Len Lye - Rhythms

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Film Description

A fine retrospective of the pioneer of 'direct film' whose techniques included painting and scratching images directly onto celluloid, using found footage, casting shadows of objects onto unexposed film and experimenting with early colour techniques. A magical collection.

Film Information

VHS Extras

Comprising A Colour Box, Kaleidoscope, The Birth of the Robot, Rainbow Dance, Trade Tattoo, Colour Flight, Swinging the Lambeth Walk, Color Cry, Rhythm, Free Radicals, Particles in Space, Tal Farlow.

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Reviews & Articles

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Review by GH on 18th December 2002

Rhythms is an exuberant and gleeful collection based around the irrepressible urgings of different rhythms, from mambo tunes to a Sonny Terry harmonica solo. Lye talks of realising with a start that, ‘…if there was such a thing as composing music, there could also be such a thing as composing motion’ and all these short films testify to his masterly experimentation in this field, products of wanting to move away from more laborious animation techniques to simpler, freer, more direct and spontaneous film-making.


Lye’s films made for the GPO in the thirties are for many his masterpieces and his most recognisable works. A single colour picture is built up from a number of simultaneously exposed negatives to form a celebratory collage in which abstract shapes and treated film of people and objects are buoyant and vivid. All to advertise cheaper parcel post rates or the benefits of National Savings.


His film Rhythm was a reduction of 90 hours of film of men working on the Chrysler Corp. production lines to a 1 minute film set to the rhythm of African drumming. Commissioned as an advertisement by Chrysler it was needless to say rejected.


Lye relished the notion of making primitive markings in a technological field and it is partly this odd marriage that makes his films so immediate and captivating. Above all though, it is the implicit dancing rhythms of his films that makes them such wonders, from the joy of his colour works to his later ‘ziggle-zag-splutter’ scratched films. Watch them and try to stop yourself smiling for joy.

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Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Experimental Animation

Including: A Scanner Darkly, Berthold Bartosch - L Idee, Dog Star Man - Stan Brakhage, Fluxus - Fluxfilm Anthology, Harry Smith - Early Abstractions, Len Lye - Rhythms, Norman McLaren - The Masters Edition, Oskar Fischinger - Volume 1, Oskar Fischinger - Volume 2, Phil Mulloy - Extreme Animation.

GPO / Crown Film Unit Films

Including: 40s Britain - Fishermen At War, Classical Music In The Forties, Drifters / Caller Herrin, GPO Animation, Len Lye - Rhythms, London Pride, Night Mail / West Highland, The GPO Classics Collection: Britain At War - The First Days, The GPO Classics Collection: Britain at War -Under Fire, The GPO Story: Thirties Britain (Vol 1).

Re:Voir - Superb Art Films

Including: Barbara Hammer - Sanctus, Berthold Bartosch - L Idee, Bill Morrison - 8 Films, Boris Lehman - A La Recherche du Lieu de ma Naissance, Boris Lehman - Lecon De Vie, Cinema Dada, Divine Horsemen: Living Gods Of Haiti, Dog Star Man - Stan Brakhage, Experimental Films - Deren, Fluxus - Fluxfilm Anthology.

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