Bendazzi, Cartoons

p. 75 Classifies Lye’s films into three main groups:

1) Rainbow Dance and others that “revolve around the exploration of color.”

2) Trade Tattoo, Color Cry, and others that “center on texture, colour transparency, and the interrelationship between these two elements…[The] unusual palette includes unsaturated colours, dusk and periwinkle blue.”

3) Free Radicals, Particles in Space, Tal Farlow- “Lye’s last films make a masterful use of ‘graffiti’ on black stock, creating three-dimensional exploration.”

p. 75- “The major contribution of this genial New Zealander was his audacious inventiveness, which allowed him to film abstract cartoons (Tusalava), to give up the camera, and to combine, as never before, abstract drawing with live action images (Trade Tattoo).”

p. 76- “What interested Lye was the composition of movement: animation techniques are methods of controlling the movement on the basis of its composition. As for the connection between his activities as a filmmaker and as a kinetic sculptor, he wrote that he wanted to communicate nothing, or at least, nothing to the ‘new brain.’ His images came from the primitive ‘old brain’ to the body and to its sense of kinetic presence.”

Curtis, Experimental Cinema

p. 36- “Len Lye is one of the few significant figures in British cinema between the wars. He is as important to personal (informal) animation as Griffith is to the traditional narrative film”

“As a child in New Zealand, he built simple three dimensional models to study kinetics, then left for Australia, where he studied animation. Coming to England in 1927, he persuaded the Film Society to pay for the photography of his first film Tusalava….He worked directly on the surface of rejected sound take (clear film with only the soundtrack printed), given to him by professional filmmakers (members of the Film Society). Having completed a certain amount of this material, he showed it to John Grierson of the GPO film unit, suggesting that with the insertion of suitable slogans, it could be used as a GPO promotional film. Much to his surprise, Grierson agreed. So Colour Box – the first non-camera film – was seen by a larger public than any experimental film before it, and most since. In 1947 Cavalcanti wrote (Sight and Sound, vol. 16, 1964): ‘Colour Box is a very important film, not only because of its successful use of colour, but also because it is a demonstration of the rhythm created on the screen by the succession of lines composing each individual frame or group of frames. Eisenstein in his book Film Sense takes much more time and much more pains to explain the same thing that Colour Box throws at you so naturally, and does so in less than three minutes.’”

p. 36-37- “In Rainbow Dance Lye introduced the human figure: ‘I always wanted to do a live action film. My area of imagery is only concerned with the sensory side of bodily being and what they call neuromotor, nerve muscle stuff, which is the area of dance, but I’m not that interested in dance…I wasn’t interested at all in naturalistic work. What I was interested in was the way of taking…real live action in the studio, under circumstances in which your understanding of motion would be such that you could break that mountain right down and build it up again in cinema terms, kinetic terms.’”

Sitney, Visionary Film

p. 230- In Colour Box, a wavy, vertical line multiplies itself and interacts with circles and fields of dots against a background washed with paint. Lye avoids all indication of screen depth by having no movement into or out of the vanishing point.”

p. 231- “Although his reputation has been sustained by the invention of direct painting on film, Lye deserves equal credit as one of the great masters of montage. His specialty has been the jump-cut, an elliptical condensation of action achieved by elimination of middle shots, so that the figure on the screen seems to jump forward along a prescribed course of action.”

“Having created a film purely exploiting the jump-cut (Rhythm), he made another, working only with the surface of unphotographed film. This time he scratched ideographic lines onto black film stock. Free Radicals reduces and distills the dynamics of the hand made film to a primitive kinetic dance of white lines and angles. The jaggedness of these meticulously executed scratches is an indexical evocation of the concentrated energy required to etch them onto film.”