Len Lye Movies

This film documents the major directions in modern American art during the first seven years of the 1960s. The keynote is that the artist has...

Lye created a series of scratched images in the 1950s – more regular or geometric than his usual style – to accompany Rock...

Short comedic documentary about crops.

Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to...

Master of Motion follows Len Lye, New Zealand's greatest international artist, and showcases his visionary work in film and sculpture and his...

Documentary about women factory workers.

Surrealism, avant-garde sound montage, and irreverent wit might be the last thing you'd expect from a government-sponsored film about wartime...

Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film.

This documentary, made seven years after the death of legendary filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye, tells Lye's story: from being a young boy...

Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their...

A tribute to the cameramen of the newsreel companies and the service film units, in the form of a compilation of film of the cameramen themselves,...

This was another sample promotional film, which Lye offered to television stations. He scratched some dramatic black-and-white abstract images,...

This riot of color was a showcase for Lye’s hand-painted and stenciled imagery. Sponsored by Imperial Airways, it incorporates the...

Experimental documentary about recycling.

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked...

Life’s Musical Minute, recently re-discovered, is a short promotional film of this kind, based on Gene Krupa’s drum solo from...

Lye completed his last great film a few months before his death at the age of 78. The film returned to the black-and-white techniques of Free...

Documentary about New York night clubs.

Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of...

Len Lye made Pictures for Percussion as a sample for television stations while living in the United States.