Rhythm

(1957)

- Invited to make a one minute film for the Chrysler Corporation's weekly television programme, Len Lye took 90 minutes of footage showing the making of a car and edited and synchronised it to African drum music.

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.

Rhythm won first prize at a New York advertising festival but was then disqualified because its sponsor had never given it a television screening. P. Adams Sitney wrote: "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." And in Film Culture, Jonas Mekas said to Peter Kubelka: "Have you seen Len Lye’s 50-second automobile commercial? Nothing happens there… except that it's filled with some kind of secret action of cinema."

Source: centre for art tapes

Rhythm, cars, 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)

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)

Optical Poetry (2004) by Dr. William Moritz is the long-awaited, definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger. The result of over 30 years of research on this visionary abstract filmmaker and painter. In addition to Moritz's comprehensive biography, it includes numerous photographs in colour and black and white (many never before published), statements by Oskar Fischinger about his films, a newly created extensive filmography, and a selected bibliography. (John Libbey Publishing)

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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)

Free Radicals (1958) - 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"). (centre for art tapes)

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)

Audio.Visual - On Visual Music and Related Media (2009) by Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund (Eds.) is divided into two sections: the first deals with the academic discussion on the subject of visual music; the second introduces contemporary paradigms of audio-visual praxis in brief presentations and contextualises them. Apart from being a guide in the historical sense, this new volume provides theoretical approaches to understanding and making visual music. (Fluctuating Images)

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")

Viking Eggeling (1880-1925) was a Swedish artist and filmmaker. His work is of significance in the area of experimental film, and has been described as absolute film and Visual Music. (Wikipedia)

Come Closer (1952) by Hy Hirsh - In the visual music films of Hy Hirsh his exquisite taste shows up most strongly: in the parallel between the impossible three-dimensional occlusions of ribbons in Come Closer with wild infectious Caribbean carnival music, or in linking the jagged moving camera and staccato cutting of images of Paris posters in Defense d'afficher (1958-59) with an equally frenetic Cuban jazz. (William Moritz "Hy Hirsh." in "Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America", Boston: Harvard Film Archive, 1995)

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)

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Rhythm

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