WHEN : 13th June, 6:00pm
WHERE : Institute of Modern Art
You are invited to view Len Lye’s great lost film, the ‘rhapsodic’ All Souls Carnival (1957). An expatriate New Zealander, Lye worked in London from 1926 to 1944, and in New York from 1944 until his death in 1980. He is known for his pioneering ‘direct films’, made without a camera by directly painting or scratching film. All Souls Carnival was created to accompany a live performance of a new composition by American composer Henry Brant at New York’s Carnegie Hall, where it was back-projected behind the musicians. Although Lye famously synchronised his films to their soundtracks, on this occasion he and Brant developed their contributions independently, only bringing them together on the night. Lye made the film relatively quickly, with much of the work being done using felt-tip pens, making the film look gestural, painterly, and ‘wet’. All Souls Carnival is Lye at his most abstract expressionist. At twelve minutes, it is much longer than his other direct films (which tend to be music-clip length). Lye biographer and scholar Roger Horrocks discovered the original handpainted footage in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art and oversaw the reconstruction, adding a recording of Brant’s composition.
All Souls Carnival will be shown with two documentaries about action painting, Hans Namuth’s classic Jackson Pollock 51 (1951) and the Yves Klein sequence from Mondo Cane (1962). Thanks to Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Image: Len Lye All Souls Carnival 1957
