Spring 2023
Jump cuts: Len Lye
A Colour Box (1935)
Len LyeAfter Len Lye had made his first direct animation work, Full Fathom Five (1935), he approached John Grierson at the Post Office’s celebrated GPO Film Unit with the short experimental film.
Although that film is now lost, it is known to have involved direct animation synchronised with the voice of actor John Gielgud reciting lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
The direct animation technique appealed to Grierson who expressed an interest in purchasing the film to carry a Post Office announcement. Instead, Lye persuaded the GPO to commission a new film.
The brief was for ‘an abstract colour film’, which became the three-minute A Colour Box. Lye painted directly onto the film stock and synchronised his visuals to ‘The Belle Creole’, a beguine by Don Barreto and his Cuban Orchestra.
Poet and Guardian film critic Robert Herring described Lye’s visuals for A Colour Box as a ‘pouring out of image and association which leaves a feeling of magic, an underlit, underwater quality … there is mind-movement in the shapes, mind-pictures in the occasional flashes, inserts, of actual photography.’
John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London
First published in Eye no. 104 vol. 26, 2023
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.