Len Lye, Tusalava, 1929, 10 mins, 35 mm, b&w, silent, digital version. Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation. Digital version from material preserved and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery.
There’s a general distinction made between an art film (sometimes called an arthouse film) intended for a niche market and the mainstream Hollywood films intended for popular entertainment.
An even smaller genre exists that could be termed ‘film as art’ or ‘experimental film’ that adopts non-narrative forms, examines various elements of filmmaking including light, time, film technologies, arcane filmmaking practices and frequently relates to other art forms including painting, dance and sound. These films tend to be short, labour intensive and low tech.
The Light Source exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery brings together a number of artists who treat film as a creative, unconventional medium to create spectacular and unexpected effects. The artists include Len Lye, Dirk de Bruyn, Mike Leggett, Joan Brassil, Taree Mackenzie, Deirdre Feeney, Ellis D Fogg, Pia van Gelder, Hannah Gason, Ross Manning, Nicci Haynes and Teaching and Learning Cinema.
Len Lye, Colour Cry, 1952, 3 mins, 16 mm, colour (Kodachrome), sound, digital version. Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation. Digital version with the assistance of Park Road Post Production from material preserved and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery.
Exhibits by the remarkable Len Lye highlight the exhibition. The pioneering New Zealand artist should be better known on this side of the ditch. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Lye was a leading light in experimental filmmaking in London, and in the 1940s and 1950s in New York.
The earliest exhibit at Light Source is Lye’s Tusalava, 1929, a 10-minute, silent, black and white film shown here in a digital version. Lye, while still living and studying art in Wellington, arrived at the revelation: “Why try to paint movement (as Constable attempted when painting clouds), why not just make things move?”
It took Lye almost two years to make Tusalava where 4400 drawings were photographed in sequence with a Rostrum camera to produce a form of animation. In it, an octopus-like figure devours a ‘robot’ and then appears to give it new life. The menacing creature was apparently based on the Australian witchetty grub – traditionally a vital source of protein for Indigenous Australians – that gives life to those around it.
Len Lye, Free Radicals, 1958, rev 1979, 4.25 mins, 16 mm (orig. 35 mm), b&w, sound, digital version. Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation. Digital version by Park Road Post Production and Weta Digital Ltd from material preserved and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery.
The title of the film, Tusa lava, is a Samoan phrase meaning ‘just the same’ or perhaps ‘the circle of life’. The film may have carried personal experiences for the artist and subsequently became a classic in surrealist circles. As we watch it today, we enter a dream-like state with emblems from different cultures encountering organic forms that constantly morph and adopt new appearances.
Originally a live soundtrack played on two pianos with the film, but the score is now lost. Even as a silent film, it is the most captivating work at the exhibition.
Two other Lye exhibits can be experienced at the show. Colour Cry, 1952, his first major American film employed Man Ray’s “rayogram” or “shadow cast” process and arranged a variety of fabrics and stencils on strips of film for startling effect. Free Radicals, 1958 (revised 1979), regarded by some as his most significant film, focuses on light in darkness with designs scratched onto black film. One could say, it is like drawing with lightning on a black sky.
Nicci Haynes, Protest, 2022, 7 mins, digital file of laser-etched, hand-coloured 16 mm film. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery.
Canberra artist Nicci Haynes, especially in her pieces Protest, 2022 and Frame rate, 2025, approaches something of the brutal simplicity of Lye and the time-based collaging of images. Memorable are also the mesmerising images of Ellis D Fogg, Liquid Wetshows, 1968, and Dirk de Bryn’s Knots, 1990, Bridges, 2005, and Slide show, 2025.
Ellis D Fogg, Liquid Wetshows, 1968, digital file from original film footage. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery.
Light Source is an ambitious exhibition with a huge appetite but with a limited budget and limited facilities. If we are celebrating in this show the role of light and its projections from Lye to the present day, it is difficult to achieve it if we lack the work of Robert Irwin or James Turrell. Of the works included, some, such as the significant piece by Joan Brassil, are not exhibited to their full potential.
One can always argue it is better to be ambitious and fall short than to overachieve modest goals.
Dirk de Bruyn, Knots, 1990, 8 mins, digital transfer of original 16 mm film, optical sound. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Drill Hall Gallery.
Light Source, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Kingsley Street, Acton runs until 19 October, open Wednesday to Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm, no admission charges.
