Len Lye Movies

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

While stocking the shelves at work late at night, Mike finds a mysterious tape that calls upon The Peanut Vendor.

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up...

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

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.

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

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

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

A perfect fusion of poetry and film, with dense layered imagery and music from electro pioneers Louise and Bebe Barron. The writer Anaïs Nin...

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

Short comedic documentary about crops.

In 1959 the United Nations commissioned Lye to make this one-minute film, “Fountain of Hope,” to publicize United Nations Day (24th...

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

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

Master of Motion follows Len Lye, New Zealand's greatest international artist, and showcases his visionary work in film and sculpture and his...

Len Lye made this experiment in animating poetry circa 1953 utilising a clip of Sir John Gielgud reciting a passage from The Tempest.

Lye created a series of scratched images in the 1950s – more regular or geometric than his usual style – to accompany Rock...

A fictional enactment of the deadly contest between a British soldier and a German sniper hiding in a tree. Kill or Be Killed differs from most army...

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...

Correspondence between young lovers nearly ends in disaster through a mistake in postal district. Fortunately the GPO spots the error and all ends...