Finally, finally, Keith Griffiths’ documentary about Len Lye (1901–1980) turns up on YouTube. Doodlin’ – Impressions of Len Lye was made in 1987, and is one of several films that Griffiths made about avant-garde film-makers. There’s some slight crossover with his later history of abstract cinema—Stan Brakhage turns up in both films—but Lye was always much more than a film-maker despite his pioneering work of the 1930s. Doodlin’ charts Lye’s progress from his youth in New Zealand, where his earliest artistic impulses were oriented towards painting, to his travels through Samoa and Australia, and from there to London where almost by accident he ended up making short, semi-abstract films for the General Post Office’s promotional division. The single constant in Lye’s life was a restless creativity, something he later brought to kinetic sculpture after he moved to America in the 1940s. Lye is justly celebrated for his short films: Free Radicals (1958/79) is an extraordinary piece of abstract cinema, white lines and marks scratched onto the emulsion of a strip of unprocessed film that jump and flash in time to a recording of African drums. Griffiths’ documentary is a reminder that Lye was an artist who was never constrained by a single medium.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive