Film artist with zest for life

Press, 3 November 1984, Page 22

Film artist with zest for life

Figures Of Motion. Lon Lye; Selected Writings. Editors, Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks. Oxford University Press, 1984. $28,50.

(Reviewed by

Diane Prout

“My art teacher (H. Linley Richardson) gave me the great revelation ... by telling me that a person -who had his own theory of art, right or wrong, was better than he who was sweating it out with somebody else’s theory.” So spoke Len, Lye at the Film Makers’ Cinematheque in 1967. It was this remark which inspired the 14-year-old student at Wellington Technical College to hunt for his own conception of art. Eventually he was hit by the idea of composing motion, “just as a musician composes sound;” In his collection of personal writings about his early life in New Zealand, he attributed this disposition towards motion (as being a sense of myself) from having gone to school on hdrseback “long enough to like a walking world beneath my nontread.” Pushing a bike loaded with newspapers up the “endless steep hills of also helped. “When I sat down to sketch whatever motion I was watching, my body played a major role in my empathy with what I was sketching.”, • Later, in his more formal essays on film-making, Lye was to elaborate his ideas on "Movement as Language.” “Movement is strictly the language of life. It expresses nothing but the initial, living connotations of life. If is the earliest language.” As opposed to the language of thought, it is the “uncritical expression of life.” Len Lye was one of those rare artists who managed to range successfully from one medium to another. He describes his knack for switching from “motion film; to painting, to writing as prose art, to writing as philosophy, to 3D figures of motion, to art theory, to personal analytical delving,” so that by the time he was 70, he was able to turn to what

ever his “mood and circumtances dictated.” It is as a film-maker, however, that this expatriate New Zealander made a name for himself in the art history books, by pioneering “direct film,” that is, the process of making films without a camera, by painting clear celluloid or scratching black film. He explored these possibilities of direct methods so thoroughly that he has influenced almost anyone concerned with film, as an art form. His film career was a 50year search for new ways to compose motion from his first film, “Tusalava” (1929) to “Particles In Space” (1979). “Colour Box” was so controversial and screened before such a large audience that the Disney studio purchased Lye’s films for study while developing such projects as “Fantasia.” Although his name is associated primarily with kinetic art, he was also one of the leading painters of the thirties. His originality placed him as a forerunner of the abstract expressnists both in painting and film. As a kinetic sculptor in America, where he became naturalised in 1950, he is amongst the best in the early sixties period. It 1 is this diversity of talent, this abundant energy in all forms of art, which has made Len Lye less familiar than he deserves. The reason, argue the editors, is that critics confine themselves to one art form and tend to overlook the more comprehensive achievemnts of the man. Lye was, moreover, a theoretician, and all his practical and innovative experiments in animation, colour processing, editing and documentary work, have provided material for his considerable written output on the nature of art. He seems to have been a remarkable personality. His vitality found outlets in speaking ahd writing. He was, as the authors assert, “a compelling and immensely entertaining talker.” “I tell you I could speak that stuff better than I could write it.” His zigzag, back-to-front type verbalising led him to a

series of experimental exercises where the “old brain” took over and the images poured out on paper in an eccentric, personal, colloquial and highly individualised style. The parallels with William Butler Yeats’, automatic writing and the linguistic experiments of James Joyce are apparent, so it is no surprise to learn that Lye found the necessary support from the close-knit community of writers, artists, and bohemians living in Hammersmith in the late nineteen twenties. Friends included Richard Church, A. P. Herbert, Robert Graves, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Laura Riding and later Dylan Thomas. His zest for life, his hunger for innovation and experiment, led Lye from humble beginnings to travel in Australia and Samoa, where his fascination with tribal art forms led him through labouring jobs and working his passage as ship’s stoker, eventually .to London, and the opportunity to capitalise on his knowledge of primitive art in working under the sponsorship of the G.P.O. Film Unit on a number of commercial films.

The pressures of advertising did not deter Lye from producing films which became popular both with film society audiences and the general public for their freshness, speed and clever synchronisation. His technique of applying lacquer paint directly to celluloid prompted reviewers to remark, “You’ve not seen a colour film until you’ve seen a Len Lye effort.” In this stylish and elegant assemblage of Lye’s writings and ideas, the authors and editors, Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks, have produced an absorbing profile of a 20th century artist. Although some of Lye’s cinematic work has been screened here on “Kaleidoscope,” the scholarly effort to establish the full range of his talent has been left to these most competent co-editors.