Len Lye Movies

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using...

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...

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

Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to...

BBC Four’s new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness...

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

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...

This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many...

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.

Len Lye made this experiment in animating poetry circa 1953 utilising a clip of Sir John Gielgud reciting a passage from The Tempest.

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...

While stocking the shelves at work late at night, Mike finds a mysterious tape that calls upon The Peanut Vendor.

Surrealism, avant-garde sound montage, and irreverent wit might be the last thing you'd expect from a government-sponsored film about wartime...

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.

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

Lye 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...

Documentary about the Kiwi artist Len Lye and his legacy.

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into...

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

The story of how newspapers were distributed during the Blitz, stressing the importance of an accurate and objective press on the home front.