Saturday,
December 15 at 7pm
Free
Radical: The Films of Len Lye + Explosions into Colour: New
Zealand Experimental Film 1980-84
Co-presented
by The New Zealand Film Archive, The Len Lye Foundation and
Anthology Film Archives and compiled by Roger Horrocks for the
New Zealand Film Archive and The Len Lye Foundation.
 A
pioneer of “direct-to-film” animation, Len Lye was born in New
Zealand in 1901. He moved to England in the 1920s and subsequently
to New York in 1944 where he spent the last 40 years of his
life. A pioneer of “scratch” or “direct” filmmaking, Lye used
various tools to mark patterns, shapes and images directly onto
the film’s surface. In works such as Free Radicals,
Lye explored the dynamic energy of abstract images propelled
into life by lively jazz scores or Pacific-inspired rhythms.
Several of Lye’s films were made for clients including the British
Government Post Office and the Chrysler Corporation. Despite
their commercial nature, Lye tackled these projects with a playful
sense of experiment, retaining his trademark study of dynamic
motion.
Shortly
before his death in 1980, Lye bequeathed his personal collection
to the Lovett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand,
where the Len Lye Foundation is based. Since then the New Zealand
Film Archive and the Len Lye Foundation have worked together
towards a complete catalogue of the artist’s career.
 Free
Radical: The Films of Len Lye
is a chronological survey of the artist’s career from 1929’s
Tusalava to 1958’s Free Radicals. The program
is presented on 16mm film includes recently revised or restored
versions of such Lye classics as Tal Farlow and Particles
in Space. Free Radical:
The
Films of Len Lye is 67 minutes in length.
Colour
Flight
Tusalava,
1929, 10 mins; A Colour Box, 1935, 4 mins;
Kaleidoscope, 1935,
4
mins; The Birth of a Robot, 1936, 7 mins; Rainbow
Dance, 1936, 5 mins; Trade Tattoo,
1937, 5 mins; N. or N.W., 1937, 7 mins; Colour
Flight, 1938,
4
mins; Swinging the Lambeth Walk, 1939, 4 mins;
Musical Poster #1, 1940, 3
mins; Color Cry, 1952-3, 3 mins; Tal
Farlow, 1950s, revised 1980, 2 mins; Rhythm,
1957, 1 min; Free Radicals, 1958, revised 1979,
4 mins; Particles in Space, 1957, revised 1979,
4 mins.
followed
at 8:30pm by
Explosions
into Colour: New Zealand Experimental Film
1980-84
In
the early 1980s, a generation of experimental film makers emerged
in New Zealand steeped in cinematic values and a desire for
radical experiment. Writing about his film Mouth Music,
director Gregor Nicholas cited references “made in the spirit
of affection and irony” to film makers including Carl Dreyer,
Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. There was also a strong element
of psychodrama, and issues of race, politics and industrial
culture were sometimes mixed with visions from the subconscious.
Monkey
dir.
City Group, New Zealand, 1978, 10 mins
City
Group was an Auckland-based collective of artists and filmmakers
that emerged in the early 80's making a number of radical non-narrative
films. In Monkey, manipulated sounds accompany images
of various characters being wrapped in cellophane, a Maori man
hushing a Pakeha (European) in a police line-up and
covering his eyes and ears to the sound of pigs and other farm
noises. This scene is then racially inverted.
Springbok
dir.
City Group, New Zealand, 1981, 15 mins
Shot
on Super 8, Springbok combines dance, symbolic figures
of fascism and
a
discordant soundtrack in an eerie and dark meditation on racial
intolerance.
The
Search for Otto
dir.
Richard Von Sturmer, Charlotte Wrightson and Derek Ward, New
Zealand, 1986, 15 mins
In
The Search for Otto, a woman develops an obsession
with a masculine figure from her dreams. Though never seen in
real life, she is led to him by a series of strange environments.
Throughout the film Otto remains elusive. He escapes into the
imaginative world of an Egyptian landscape, but leaves behind
a series of objects, a punching bag, an ashtray, an open book...
Mouth
Music
dir.
Gregor Nicholas, New Zealand, 1981, 15 mins
Mouth
Music opens with a series of
brilliantly lit talking heads, accompanied by music, followed
by an abstract series of images: a body builder, a woman, a
painter at work, a couple arguing. With the current interest
in language, some are realizing that speech has been over-emphasized
and the body neglected. With its emphasis on ritual, Mouth
Music asserts gesture and movement as an important channel
of meaning.
Tall
Dwarfs’ Turning Brown and Torn in Two
dir.
Chris Knox, New Zealand, 1987, 4 mins
Many
years before he had even seen it, filmmaker Chris Knox claimed
that Tony Conrad's The
Flicker was his most influential
film. Inspired by the imagined strobe energy of The Flicker
and the “direct to film” techniques of Len Lye, Knox mixes
live action, collage, stop-motion and animation to create films
that double as music videos. Knox cites Len Lye, Norman McLaren,
Frank Mouris, Jan Svanmajer and Warner Brothers’ cartoonists
Tex Avery and Robert Clampett as influences. Tall Dwarfs’
Turning Brown and Torn in Two was played on MTV’s Beavis
and Butthead.
Bodyspeak
dir.
Gregor Nichola, New Zealand, 1983, 10 mins
Bodyspeak
juxtaposes elaborate dances
from different cultures (a Samoan ceremonial dance, a drum dance
from the Cook Islands and a Tango). Notions
of
sexual/cultural difference and prejudice are examined through
techniques of cultural collision.
Flicker
dir.
Fetus Productions, New Zealand, 1985, 4 mins
Emerging
in the late 1970s, Fetus Productions traversed music, art, experimental
film and fashion, and played a key role in the development of
international Industrial Culture. Fascinated with both urban
and physical decay, Fetus' work often drew on grim subject matter
from footage of an autopsy to victims of eugenics.
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