About

Wild orchestrations of colour and excitable shapes dance playfully across the screen in these delightful infusions of colour and sound. Including the work of renowned experimental filmmakers such as Norman McClaren, Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye, this selection of films celebrates the boundless joy of abstract cinema.

Please note: Patrons, especially those sensitive to flickering and strobe light sources, are advised that some of these films contain flashing light effects.

Whitewash 1973

"Lynsey Martin’s work includes the use of collage and its erasure, the grain of the photographic image and handpainting and drawing imagery directly on the film surface. Martin deals with the graphic and material elements of the filmstrip, the nature of filmic movement and the nature of photography in public space." Dirk de Bruyn

4 minutes | All Ages

Lines - Vertical 1960

In Academy Award-winning animator/filmmaker’s Norman McLaren’s Lines: Vertical, a series of vertically etched white lines move and replicate with elegant precision against a shifting monochromatic backdrop in response to a serene, eastern-inspired classical score.

Produced in collaboration with McLaren’s colleague and fellow animator Evelyn Lambart at the National Film Board of Canada, for which the pair worked for several decades, founding the organisation’s animation studio (Studio A). The film features the music of composer Maurice Blackburn on electric piano and is a hypnotic study in pure design.

6 minutes | All Ages

A Colour Box 1935

Vibrant multicoloured abstract patterns erupt to propulsive island rhythms in New Zealand-born artist/filmmaker Len Lye’s ground-breaking and surreal advertisement for the British General Post Office, A Colour Box.

Made by painting directly on celluloid, Lye’s kinetic vision was the first ‘direct’ film to be screened to a general audience at the 1935 Brussels International Film Festival and was a touchstone for later experimental filmmaker-animators including Norman McLaren and Mary Ellen Bute.

Digital version produced from 35mm Eastmancolor restoration by the BFI National Archive and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.

3 minutes | All Ages

Boogie-Doodle 1941

African American pianist Albert Ammon brings the boogie, McLaren the doodle, in this all-too-brief abstract animation that is perhaps best formally described by its own comic opening titles (presented in eight languages!): ‘An experimental film…, made without camera, by drawing directly upon 35mm movie film’.

Made in 1940, just a year prior to McLaren establishing the animation studio at the National Film Board of Canada (Studio A), which released the film in 1941, Boogie Doodle is a brightly coloured, highly rhythmic, and joyful ode to the spontaneity and universality of artistic creation; McLaren’s playful, frenetic, and highly expressionistic drawn-on-film animation is a perfect match to Ammon’s propulsive boogie-woogie musical stylings.

3 minutes | All Ages

Rainbow Dance 1936

A lone silhouette (Rupert Doone) stands in a city street amid a heavy (animated!) downpour. Suddenly, the rain stops, a rainbow forms, and he is whisked away to far-flung exotic locales, where he proceeds to strut, sightsee, dance, and play tennis amidst a colouristic storm of concrete and abstract imagery.

Employing black and white shot footage overlaid with vibrant colour effects, New Zealand-born artist/filmmaker Len Lye’s innovative and surreal advertisement for the British General Post Office. Rainbow Dance is a follow up to his earlier work with the G.P.O., which showcases Lye's innovative use of early abstract filmmaking techniques, including painted-on-film animation, stencil overlays, and vibrant Gasparcolor film processing.

4 minutes | All Ages

Color Rhapsodie (Seeing Sound) 1955

A rhythmic, kinetic, and brightly coloured abstract short, Mary Ellen Bute’s Color Rhapsodie, part of her Seeing Sound experiments in visual music, explores the synaesthetic possibilities of the medium, adapting eclectic visual motifs–including brightly coloured fireworks, clouds, and abstract geometric forms–to the musical cadences of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” using precise mathematical formulae.

A pioneering figure in early experimental filmmaking, Bute was a trailblazer for recognition of women’s role in the medium, and her films have lost none of their vibrancy, flamboyance, and assurance.

7 minutes | All Ages

Stars and Stripes 1940

Sometimes dancing, sometimes fighting, always in motion; “stars” and “stripes” of red, white, blue, and black zoom and collide onscreen to the patriotic marching cadences of John Philip Sousa in Norman McLaren’s characteristically frenetic, tongue-in-cheek, and subtly subversive drawn-on-film animation.

Made in New York City during the outbreak of World War II, this early feature, made a year prior to McLaren’s move to Ottawa, Canada, in 1941, anticipates the vociferous anti-war themes the filmmaker would expand upon in his now iconic (and iconoclastic!) Academy-Award winning short film, Neighbours (1952).

2 minutes | All Ages

Kinegraffiti 1964

Printed on 16mm negative, with erupting fireworks appearing black on a white background, internationally renowned Australian experimental filmmakers Arthur and Corrinne Cantrill’s Kinegraffiti is a stark yet spontaneous study in the kinetics of process and catalysis, featuring an abstract, musique concrete-inspired soundtrack of plucked piano strings and reversed xylophone.

4 minutes | All Ages

Blinkity Blank 1955

The abstract becomes concrete, and concrete abstract, in Norman McLaren’s playful and percussive animated short, an innovative experiment with the rhythmic possibilities and negative space of its celluloid medium.

Featuring hand etched drawings engraved directly on blank film to create vivid animated imagery, the filmmaker also incorporates a unique blend of abstract rhythmic noise, achieved by engraving directly on the film's optical track, and the melodic musings of Maurice Blackburn's stirring improvisational jazz score.

This remarkable animation won a host of awards upon its release, including the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes (1955), the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film (1956), and the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival (1955).

5 minutes | All Ages

Lines - Horizontal 1962

In Academy Award-winning animator/filmmaker’s Norman McLaren’s Lines: Horizontal, a series of horizontally etched black lines move and replicate with elegant precision against a shifting monochromatic backdrop in response to American folk musician Pete Seeger’s evocative wind and string score.

Produced in collaboration with McLaren’s colleague and fellow animator Evelyn Lambart at the National Film Board of Canada, this work is a recapitulation of the pair’s experiments in planar minimalism used in Line: Vertical 1960, a continuation of their hypnotic, zen-like approach.

7 minutes | All Ages

Allegretto 1936

German filmmaker Oskar Fischinger's work caught the eye of Paramount Studios in the United States who hired him to produce animations for them. Allegretto was made at Paramount but when the Studio refused to pay for colour film stock and offered black and white only, the animator bought back his film so he could complete it in colour. Allegretto is a joyous riot of circles, diamonds and colour set to the orchestral music of American composer Ralph Rainger.

3 minutes | All Ages