Len Lye Movies

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

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

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

This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many...

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.

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

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

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

Lye edited together “swing” versions of the popular Lambeth Walk (including Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stephane Grapelli on violin),...

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...

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

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...

Rainbow Dance is a 1936 British animated film released by the GPO Film Unit. This is Lye's second film. It uses the Gasparcolor process.

Documentary about women factory workers.

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...

This riot of color was a showcase for Lye’s hand-painted and stenciled imagery. Sponsored by Imperial Airways, it incorporates the...

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,...

Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their...

Short comedic documentary about crops.

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