(Pro)Motion Pictures: Len Lye in the Thirties

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Notes

1. For example, the major critical and historical studies of the British Documentary Movement during the inter-war period mention Lye's work either fleetingly (Low 1979 103–107; Sussex 1975 84–85; Ellis 2000 119), or not at all (Lovell and Hillier 1972; Kuhn 1980; Swann, 1989; Aiken 1990; Winston 1995). In more recent times, Ian Christie (2000), Jamie Sexton (2001 256–265; 2008), and Michael O’Pray (2003 44–47) have engaged more readily in the relations between Lye's film-making and alternative film culture in Britain and in the 1920s and 1930s. As this reference to O’Pray indicates, Lye's films from the 1930s fare better in treatments of experimental filmmaking (e.g. Le Grice 2002 70–73; Rees 2007 55–64; Curtis 2007).

2. “The direct application of paint to the surface of film transformed the dynamics of the graphic film. Color could be rendered more vivid than it could by the photographic process; the different kinds and densities of paint opened a range of texture hitherto ignored; and above all the problems of shape, scale, and the illusions of perspective which the early graphic film-makers inherited from the painterly and photographic traditions could be bracketed by an imagery that remained flat on the plane of the screen and avoided geometric contour” (Sitney 2002, 233).