Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema

Abstract

OCTOBER 144, Spring 2013, pp. 73–91. © 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In late 1936, a year after it had been awarded a Medal of Honor in the specially created category of “fantasy film” at the International Cinema Festival in Brussels, Len Lye’s first hand-painted film, A Colour Box (1935), was screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it met with a less than rapturous response. Consisting of little more than quivering fields of dots, eccentrically pinwheeling triangles, and trembling vertical lines, all jumping to the jaunty rhythms of a Creole jazz soundtrack, the film’s dancing sheets of color instantly aroused the ire of Nazi spectators present in the audience. As the German daily Film-Kurier would later report: “The English color short A Colour Box, which attempts the kind of abstract film composition of Fischinger but with inadequate artistic means, was met with such loud condemnatory stomping that the screening had to be stopped before the film was over.”1 So degenerate was the film, it seems, that despite being only three minutes in length it could not be screened in its entirety. In retrospect, of course, there is nothing startling about this turn of events. By virtue of its complete abstraction and its recourse to a “negroid” musical accompaniment, it would have been difficult in 1936 to find a film more strikingly at odds with even the most liberal canons of Nazi cinema—as the FilmKurier’s rather startling invocation of Oskar Fischinger as a yardstick of comparative acceptability in this context suggests.2 Moreover, when Lye’s motives for drawing on the combined resources of abstraction, jazz, and animation in his hand-painted films are taken into account, the severity of this judgment can only be compounded. For at the heart of Lye’s filmmaking practice lay an urge