Selections from Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films (1938)

Abstract

In 1926 the new zealand artist, writer, and budding filmmaker len lye arrived in london by way of sydney, australia.Only twenty-five years old, Lye was still a few years away from his first breakthrough in film: Tusalava (1929), a nine-minute animated film composed of over 4,400 drawings that took nearly two years to complete (Horrocks, Len Lye 91). The artist would spend the next two decades in London, years in which his association with the General Post Office Film Unit would provide him with the resources he needed to create some of his most famous films, such as A Colour Box (1935), Rainbow Dance (1936), and N or NW (1938).In December 1925, a young American poet by the name of Laura Gottschalk—soon to change her name to Laura Riding—followed Robert Graves's advice and moved to London. While she had yet to publish a book of poems, her poetry had appeared in a number of literary journals, most notably the Fugitive (Jacobs xvii). Her first collection, The Close Chaplet, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in October 1926.