Visual Music Archive

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Swinging the Lambeth Walk 

(1939) 

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.

Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939), a four-minute, hand-painted Dufaycolor film "with a colour accompaniment by Len Lye". Primary red, blue and deep green colour fields are rendered frameless by upwardly cascading kite shapes, luminous tapered stripes, and batik-like patterns.

 

Akin to Oskar Fischinger's fine art advertising films, Lye's cinematic "figures of motion" sublimated their commercial purpose by emphasising geometric and all-over abstraction and direct authorial inscription. As Tess Takahashi notes, filmmakers like Lye, Norman McLaren and Harry Smith saw direct animation as "a way for the artist to imbue film with the imprint of the filmmaker's essential self… [This] self, represented for Lye by the then-new discovery of DNA, was transmitted in the process of direct animation.” Characterised by an obsessive fascination with colour, pattern, texture and movement these films elude textual analysis and descriptive language, preferring the non-verbal register of synaesthesic perception. Like Stan Brakhage's hand-painted oeuvre, Lye's films strive toward a condition of pure cinema. This focus on medium-specificity and formal concerns limits the range of possible (literal) interpretations, and has been described as "cold rationalism" by the avant-garde film diarist, Jonas Mekas.

 

Source: Senses of Cinema

 

 

Swinging the Lambeth Walk, *****, 1st generation, Film

Reading

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)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Hans Richter - Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde (2000) edited by Stephen C. Foster. Few artists spanned the movements of early twentieth-century art as completely as did Hans Richter. Richter was a major force in the developments of expressionism, Dada, De Stijl, constructivism, and Surrealism, and the creator, with Viking Eggeling, of the abstract cinema. Along with Theo van Doesburg, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and a few others, he is one of the artists crucial to an understanding of the role of the arts in the reconstruction era following World War I. (MIT Press)

Hy Hirsh (1911-1960) was born in Philadelphia. He lived in Los Angeles between 1916 and 1937, and began working with still photography in 1932, according to a curriculum vitae he prepared in 1961. He worked as a motion picture cameraman between 1930 and 1936, moved to San Francisco in 1937, then to Europe in 1955 where he spent the last years of his life in Amsterdam and Paris. (Cindy Keefer: "Hy Hirsh Preservation: History And Mystery" in "KINETICA 3: Abstraction, Animation, Music - Featuring Hy Hirsh and the Fifties - Jazz and Abstraction in Beat Ear Film", Los Angeles, 2001)

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)

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)

Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)