Len Lye and the Direct Film

I'm home this week taking care of my infant daughter Jillian, so I'm pretty much on her schedule, which means a quarter of an ounce of formula followed by a six-minute nap followed by another quarter of an ounce of formula, and so on throughout the day. Because I'm doing pretty much everything one-handed, the entries are going to be a bit erratic this week.

At City of Sound, a site maintained by Londoner Dan Hill, there's a feature on the New Zealand avant-garde filmmaker and artist Len Lye. Lye made a series of direct films (i.e., films made by drawing or painting directly on the film stock), first for the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, and later for the British General Post Office. He traveled widely among Maori, Australian aboriginal, and African tribes, and his work has an anthropological feel to it. Imagine crossing David Byrne with Claude Lévi-Strauss, and you've got the general idea. Direct films, which were popular among European avant-garde filmmakers in the 1920s, aren't my favorite type of experimental film. Direct films lacked the rich graphic textures of abstract painting, and the musical accompaniment was generally poorly to the rather primitive sound systems of the period. Lye not only had terrific taste in music -- Hill points out that music sounds very contemporary -- he also regarded indigenous cultures without a trace of condensation.