Len Lye Filmes

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. The...

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

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

In 1944 Lye moved to New York City, initially to direct for the documentary newsreel The March of Time. He settled in the West Village, where he...

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

Documentary about New York night clubs.

Experimental documentary about recycling.

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...

Documentary about the Kiwi artist Len Lye and his legacy.

This was another sample promotional film, which Lye offered to television stations. He scratched some dramatic black-and-white abstract images,...

Life’s Musical Minute, recently re-discovered, is a short promotional film of this kind, based on Gene Krupa’s drum solo from...

A British WWII propaganda short warning citizens that Nazi sympathizers could be listening to their everyday conversations to discover important...

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked...

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

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

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

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

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.

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