Len Lye: - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Len Lye:
The Vital Body of Cinema

LUKE SMYTHE

In late 1936, a year after it had been awarded a Medal of Honor in the spe-
cially created category of “fantasy film” at the International Cinema Festival in
Brussels, Len Lye’s first hand-painted film, A Colour Box (1935), was screened at
the Venice Film Festival, where it met with a less than rapturous response.
Consisting of little more than quivering fields of dots, eccentrically pinwheeling
triangles, and trembling vertical lines, all jumping to the jaunty rhythms of a
Creole jazz soundtrack, the film’s dancing sheets of color instantly aroused the ire
of Nazi spectators present in the audience. As the German daily Film-Kurier would
later report: “The English color short A Colour Box, which attempts the kind of
abstract film composition of Fischinger but with inadequate artistic means, était
met with such loud condemnatory stomping that the screening had to be stopped
before the film was over.”1 So degenerate was the film, it seems, that despite being
only three minutes in length it could not be screened in its entirety.

In retrospect, of course, there is nothing startling about this turn of
events. By virtue of its complete abstraction and its recourse to a “negroid”
musical accompaniment, it would have been difficult in 1936 to find a film more
strikingly at odds with even the most liberal canons of Nazi cinema—as the Film-
Kurier’s rather startling invocation of Oskar Fischinger as a yardstick of compar-
ative acceptability in this context suggests.2 Moreover, when Lye’s motives for
drawing on the combined resources of abstraction, jazz, and animation in his
hand-painted films are taken into account, the severity of this judgment can
only be compounded. For at the heart of Lye’s filmmaking practice lay an urge

1.
“Erfolge und Versager am Lido: Hausschlüssel treten in Aktion,” Film-Kurier, Aug. 13, 1936,
p. 1, cited (and incorrectly dated August 16) in William Moritz, “Len Lye’s Films in the Context of
International Abstract Cinema,” in Len Lye, éd. Jean-Michel Bouhours and Roger Horrocks (Paris: Édi-
tions du Centre Pompidou, 2000), p. 194.
That Fischinger’s name was mentioned by the Film-Kurier at this date is surprising for two
2.
raisons: not only because of his history as an abstract filmmaker, but because he had recently fled to
the United States in an effort to escape the increasingly unwelcome attentions of the German authori-
liens. For a summary of the race-related criticisms to which jazz was subjected under National Socialism,
see Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York; Oxford: Oxford
Presse universitaire, 1992), pp. 31–32.

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Len Lye. A Colour Box. 1935. All images courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation
and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Nouvelle-Zélande.

to use cinema as a device for enlivening viewers’ bodies via a process he referred
to as “bodily empathy,” an impulse that placed his work in direct opposition to
the stern somatic ethos of discipline, desensitization, and corporeal alienation
that anchored key sectors of Nazi art production. Little wonder then that A
Colour Box may well have been the target of a carefully choreographed propagan-
da attack at Venice.3

As dramatic as it was, cependant, Lye’s hostile reception at Venice does not
bring the full stakes of his cinematic agenda into view. On the contrary, when we
examine the remainder of Lye’s prewar cinematic output from the perspective of
his lifelong fascination with the body’s empathic response to sound and move-
ment, it becomes increasingly evident that his art was ranged in opposition to
something much broader than the somatically deadening terms of Fascist aesthet-
ics, namely the forces of corporeal alienation at work in several focal domains of
industr ial modern life. Among these may be numbered the increasingly
Taylorized conditions of the workplace, the rapidly advancing efforts of govern-

Moritz, “Len Lye’s Films in the Context of International Abstract Cinema,” p. 194.

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The Vital Body of Cinema

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Lye. A Colour Box. 1935.

ments worldwide to rationalize and centrally administer the entire social infra-
structure, and the sedentary pleasures of the cinema itself. When war broke out,
Lye then brought his heightened kinesthetic sensibilities to the battlefield, coolly
demonstrating the merits of a refined somatic consciousness in the bloody con-
frontation with Fascism.

Movement as Muse

From the beginning of his career in the early 1920s until his death in 1980,
Lye sought to use dynamic artworks to awaken sensations of motion within their
onlookers. In service of this aim, he became both a pioneer filmmaker and kinetic
sculptor. Working in London in the interwar period, he helped initiate the genres
of hand-painted and scratch filmmaking, while also making important early forays
into color processing. After moving to New York in 1944, he became a leading fig-
ure in the kinetic-sculpture movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His motion- based
aesthetic, cependant, originated in the cities and countryside of his native New

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Zealand, where he was born in 1901, far from the centers of the European and
North American art worlds where it would later be implemented.4

Lye’s sensitivities to movement first developed in the context of the “sense
games” he invented as a child, in which he strove to focus on a single sensory regis-
ter from dawn until dusk, later replaying his experiences as he prepared to go to
dormir. While developing his senses in this way, Lye grew increasingly receptive to
sensations of sound, color, and above all motion.5 By attending closely to the “fig-
ures of motion” inscribed by animals, eau, clouds, and plants, he became aware
of the phenomenon he would later refer to as “bodily empathy,” whereby the
echoes of observed movements could be discerned, and indeed amplified, within
his own body.6 As he wrote in 1964,

je . . . eventually came to look at the way things moved mainly to try to
feel movement, and only feel it. This is what dancers do; but instead, je
wanted to put the feeling of a figure of motion outside of myself to see
what I’d got. I came to realize that this feeling had to come out of
moi-même, not out of streams, swaying grasses, soaring birds; donc, instead of
sketching lines and accents described by things in motion, I now tried
to tie and plait their particular motion characteristics into my sinews—
to attach an inner kind of echo of them to my bones. . . . It might seem
inane to anyone else, but the way I practiced it, I could levitate with the
curling smoke, scud with the wind-blown leaf, sashay with the reflections
of masts on water, shimmy with the flapping flag, glide with the snake.7

As these remarks suggest, Lye never aspired to an asubjectival fusion with
the natural world in his sense games. To the contrary, he cherished the experi-
ence of empathy for the way it heightened and refined his sense of individuality, un
task he viewed as fundamental to all forms of creative expression.8 To observe,
absorb, transcribe, and retransmit the experience of motion in ways that could
assist others in acquiring a heightened sense of their own somatic capabilities
became the focal concern of Lye’s art as early as 1920, while he was still a student
at Wellington Technical College, and sustained his practice for some sixty years
thereafter. Though his first forays in this direction were static (comprising sketch-
es of the movement patterns of waves and clouds), after relocating to Sydney in
1922 he entered the arena of moving images, scratching figures of motion gener-
ated from within his own body onto strips of black leader obtained from an anima-

Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001), p. 8.

4.
Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent biographical references will be drawn from this source.
5.
See Lye’s reminiscences of this early period of his life in “Beginnings” (n.d.), in Figures of
Motion: Len Lye/Selected Writings (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1984), éd. Wystan Curnow and
Roger Horrocks, pp. 30–32.
6.
7.
8.

Lye introduced the term “bodily empathy” in ibid., p. 25.
Lye, “The Art that Moves” (1964), in Figures of Motion: Len Lye/Selected Writings, p. 82.
See Lye, “Beginnings,” p. 32, and “Is Film Art?» (1959), in ibid., p. 53.

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The Vital Body of Cinema

tion studio where he had found work. Though no finished films emerged from
these experiments, he began working on an animated short, Tusalava (1929), fol-
lowing a second move to London in 1926, and completed it some three years later.
Unfolding in extreme slow motion, Tusalava depicts the emergence of two
opposing figures from a striated matrix of dot-like configurations, most likely
inspired by Australian Aboriginal art. Later in life, Lye described one of the figures,
which is vaguely humanoid, as a “totem of individuality” and the other, which is
wormlike, as a “witchetty grub,” an important Aboriginal food source he had never
seen but was the subject of a dance he admired featuring sinuous writhing move-
ments akin to those he made use of in his film.9 Throughout Tusalava’s ten- minute
duration, the witchetty grub invades its totemic counterpart with a pair of tentacular
protrusions, struggling to absorb it in its entirety before being thrust aside by the
totem’s last-gasp explosive death throes. While Lye himself remained unsure of the
film’s meaning, it mooted two key premises of his later cinematic efforts: his concep-
tion of the film image as a locus for the transfer of energy between bodies and his
construal of cinematic movement as a brand of “vicarious” dance.10 This dance-like
understanding of the film image would always hold a central place in his work, comme
would Primitivism, for Lye would never shed his conviction that tribal cultures
remained connected to dimensions of sensory experience that had been covered
over in modern Western art forms by a cognitively biased “literary” crust.11 In his
own art he sought to tear away this crust, beginning in the mid-1930s with the hand-
painted film idiom he would come to call “direct” filmmaking.12

Direct Filmmaking and the Body of Leisure

During his early years in London, Lye was exposed to a much broader range
of films than had been available to him in New Zealand and Australia. At the
London Film Society, where Tusalava had first been screened, he was able to view
the work of significant avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s such as Man Ray, Hans
Richter, Viking Eggeling, Fernand Léger, Fischinger, and others. Elsewhere, il
was free to sample the full spectrum of narrative-driven, commercial filmmaking
streaming out of Britain and Hollywood at this time, all the while seeking to devel-
op new cinematic projects of his own.13 Some time around 1934, after years of

Lye, “Gene-Deep Myth” (1978), in ibid., pp. 90–94.
9.
Lye posited film movement as a kind of “vicarious dance” in “The Art that Moves,” p. 86.
10.
11.
Lye, “Notes on a Short Colour Film” (1936), in ibid., p. 51. I employ the term “primitive”
here in accordance with Lye’s own understanding of its meaning, lequel, as the foregoing comments
make clear, carried no connotations of backwardness or underdevelopment and was instead aligned
with a state of somatic advancement.
12.
13.

Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 133.
On Lye’s film-going habits in London, see ibid., pp. 97, 127–28.

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Lye. Tusalava. 1929.

fruitless attempts to obtain commercial backing for a variety of ventures, he hit
upon the idea of working without the expense of a film crew, camera, or lighting
equipment by painting onto and scratching into clear strips of unwanted cellu-
loid. Par 1935, he had located a brand of lacquer paint that would not crack or peel
when run through a film projector and had obtained the assistance of John
Gielgud in the production of his first hand-painted film, Full Fathom Five (1935),
which featured the actor reading passages of The Tempest to a synchronized musical
accompaniment and a medley of off-cut film sequences that Lye had hand-tint-
ed.14 It was this now lost film that won him funding and commissions from the
British Government’s GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit, which would support
him for the next several years.

The GPO Film Unit had been founded in 1933 and was charged with inform-
ing the British public of the post office’s activities, which at that time included
infrastructural projects such as the creation of a national telephone network. Dans
the hands of its first director, John Grierson, cependant, the unit’s informational

14.
Australian composer Jack Ellitt, who worked closely with Lye on many early film projects.

Like Tusalava before it, Full Fathom Five benefited greatly from Lye’s friendship with the

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The Vital Body of Cinema

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Lye. Tusalava. 1929.

mandate was interpreted broadly, with Grierson trying to produce technically
innovative and socially progressive films that would help raise the standards of
British filmmaking.15 While this initiative resulted for the most part in high-quali-
ty social-realist documentaries, seeing Full Fathom Five inspired Grierson to expand
the unit’s hor izons by underwr it ing a ver y different kind of filmmaking.
Impressed by Lye’s inventive work, Grierson asked him to produce an advertise-
ment for new postage rates. The result was A Colour Box.16 With Grierson’s bless-
ing, the film does not belabor its commercial function, remaining wholly abstract
until its final thirty seconds. From that point forward, a series of hand-stenciled
statements appear onscreen, but make little impression on viewers amid the film’s
prevailing onslaught of sound and color.17

For a summar y of t he GPO’s act iv it ies, see Scott Ant hony, “GPO Film Unit ,»

For further details regarding the circumstances of this commission, see Horrocks, Len Lye: UN

15.
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/464254/index.html (accessed December 12, 2011).
16.
Biography, pp. 135–36.
17.
As a number of early newspaper reports attest, the advertorial content of Lye’s early direct
films was often lost on spectators. Voir, for example, the clippings from the Leicester Mercury, le
Illustrated Leicester Chronicle, and the Morning Post, collected in Lye’s review scrapbook of the 1930s (Len
Lye Foundation Archive, ID 1789, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Nouvelle-Zélande, pp. 31–32).

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Thanks to the sheer novelty of A Colour Box, which earned it a great deal of
notoriety in Britain, Lye was given further commissions, both by Grierson and by
several commercial sponsors who were attracted to the prestige value of Lye’s
work.18 With this support, he produced four more direct films in the ’30s:
Kaleidoscope (1935), commissioned by Churchman’s Cigarettes; Colour Flight (1938),
commissioned by Imperial Airways; and two further GPO commissions, Swinging
the Lambeth Walk (1939) and Musical Poster #1 (1940). Given the same kind of lee-
way in his commercial films as he received in his GPO projects, Lye was able to
keep their advertorial content to a minimum and instead focus on advancing his
somatic concerns.

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Lye. Swinging the
Lambeth Walk. 1939.

If Tusalava had been the first of Lye’s works to center on a dance-like
exchange of energy between bodies, his direct films of the ’30s took this process
much further. In a freewheeling but lyrical idiom that resisted any crisp separation
of media categories or firm distinction between high and low cultural forms, Lye
transformed the moviegoing experience into a source of bodily jouissance and revi-
talization capable of countering the somatically alienating cultural tendencies of
his day. Reversing the enervative vision of energy transfer that had formed the
nucleus of Tusalava’s narrative, Lye directed its mode of address outward, across
the screen’s threshold. Ce faisant, he transformed the film image into an inner-
vating reservoir of stored somatic impulses whose energies were capable of arcing
outward into real space. These energies, Lye hoped, would invigorate the sensoria
of onlookers, allowing them to recover a deeper, more enlivening sense of their
individual kinesthetic capabilities within the increasingly ocular-centric and devi-
talizing spaces of Depression-era cinema.

18.
Biography, pp. 142–43.

On the relationship between Lye and his commercial sponsors, see Horrocks, Len Lye: UN

The Vital Body of Cinema

While the cinematic culture of the 1920s and ’30s had by no means been
somatically inattentive, the key genres of silent comedy, with its endless series of
kinesthetic pratfalls and catastrophes, and early animation, whose metamorphic
chaos could (quite literally) stretch the viewer’s capacity for bodily empathy to its
limits, were by this stage heading into decline. It was into the space vacated by
these genres that Lye inserted the innovative language of direct cinema, moving
to oppose those remaining forms of narrative cinema that alternately deadened
the sensoria of their viewers or fostered a pacifying mode of address, effecting the
one by means of escalating and increasingly spectacularized sensory assaults and
the other by setting aside the corporeal dimension of spectatorship. Working in
this manner, Lye would distance himself decisively from all prior efforts in the
field of abstract cinema, aligning his practice instead with the liberatory impulses
of interwar popular culture and the Weimar-era avant-garde project to restructure
the human sensorium by means of mechanical technologies—albeit on his own,
highly singular terms.

Purging his films of all but the slightest narrative pretext (in the form of the
opening titles and advertising slogans that they were regrettably obliged to bear),
Lye developed an abstract cinematic idiom consisting of spinning, stenciled
geometries, swaying linear fields, and heady assaults of pure color, all dancing in a
loosely counterpointed relationship to their accompanying jazz soundtracks.
Using stencils, brushes, sticks, nails, and combs to lay luminous runs of tumbling
shapes across saturated fields of color, completely indifferent to the confines of
individual frames, Lye sought to distance his work from cognitive preoccupations
and bring it closer to what Gilles Deleuze once described as cinema’s “signaletic”
state. In this condition, which exists before or beyond the imposition of linguistic
meanings, the film image is approached as a non-signifying, non-syntactic “sig-
naletic material” whose “modulation features” (such as color, mouvement, et
sound) may be used to address spectators at the level of direct sensation.19 Lye’s
hand-painted films of the ’30s represent one of the first and most emphatic efforts
to work in this manner.

In developing his direct-film idiom, Lye was operating far from the concerns
of prior abstract filmmakers, who—from the abortive efforts of the Italian
Futurists Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra to create the first signaletic, hand-col-
ored films in 1911 to the development of abstract cinema in Weimar Germany in
the early 1920s—had worked beneath the sign of the purist and transcendental
aspirations of abstract painting. Figures as diverse as Fischinger, Walter Ruttmann,
and Henri Léopold Sauvage had sought to elevate painting to the pure heights of
musique; more ambitiously, others such as Richter and Eggeling had tried to develop
a universal language of moving abstract forms. In pursuit of these objectives, le
majority of these “absolute” filmmakers had come to share the synesthetic goal of

19.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 25–30.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta

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uniting music and painting beneath the banner of film, spurred on by the
prospect of attaining an ideal convergence of musical and visual form.20 Lye’s
kinesthetic objectives were, cependant, largely at odds with such concerns. Having
no interest in furthering the rarefying objectives of existing art forms and favoring
the worldlier, more corporeally immediate cadences of jazz over the ethereal musi-
cal accompaniments of his Continental predecessors, Lye instead returned
abstract cinema to the ground-level clamor of modernity, on terms closest to those
of the genre’s Futurist inaugurators. In doing so, cependant, he operated with less
violence and pro-industrial zeal, more lyricism, and a much greater affinity for
existing mass cultural forms.

Seeking to foster a strong somatic reaction to his hand-painted films, Lye
availed himself of the mass cultural resources of jazz, together with the jittery,
morphological madness of early animation—both important if contested sources
of progressive popular experience during the interwar period. By loosely weaving
together the eccentric rhythms of the former and the formal freedoms of the lat-
ter and fusing these in turn with the avant-garde traditions of geometric and ges-
tural abstraction, Lye created a hybrid art form centered on the technical appara-
tus of cinema that sought to deploy the progressive capabilities of both halves of
Theodor Adorno’s incomplete dialectical whole of mass and elite cultural forms.
In this way he was able to bypass Adorno’s misgivings concerning the emancipato-
ry potential of both mediums. If Adorno had harbored reservations regarding the
excessive standardization of jazz, which he regarded as a cipher for the increasing
standardization and administration of society at large, the musical material with
which Lye worked was just one strand of a considerably more sophisticated and
anarchic ensemble of color, sound, and music. By no means wholly standardized,
Lye’s films instead tack back and forth between extreme states of order and chaos,
their imagery and music moving in and out of sync in a completely unpredictable
fashion. Ce faisant, they serve a somatic sensory agenda that was greatly at vari-
ance with Adorno’s strict, and strictly modernist, confinement of progressive
musical apprehension to a purely auditory (and cognitive) plane. And if Adorno
had expressed mounting concern over cartoon violence during the course of the
1930s, believing (contrary to Walter Benjamin) that the audience’s laughing
response to such events encouraged them to masochistically identify with the vio-
lence to which they themselves were subjected in their daily lives, Lye exchanged
the depicted brutality of Mickey and Donald for a purely sensory violence of color,
light, and sound presented with the hope of countering existing cultural forms of
somatic alienation.21 In this way he was able to maneuver into a critical space

20.
I examine the topics of image-music relations and the synesthetic impulse in early abstract
cinema at greater length in my “Music and Image in Len Lye’s Direct Films,” Journal of New Zealand Art
Histoire 27 (2006), pp. 1–14.
21.
For Adorno’s reservations concerning the standardized character of jazz and other forms of
popular music, see “On Jazz” (1936), reprinted in Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California
Presse, 2002), trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, pp. 470–96. Together with Max Horkheimer, Adorno voices his
concerns regarding the socially submissive character of the laughter elicited by cartoon violence in
Dialectique des Lumières (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), trans. Edmund Jephcott, p. 110.

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The Vital Body of Cinema

located between the contrasting stances toward mass culture assumed by the two
great German critics in their exchanges of the 1930s. He achieved this by propos-
ing a form of filmmaking that could fulfill Benjamin’s hope for a revolutionary
“innervation” of technology on the part of the masses, while allowing Adorno’s
concept of a revived mimetic relationship to nature to take center stage.

Throughout the 1930s, Benjamin grew increasingly pessimistic about
humanity’s capacity to forge a new and more productive relationship to technolo-
gy. Néanmoins, he continued to regard an infusion of the revolutionary energies
of the masses into the technical apparatus of industry and culture as a potential
source of progress on two fronts: politically, as the best hope for advancing social-
ism, and ecologically, as a means of rebalancing the relationship between nature
and technology.22 Adorno, for his part, was less sanguine about the prospect of an
improved relationship to technology, yet he too was concerned to promote a
rebalancing of the human relationship to nature, which had been dangerously
repressed beneath a veneer of enlightened rationality and modern industrial
indifference. For Adorno, the recovery of a now faded mimetic relationship
between humanity and the natural realm was a sine qua non for the resumption
of social progress. Where he broke with Benjamin, cependant, was over the issue of
technology’s ability to facilitate this process. To Adorno’s way of thinking, technol-
ogy was too firmly imbued with the abstracting and alienating tendencies of
instrumental reason to help redirect society’s attentions to the sensuous particu-
larities of the natural world.23

When we constellate Lye’s position with the views of Benjamin and Adorno,
it becomes clear that at an aspirational level he shared key aspects of each critic’s
outlook, fusing Benjamin’s early early (and never wholly relinquished) technologi-
cal optimism with Adorno’s (admittedly faint and carefully qualified) faith in the
recovery of certain lost powers of sensuous mimesis. Upon recovering such pow-
ers, the human subject could in theory trade its purely instrumental and rational-
izing relationship to natural objects for a more balanced interaction of self and
monde. In his direct cinematic idiom, Lye endeavored to support such a process by

For an important survey of both thinkers’ changing views on animation in connection with the broad-
er critical reception of early animation in Europe, see Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation,
Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (Londres: Verso Books, 2002), esp. pp. 115–22, 170–79.
22.
In his 1929 essay on Surrealism, Benjamin somewhat cryptically described this infusion as a
process of “collective innervation.” See Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the
European Intelligentsia” (1929), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press, 1999), éd. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland,
and Gary Smith, p. 218. For important commentaries on this strand of Benjamin’s thought, see Susan
Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62
(Autumn 1992), pp. 3–41; and Miriam Hansen’s “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” in
Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (Stanford: Stanford
Presse universitaire, 2002), éd. Gerhard Richter, pp. 41–73.
23.
On this point, see Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectique des Lumières, p. 32. For a lucid expo-
sition of Adorno’s concept of mimesis and its social implications, see Richard Wolin, “Utopia, Mimesis,
and Reconciliation: A Redemptive Critique of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” Representations 32 (Autumn
1990), pp. 33–49.

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inscribing a dynamics of motion born in the body’s empathic relationship to
nature into the image space of cinema, thereby investing the film image with his
own highly developed capacities for sensuous mimesis. Contrary to Adorno and
Benjamin, cependant, there was no explicitly revolutionary dimension to his prac-
tice and no direct investment in Marxist cultural politics. Plutôt, his aesthetics
were rooted in a simpler wish to use technology to enhance the sensory lives of his
films’ spectators. This therapeutic agenda enables us to place Lye’s work in a fur-
ther context, namely the efforts of avant-garde artists of the 1920s to use new
technology to restructure the human sensorium.

At various moments in the 1920s, European artists had endeavored to use
new technology to alter the human sensorium, by amplifying or restructuring its
existing sensory capabilities. Richter and Eggeling, for example, had aspired to
enhance the communicative capabilities of vision by means of their universal lan-
guage. Aleksandr Rodchenko and László Moholy-Nagy, meanwhile, had sought to
use photography and projected light to adapt the senses to the changing perceptu-
al conditions of modernity. But while Lye shared the belief of these artists in the
susceptibility of the senses to the acculturating influence of technology, he was
interested neither in expanding the horizons of an existing sensory faculty à la
Richter and Eggeling nor in modernizing percept ion in the manner of

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Lye. Rainbow Dance. 1936.

The Vital Body of Cinema

Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy. Plutôt, his aspirations were strictly therapeutic,
being directed toward the restoration of an innate but socially neglected register
of somatic experience. Nevertheless, Lye shared the technological optimism of his
predecessors, together with their urge to fold the experience of art back into the
spaces of everyday life—and it was in this spirit that he produced Rainbow Dance
(1936), an advertisement for post-office savings accounts that rehearsed a range
of possibilities for a somatically unalienated relationship to leisure activity in the
world beyond the sedentary confines of the cinema.

Merging several cinematic idioms and making inventive use of the new
Gasparcolor printing process, Rainbow Dance was supposed to make the virtues
of leaving money in the care of Britain’s Post Office Savings Bank abundantly
clear. What Lye produced, cependant, was a heady paean to bodily vitality, as fig-
ured by a lone silhouetted figure’s jaunty and increasingly rapturous engage-
ments with his worldly surroundings. Loosely chronicling the life and times of a
Londoner who leaves the drab confines of the city for a country vacation, où
he walks and dances in the hills and then plays tennis with a medley of painted
balls that spin and whirl around him, Lye fed a combination of found footage
and handmade imagery through the cumbersome three-negative Gasparcolor
colorization process. The result is a balletic narrative in which the energies of
the natural environment—in the form of ocean waves, rain, and overlaid screens
of color—continue to invade and animate the body of his protagonist. In this
half-drawn, half-photographic world, the sonorous forces of Creole music and
pure, luminous color are repeatedly transposed from the body’s exterior to its
interior and back again in a free play of counterpointed exchange between the
human sensorium and its enveloping milieu. In this dreamworld of unalienated
bodily sensation, an emphatically kinesthetic dimension is brought to all modes
of leisure activity. So captivating and immediate is Lye’s imagery that the stiff
voice-over by the film’s sponsor during the film’s final moments feels like noth-
ing so much as a suffocating recall to the darkly silhouetted realm of featureless
streets and houses with which it once more be drained away by the routinized
demands of everyday existence.

The Rhythms of Labor and the Social Body

If in his direct films and Rainbow Dance Lye sought to recall for his viewers
the pleasures and possibilities of a somatically replenished and re-sensitized
approach to their leisure activities, he elsewhere broadened the scope of his socio-
somatic interests to encompass the times and spaces of labor and the increasingly
rationalized rhythms of the entire social body. That the social field at large could
be rendered amenable to the needs and desires of an unalienated human body
was an assertion that Lye formulated in two steps, the first taken rather shakily in
a seven-minute publicity film for Shell Oil, entitled Birth of the Robot (1936), et
the second more assuredly in Trade Tattoo (1937), Lye’s major contribution to the

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interwar filmic discourse of rhythm, montage, labor, and social life.

Birth of the Robot (1936), a stop-motion puppet ﬁlm in which Lye presented
the discovery and exploitation of oil as the latest and most liberating step in
humanity’s passage from myth to enlightenment, is a work that is difﬁcult to align
with the core values of Lye’s empathy-based aesthetic but is signiﬁcant neverthe-
less because of the reconciled vision of natural and technological existence it
endeavors to put into play. Freely blending imagery from the ancient and modern
eras, the ﬁlm begins with an automobile and its driver touring the Egyptian sands
in a car that runs on music beamed from a clockwork space station (symbolizing
the solar system) where Venus resides. After the car and its driver succumb to a
sudden and mysterious sandstorm in the desert that gradually mutates into a tum-
bling psychedelic time tunnel, the notes of Venus’s music, which rain down from
the sky, magically transform into oil droplets that soak into the desert sands.
There they contribute to the magical resurrection of both car and driver alike,
with the latter reborn as a dancing, hot-stepping robot, whose appearance signals
the onset of combustion-driven modernity. During the ﬁlm’s ﬁnal sequences, un

Lye. Birth of the
Robot. 1936.

car-driven process of urban and economic expansion begins to overtake the globe,
with roads and highways inching their way toward all points on the map. Yet even
as this process takes hold, the sun continues to shine, the ﬁelds remain green, et
the natural environment remains jubilantly intact.

For an artist whose aesthetics were rooted in the human sensorium’s mimet-
ic affinity with nature, who would later stress that he derived little “emotional sat-
isfaction from parallels made between human and mechanical principles and
processes,” Birth of the Robot is an odd work. It seems to center on the double fanta-
sy of a robotic apotheosis of the human soma and a utopian conception of a world
to come in which the realms of first and second nature will remain in consummate
accord.24 While the first fantasy runs counter to the treatment of technology and

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The Vital Body of Cinema

the body that prevails elsewhere in Lye’s oeuvre and is therefore difficult to align
with the remainder of his filmic output, the second is wholly representative of his
never-to-be-abandoned aspirations to a dreamworld of total reconciliation
between technology and nature. It is this dreamworld that would form the focus
of Trade Tattoo (1937), Lye’s last major GPO commission and a film in which the
laboring body takes center stage.

Trade Tattoo was intended to demonstrate the centrality of the mail system to
the social and economic welfare of an increasingly rationalized British society at
home and across the full reach of its world-spanning trade networks. Lye himself,
cependant, preferred to approach the film as a forum for conveying “a romanticism
about the work of the everyday, in all walk/sit works of life.”25 Joining an estab-
lished line of cinematic efforts to figure the dynamism of modern life via the
rhythmic agglomerations of montage, Lye’s ode to trade and society in Trade
Tattoo presents a world in which the demands of labor and social rationalization
are reconciled with the pleasures of unalienated bodily sensation.

Working with offcuts of existing GPO films and splicing together a handful

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Lye. Trade Tattoo. 1937.

of upbeat musical sources, Lye subjected every frame of Trade Tattoo’s imagery to
the subtractive coloring processes of the three-strip Technicolor system, lequel
allowed him to introduce thirty-two different color effects to his black-and-white
footage. Alternating between entirely hand-painted sequences, luridly tinted pas-
sages of found footage, and hybrid moments in which the two are superimposed,
the film as a whole comprises a powerful rhythmic aggregate of image, color, et
sound, resting as usual on the loose and occasionally divergent approach to syn-
chronization that was Lye’s stock-in-trade. Opening with a flurry of color in the
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24.
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Lye, “The Art that Moves,” p. 85.
Lye, cited in Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 151.

OCTOBER

forms, the film soon progresses to a smooth montage of scenes addressing differ-
ing facets of British economic life; laboring processes like the smelting and forg-
ing of metal, the shipping of goods, and the bustle of markets in far-flung geo-
graphic locales dominate proceedings. From the film’s midpoint onward, le
hand-stenciled intertitles that impose a minimum of narrative structure on Lye’s
ceaselessly mutating imagery shift from outlining the tasks of trade and industry
to stressing the role of the postal system in facilitating trade. Toward the film’s
end, amid an increasingly far-flung montage of shipping, rail travel, and postal
sorting, the viewer is reminded that “the rhythm of trade is maintained by the
mails.” Moments later, the viewer is exhorted to “keep in rhythm by posting early.”
Ainsi, while the film operates most immediately as a vehicle for assimilating the
spectator to the routinized requirements of the mail system, at a more expansive
level it concerns the role of the laboring body within an entire complex of ratio-
nalizing forces over which the British government presides. And this role, as the
film suggests, is not one of docile submission; instead, the laboring body’s func-
tion is to infuse the rigid rhythms of the social structure with the lively, less pre-
dictable impulses of the human soma.

Throughout Trade Tattoo, Lye constructs sequences in which a more balanced
exchange of energies between the domains of the organic and the mechanical
prevail. To this end, the blue-collar workers in the film are shown in only lightly
industrialized settings, directing the movements of cranes and ropes with ease
instead of having the rhythms of automated machinery imposed upon them. Et
when footage of a mail room appears, Lye focuses not on the sedentary and repet-
itive desk-bound activities of white-collar work, but instead hones in on the deft
and dexterous hand movements of bustling clerks and secretaries.

The film also works to soften and contest the rhythms of automation at an
abstract level, for from start to finish, Lye employs the syncopated and unpre-
dictable rhythms of music, montage, and stenciled fields of color to further miti-
gate the severe and unforgiving routines of rationalized labor. Surtout, cependant,
he never brings these rhythms to a halt, nor does he derail them completely—ges-
tures of restraint in keeping with his energizing but not non-revolutionary aspira-
tions in the field of leisure. In Trade Tattoo, Lye was by no means agitating for the
inception of entirely new processes of labor and social oversight; instead, he was
calling for a much-needed recalibration of the relationship between the abstract-
ing forces of reason and the singular needs and powers of the bodies over which
they reign.

The word “tattoo” has two meanings. In addition to referring to an image on
the skin, it can also designate a form of military entertainment in which soldiers
march in lockstep formation to a musical accompaniment. While the free and live-

Kill or Be Killed

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The Vital Body of Cinema

ly rhythms of Trade Tattoo exhibit no such discipline, seeming if anything to mock
the notion of martial uniformity, when war did come to Europe, Lye proved that
he was more than capable of militarizing his practice.

Dans 1941, after several years of sparse freelance work, Lye began receiving com-
missions from a second government film agency, the Realist Film Unit, producing
informational shorts for the war effort. While required in these soberly paternalistic
films to adopt a blandly realist idiom, on one memorable occasion, the riveting Kill or
Be Killed (1942), about the mutual stalking of a British and a German sniper in wood-
land surroundings, he was able to put his kinesthetic interests to chillingly effective
utiliser. By the standards of Lye’s previous output, Kill or Be Killed was extremely long, Dans
other respects, cependant, it marked a return to earlier interests: working to transform
the film’s straightforward narrative scenario into a tense evocation of the body’s role
in tactical combat, he found himself deploying the slower rhythms of Tusalava, depuis
some fifteen years earlier.

As Roger Horrocks was the first to observe, Kill or Be Killed is the only film
among Lye’s wartime output to firmly incorporate his somatic concerns: it makes
inventive use of close-ups and long, gradually unfolding sequences of movement
to align the somatic experiences of spectators with those of the film’s protagonist,
a Scottish sniper patiently tracking and then assassinating his German counter-

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Lye. Kill or Be Killed. 1942.

OCTOBER

part.26 Throughout the film’s painstakingly relayed real-time sequences, which Lye
himself directed, a variety of isolated audio and visual cues—ranging from a sud-
den gleam of light reflecting off a hidden pair of binoculars to the sound of hur-
ried footsteps on the forest floor—are used to punctuate the film’s incremental
narrative flow. Aside from these occasional moments of audiovisual excitement,
cependant, it is the film’s unstinting concentration on the nuances of bodily move-
ment, the gradually unfolding figures of motion inscribed by the crawling, sidling
bodies of the snipers that imbue it with a slowly mounting sense of drama.
Anticipating the first-person shooting techniques of later decades, Lye mounted a
camera on the British soldier’s waist for an early sequence in the film. Plus tard, as the
soldier moves stealthily among the undergrowth, his movements are plunged peri-
odically into darkness, such that tracking his position becomes as much a matter
of corporeal guesswork and anticipation as detached observation. The results of
this artfully observed encounter are brutal: following his death, the German
sniper’s body is used as a decoy to attract a nearby patrol, each of whose members
are in turn picked off as they move into an open clearing.

If Lye had endeavored to deploy cinema as a life-giving apparatus during the
1930s, transforming the screen image into a vital and enlivening repository of
stored somatic energy, he emphatically reversed his priorities in the midst of war,
returning not only to the incremental rhythms and gray tones of his first film,
Tusalava, but also to that film’s grisly scenario of life-taking. Having been forced
by circumstance to relinquish the formal freedoms of abstraction, Lye was obliged
to bring his somatic preoccupations to bear within the context of a purely depic-
tive idiom. Ce faisant, he was at last able to proffer his deferred response to the
events of Venice in 1936, exchanging the joyful energies of color, line, and synco-
pated rhythm for the altogether sterner regimens of military discipline and con-
trol. Not only this, but even as he consented to militarize his practice, Lye offered
a second, strictly cinematic rebuke to Fascism, counterposing the sovereign indi-
viduality of his triumphant British sniper to the docile ranks of the militarized
German masses, the image of whom was writ large in innumerable films and pho-
tographs of this period.

Coda: Somaesthetic Cinema

If Lye’s early films are usually seen in the context of abstract cinematic para-
digms, it should now be evident that he was not the last exemplar of a transcen-
dentally directed and idealizing tradition of prewar avant-garde film practice. Il
was instead that period’s most significant exponent of an earthbound and materi-
ally inflected form of cinema, one whose rehabilitative bodily concerns would
eventually be revived in the postwar period.

When the avant-garde filmmaking tradition resumed on the American West
Coast in the 1950s, it initially owed much to the visual-music paradigm of the pre-

26.

Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, p. 199.

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The Vital Body of Cinema

war period. In the 1960s and 70s, cependant, the body once again became the object
of a host of new moving-image practices. Employing many different formats and
technologies, these ranged from the nonobjective extremes of psychedelic light
shows, flicker films, and three-dimensional projections to the arch-realistic enter-
prises of Warholian ennui and real-time video surveillance. Though many of these
practices aspired to a much less reassuring mode of bodily address than Lye
sought to foster in his own work, all evinced a Lye-like urge to protect the body
and its sovereign capabilities from the encroachments of socially prevalent forms
of corporeal discipline and control.27 Indeed, it is this protective impulse that
unites such diverse phenomena as the sensory assaults of the flicker film (comme
shown in the work of Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits), the soothing exchange of
energies between human bodies and slowly shifting beams of light (as shown in
the solid-light films of Anthony McCall), and the use of video surveillance to criti-
cally restructure viewers’ relationships to their own body images (as shown in the
work of Bruce Nauman).28

Like Lye, many of these postwar practitioners adopted an expanded and
increasingly transmedial cinematic outlook, while others moved beyond the con-
fines of film entirely. Here too, Lye remains an important precursor, for such
developments were entirely in keeping with his work as a direct filmmaker where
considerations of medium- and apparatus-specificity remained secondary to a
reception-centered interest in somatic rejuvenation. It is for this reason that Lye’s
approach to kinetic sculpture in the postwar period could proceed on much the
same basis as his filmmaking activities, remaining rooted in the phenomenon of
bodily empathy in spite of his transition from celluloid to steel. Ainsi, in works
ranging from his softly swaying Fountain (1963–76) to his violently shuddering
Blade (1976), the transmission of somatic energy from artwork to spectator
remained uppermost in Lye’s mind. His ultimate allegiance was to figures of
motion and their impact on the human body, not to cinema or sculpture per se.

Several publications by Branden Joseph address this phenomenon. Voir, in particular, his Beyond

27.
the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
28.
I consider McCall’s contribution to the postwar tradition of somaesthetic cinema in my
“Anthony McCall and the Somaesthetics of Solid Light,” in Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light (Wellington,
N.Z.: Adam Art Galler y, 2010). Voir: http://www.adamartgaller y.org.nz/admin/wp – content/
uploads/2010/02/lukesmytheessay2.pdf (accessed October 24, 2010).