Peanuts (2023)
While stocking the shelves at work late at night, Mike finds a mysterious tape that calls upon The Peanut Vendor. ...
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Leonard Charles Huia "Len" Lye (5 July 1901 – 15 May 1980), was a Christchurch, New Zealand-born artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley.
While stocking the shelves at work late at night, Mike finds a mysterious tape that calls upon The Peanut Vendor. ...
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Lye created a series of scratched images in the 1950s – more regular or geometric than his usual style – to accompany Rock 'n' Rye, a track by jazz guitarist Tal Farlow, but he did not get far with the editing. He returned to the material in 1980 but d ...
Watch NowLye 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 Radicals. Lye created what he called "vibrant little images" or "zig-zags" with a sense of "zizz". The clusters of ...
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In 1959 the United Nations commissioned Lye to make this one-minute film, "Fountain of Hope," to publicize United Nations Day (24th October). The film was screened worldwide in cinemas and on television. Lye superimposed the word for "peace" in many diffe ...
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In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at the I ...
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This was another sample promotional film, which Lye offered to television stations. He scratched some dramatic black-and-white abstract images, hand-coloured them, and combined them with African drum music. The film gives us a taste of what Free Radicals ...
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Len Lye made Pictures for Percussion as a sample for television stations while living in the United States. ...
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Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented with a ...
Watch NowIntended 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 sponsor was horrified by the music and suspicious of the way a worker was shown winking at the camera; altho ...
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Life's Musical Minute, recently re-discovered, is a short promotional film of this kind, based on Gene Krupa's drum solo from "Golden Wedding" by the Woody Herman jazz band. It was Lye's attempt to gain support from Life Magazine. ...
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Len Lye made this experiment in animating poetry circa 1953 utilising a clip of Sir John Gielgud reciting a passage from The Tempest. ...
Watch NowIn 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 mixed with artists who later became the Abstract Expressionists, encouraged New York's emerging filmmakers such ...
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A perfect fusion of poetry and film, with dense layered imagery and music from electro pioneers Louise and Bebe Barron. The writer Anaïs Nin provides dialogue from her novella "House of Incest" and appears adrift in the undersea realm of Atlantis before a ...
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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, their training and some of their most dramatic film. ...
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The story of how newspapers were distributed during the Blitz, stressing the importance of an accurate and objective press on the home front. ...
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A British WWII propaganda short warning citizens that Nazi sympathizers could be listening to their everyday conversations to discover important information about the war effort. ...
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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 instructional films because of its powerful dramatization. ...
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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. ...
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Surrealism, avant-garde sound montage, and irreverent wit might be the last thing you'd expect from a government-sponsored film about wartime cookery. But director, artist, animator and all-round firework of a man Len Lye specialised in the unexpected. A s ...
Watch NowLen Lye's camera-less film animates "swing" versions of the popular Lambeth Walk—featuring Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stéphane Grappelli on violin—through scratched and painted imagery directly on celluloid. Sponsored by the Tourist and Industrial ...
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Correspondence between young lovers nearly ends in disaster through a mistake in postal district. Fortunately the GPO spots the error and all ends well, but with the moral that correspondents should get the address right. ...
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Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of outtakes from GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Night Mail. Lye transformed this footage in what has been ...
Watch NowThis riot of color was a showcase for Lye's hand-painted and stenciled imagery. Sponsored by Imperial Airways, it incorporates the airline's "speedbird" symbol, and the music consists of "Honolulu Blues" by Red Nichols and a rumba by the Lecuona Cuban Boys ...
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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. ...
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This experiment was a "prestige advertisement" for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many European filmmakers turned to puppets as an alternative, and Lye enlisted the help of avant-garde friends such as Humphrey ...
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Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film. ...
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For Kaleidoscope, which was sponsored by Churchman Cigarettes, Lye animated stenciled cigarette shapes and is said to have experimented by cutting out some of the shapes so that the light of the projector hit the screen directly. As in Colour Box Lye uses ...
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Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to 'Peanut Vendor', a 1931 jazz hit for Red Nichols. The two foot high monkey had bolted, moveable joints and s ...
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BBC Four's new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness of some of the great animation pioneers who have worked in Britain – trailblazing talents such as Len Lye, Joh ...
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Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their own experiments in the field of visionary filmmaking. ...
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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 staring at the sun, to travels around the Pacific and life in New York. It includes excerpts from many of his fi ...
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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 expanded his realm from the two-dimentional picture frame, climaxed by the artists of the 40s and early 50s, merge ...
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