Movies

Life’s Musical Minute, recently re-discovered, is a short promotional film of this kind, based on Gene Krupa’s drum solo from...

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

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...

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

Documentary about New York night clubs.

Correspondence between young lovers nearly ends in disaster through a mistake in postal district. Fortunately the GPO spots the error and all ends...

Documentary about the Kiwi artist Len Lye and his legacy.

This was another sample promotional film, which Lye offered to television stations. He scratched some dramatic black-and-white abstract images,...

In 1959 the United Nations commissioned Lye to make this one-minute film, “Fountain of Hope,” to publicize United Nations Day (24th...

Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of...

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

Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their...

Short comedic documentary about crops.

A British WWII propaganda short warning citizens that Nazi sympathizers could be listening to their everyday conversations to discover important...

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

Experimental documentary about recycling.

Documentary about women factory workers.

Len Lye made Pictures for Percussion as a sample for television stations while living in the United States.

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

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...