Reflection 3 – Early Abstract Film

Back in the 1950s, Len Lye had already started to make fast-editing videos, which we could see in his film Rhythm. As Horrocks said in his essay, in the early 1960s, Len Lye noticed that there was a lack of ready comprehension of visual motion and this motivated him to consider the theory of kinetic art (Horrocks, 1). In the 1950s and 1960s, as innovation in technology happened, Lye was attracted to create kinetic sculptures by “electric programming” (Horrocks, 1). In Lye’s works, motion is not subsidiary but becomes “the whole work” (Horrocks, 2). From his film Rhythm, I could understand that motion is his main focus, especially emphasized compared to the plot and what is happening. Repeating some episodes of the recorded video, Splitting an episode into several ones, and rotating the scene are techniques that match today’s fast-editing. What caught my attention was that he also made the background music match the motions in his film perfectly. Each motion and change of the scene exactly follows the beats of the music. 

“Rhythm uses rapid editing to speed up the assembly of a car, synchronizing it to African drum music” (Harvard Film Archive). One comment on the film on YouTube is that “the jump cuts timed to the rhythm of the soundtrack have become a standard part of the modern editing toolkit” (@Vidiot1955). In terms of the techniques to make a film of motions, Lye tried to “paint on a tiny canvas” (Horrocks, 7). “He was interested not in creating hard-edged ‘geometrical’ beauty of a constructivist kind but in making painterly gestures that had the sureness of the movements of “action painters” (Horrocks, 7). According to my understanding, when he was shooting the video he made some changes on the canvas, very similar to how we add a filter on the videos now. After recording the videos, Lye made matching background music and used fast editing for the video to finally reach the result of the film Rhythm.

Works Cited

Horrocks, Roger. “Len Lye: Motion, Time, Energy.” Len Lye: The Long Dream of Waking, 14 Sept. 2017, www.academia.edu/40352046/Len_Lye_Motion_Time_Energy.