TSPDT

Key Production Country: UK
Key Genres: Short Film, Animation, Music, Avant-garde/Experimental, Abstract Film, Experimental Film
Key Collaborators: Alberto Cavalcanti (Producer), Jonah Jones (Cinematographer)

"Born in New Zealand, arrived in Britain in the 1920s, and emigrated to the US in 1944. Lye's animation work is chiefly associated with the British Documentary Movement in the 1930s and early 1940s. He is remembered as an experimentalist in both form and technique, inventing a system of painting directly onto film which was used in the award-winning Colour Box (1935). The technique was later adopted by Norman McLaren. Lye's career did not progress in America, and he left film-making for painting and sculpture in the late 1950s." - John Caughie (Encyclopedia of European Cinema, 1995)

"By inventing new ways of making films without a camera, expert knowledge or extensive equipment, he initiated a field of artisanal, self-sufficient screen practice that continues to grow and thrive. Importantly, his innovative modernist films reveal that experimental cinema can be a fun, ecstatic and pleasurable experience, self-rendering a cinema of limited means that is no less valuable." - Brett Kashmere (Senses of Cinema, 2007)

"There was, by his own admission, nothing to 'understand" in most of his films, although he also worked, less successfully, on live-action wartime propaganda shorts for the Ministry of Information. Regardless of whether one buys his strange, pretentious claims about images coming from the 'old brain' to the body's sense of 'kinetic presence', there is in his most enduring work an engaging vitality and sensuality." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)

"Lye’s central concern was with movement. In his theoretical writings, he advanced an idea that motion could be experienced as directly and powerfully as any of the senses. This “bodily empathy,” as he called it, was evident in his manner of composition, and what he strove to impart to his viewers. “The way I practiced it,” he wrote in 1964, “I could levitate with the curling smoke, scud with the wind-blown leaf, sashay with the reflections of masts on water, shimmy with the flapping flag, glide with the snake.” He gives as much attention to evoking these states as he does in rendering them in a more pictorial way." - Genevieve Yue (Film Comment, 2014)

"Imaginative pioneer animator who invented the technique of drawing and painting dynamic forms onto film (in Colour Box) and worked for John Grierson at the GPO Film Unit in the Thirties. His work considerably influenced Norman McLaren, who took up and developed his techniques, but he himself was not able to make a career in the cinema and later, after he moved to the USA, turned to more traditional art forms." - Georges Sadoul (Dictionary of Film Makers, 1972)

"All of a sudden it hit me - if there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can't there be figures of motion?" - Len Lye