Free Radicals

(1958)

- In Free Radicals Len Lye used black film stock and scratched designs into the emulsion. The result was a dancing pattern of flashing lines and marks, as dramatic as lightning in the night sky.

In arguably his greatest film, Len Lye reduced the medium to its most basic elements – light in darkness – by scratching designs on black film. His scratches were as energetic as lightning in the night sky. He used a variety of scribers ranging from dental tools to an ancient Native American arrow-head, and synchronized the images to traditional African music ('a field tape of the Bagirmi tribe').

The film won second prize out of 400 entries in an International Experimental Film Competition judged by Man Ray, Norman McLaren, Alexander Alexeieff and others, at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. In 1979 Lye further condensed this already very concentrated film by dropping a minute of footage. Stan Brakhage described the final version as "an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece (a brief epic)".

Source: centre for art tapes

Free Radicals, typography, 1st generation, Film

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Len Lye (2009) co-edited by the curator Tyler Cann and the writer, critic and poet Prof. Wystan Curnow is a tribute to one of New Zealand’s most internationally acclaimed artists is the most comprehensive visual presentation of Len Lye’s art to date.

Over 1,000 new photographs were created and hundreds of them selected for this image-rich publication, presenting the full range of Len Lye’s work, from drawings and paintings right through to his photograms and kinetic experimentations. (Govett-Brewster)

Art That Moves: The Work of Len Lye (2009) by Roger Horrocks, author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed 2001 Len Lye: A biography, shifts the focus from Len Lye's life to his art practice and innovative aesthetic theories about "the art of motion," which continue to be relevant today. Going beyond a general introduction to Len Lye and his artistic importance, this in-depth book offers a detailed study of his aesthetics of motion, analyzing how these theories were embodied in his sculptures and films. (Amazon)

Len Lye: A biography (2001) by Roger Horrock tells for the first time the story of an extraordinary New Zealander, a brilliant artist with an international career who never lost the informality, the energy, the independence of spirit of his South Pacific origins. Len Lye began as an unsettled working-class kid with limited prospects and became a leading modernist artist in London and New York. Roger Horrocks's exhaustive study of Lye has taken many years and is based on interviews with many of those close to the artist as well as on voluminous documentary sources. (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery)

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Len Lye (1901-1980) was an experimental film-maker, poet, painter, kinetic sculptor, eccentric and ebullient personality. Len Lye was one of the few filmmakers working in inter-war Britain to have established an international reputation in experimental filmmaking. Though his British oeuvre was by no means limited to the making of abstract films, this was the area that most interested Len Lye and he has sometimes been viewed as the only genuine avant-garde filmmaker of this period. (screenonline)

Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939) - The four-minute, hand-painted Dufaycolor film with a colour accompaniment by Len Lye, matches visual motifs to musical instruments: diagonals introduce piano phrases, circles express drum beats, wavy horizontals represent guitars licks, vertical lines map base parts, etc. Primary red, blue and deep green colour fields are rendered frameless by upwardly cascading kite shapes, luminous tapered stripes, and batik-like patterns. (Senses of Cinema)

Rhythm (1957) was intended as a publicity film for Chrysler, Len Lye used rapid editing to speed up the assembly of a car, and synchronized it to African drum music. Chrysler was horrified by the music and suspicious of the way a worker was shown winking at the camera. (centre for art tapes)

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film. Stan Brakhage's films are usually silent and lack a story, being more analogous to visual poetry than to prose story-telling. He often referred to them as "visual music" or "moving visual thinking." His films range in length from just a few seconds to several hours, but most last between two or three minutes and one hour. He frequently hand-painted the film or scratched the image directly into the film emulsion, and sometimes used collage techniques. (Experimental Cinema)

Harry Everett Smith (1923-1991) was an American archivist, ethnomusicologist, student of anthropology, record collector, experimental filmmaker, artist, bohemian and mystic. Harry Smith is a well-known figure in several fields. People who know him as a filmmaker often do not know of his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, while folk music enthusiasts often do not know he was "the greatest living magician" according to Kenneth Anger. (Wikipedia)

Dada (1936) by Mary Ellen Bute - In 1931, Universal had run one of Oskar Fischinger's Studies as a novelty item in their newsreel. Mary Ellen had seen it, and proposed to Universal that they use one of her films in a similar fashion. Since they could use only two or three minutes, Mary Ellen made a special piece, Dada, which Universal distributed in 1936. (William Moritz: "Mary Ellen Bute: Seeing Sound")

Opus I (1921) - Music by Max Butting. Walther Ruttmann's Opus 1 is the first abstract or absolute work in film history screened publicly. Instead of containing depictions of reality, it consists entirely of the colors and shapes already formulated in Ruttmann's Painting With Light manifesto. In 1919, he writes that, after nearly a decade, he finally "masters the technical difficulties" struggled with as early as 1913 while executing his formulated idea. (Media Art Net)

Walther Ruttmann (1887-1941) was a German film director and along with Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling an early practitioner of experimental film. His film career began in the early 1920s. His first abstract short films, Opus I (1921) and Opus II (1923), were experiments with new forms of film expression, and the influence of these early abstract films is especially obvious in the early work of Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s. Walther Ruttmann and his colleagues of the avant garde movement enriched the language of film as a medium with new form techniques. (Wikipedia)

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) was a German abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. He made over 50 short animated films, and painted c. 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries and collections worldwide. (Wikipedia)

Study No. 8 (1931) - original title: Studie Nr. 8 by Oskar Fischinger. He "did not have enough money to buy the rights for the second half of Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Despite the lack of the finished ending of the music, this study remains the most complex, most stunning, and for the artist the favorite and most important of the black and white films." (Dr. William Moritz, Canyon Cinema)

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