stenciled imagery. Sponsored by Imperial Airways, it incorporates the airline’s “speedbird” symbol, and the music consists of “Honolulu Blues” by Red Nichols and a rumba by the Lecuona Cuban Boys.
01 January 1958
This was another sample promotional film, which Lye offered to television stations. He scratched some dramatic black-and-white abstract images, hand-coloured them, and combined them with African drum music.
13 November 1945
Documentary about New York night clubs.
