Free Radical: The Films of Len Lye

Introduced by Mark Williams, exhibition manager at the New Zealand Film Archive.
Born in New Zealand in 1901, Len Lye was largely self-educated, and early on studied Aboriginal, Samoan, and Maori indigenous art and dance, which influenced his pioneering direct-animation films.  Lye was a committed doodler, whether on film or paper or with bits of steel, and saw this as a means of accessing the "old" or "primitive" brain.  "my film stuff is old brain stuff.  It is nothing to the new brain and literature.  it is to do with the body and kicking around."  And kick around he did -- scratching, painting, and batiking directly on the filmstrip, ingeniously creating vibrant and dazzling handmade films without a camera.  Lye's images pulsate with energy and vitality, a "sensory ballet" of rhythm.  This program offers a chronological survey of the artist's career from 1929's Tusalava to 1958's Free Radicals.