Len Lye's films RAINBOW DANCE AND TRADE TATTOO

(This is a chapter from "Len Lye: A Biography")

Lye’s next commission, Rainbow Dance, was arranged by Grierson. In Lye’s words: ‘Every film I got from the G.P.O., I tried to interest myself in it by doing...something not previously done in film technique.’ [1] His producer Cavalcanti was always excited by this approach: ‘Len Lye could be described in the history of British cinema by one word - experiment. Perhaps the greatest of [his] experiments were with colour. But rhythm came very close nearby, and there were many other items such as camera angles and a very personal way of pursuing pure filmic expression.’ Rainbow Dance grew out of Lye’s interest in the new ‘colour separation’ processes such as Gasparcolor. Splitting up each image into three separate negatives (by the use of colour filters) and then re-combining them to produce a positive print was a complex business, but it gave more control over the final product in providing opportunities for fine-tuning. He was also intrigued by the fact that the three intermediate negatives were black and white, even though each represented a different area of colour. It occurred to him that any black and white material could be fed into this system and converted into colour. Such material might be new or old, positive or negative, filmed or handpainted - there were no limits. This idea enabled him to see the technology as like a musical instrument waiting for a bold performer who could use it to create wild cadenzas of colour. Alternatively, it was a kind of cubist machine that could swallow bland documentary footage and convert it into vivid, multi-coloured fragments.

Why were others not using the technology as freely as this? Because they still thought about film in realist terms, devoting their energy to imitating nature and getting the colours right. Lye, on the other hand, came to film as a modernist interested in abstract shapes, dream images, and collage effects. Why not ‘a strange yellow tree in a deep blue sky’ with ‘vibrant colour spots’?[2] Lye’s lateral approach to colour processing was typical of his general attitude to technology. While he never learned to drive a car - and noone who knew him wanted to encourage the idea - he could display an intuitive understanding of technology that would astonish the experts. Lye took his colour processing idea to John Grierson and succeeded once again in arousing his interest. Having organised a commission for a five-minute film to advertise the G.P.O. Savings Bank, Grierson asked Cavalcanti and Basil Wright to act as producers to keep this odd project on the rails. Wright later remarked: ‘I loved Len Lye's films. I produced one of them without knowing what the hell it was all about. I must say, seeing it again (at a retrospective) I was frightfully impressed.’[3] Lye also won the support of the Gasparcolor laboratory, although Adrain Klein was initially sceptical that anyone would be able to juggle the three colour films (or matrices) in the complex manner proposed: ‘It is a problem in non-Euclidean geometry to predict the results ’ [4]

The story-line of Rainbow Dance is minimal: a city-dweller shelters from the rain under an umbrella until a rainbow appears and magically ‘changes him into a colour silhouette’. He sets out on a holiday, travels by boat and train, goes hiking and plays a game of tennis. These actions flow from one to another in the style of a ballet. Finally there is a voice-over announcement that ‘The Post Office Savings Bank puts a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.’ Understandably some viewers saw the advertising message as an anti-climax,[5] but Lye's interest was focused on the earlier scenes, on the opportunity to film live action in the studio and ‘break that motion right down and build it up again in cinema terms’. [6] Lye was not interested in technical experiment for its own sake but saw it as a way of achieving something he had dreamed of for years - a non-naturalistic style of story-telling that used live actors as freely as if they were cartoon characters.

Cavalcanti described Rainbow Dance as ‘perhaps the first essay in film ballet’, [7] and some of Lye's ideas for ‘Quicksilver’ were able to find a home in this film. The dancer was Rupert Doone, a key figure in the Group Theatre, one of London's most adventurous theatre companies which had produced plays by T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Doone sought to revive theatre as ‘an art of the body,’ an approach reminiscent (as Ian Christie has observed) of Meyerhold’s biomechanics. [8] He collaborated with Lye and Ellitt on the choreography of Rainbow Dance which was based on everyday activities such as walking and tennis-playing synchronized to jazz music (‘Tony's Wife’ played by Rico's Creole Band). As Richard McNaughton remembered the shoot: ‘We had to rig up a white sheet in the studio without any creases in it to serve as the background because Len who was shooting in black and white wanted to use the dancer as a silhouette. Very difficult to do in those days because you had trouble with glare off the white sheet....We had to play a gramophone while the chap danced - we couldn't use synchronized playback in those days.’ [9] Even the sets were painted black and white since Lye wanted the colours created during the printing process to be as pure as possible. The filming was done by ‘Jonah’ Jones, later an expert cameraman but at that time a 20-year-old only recently promoted by Grierson from the position of messenger. He accepted Lye's odd procedures without surprise.

During the printing Lye gave full rein to his creative ideas. Complex stencil patterns were superimposed over the silhouette of the dancer. When the tennis-player made a leap, he left behind a row of variously coloured images of himself, an effect which took the old idea of Lye’s motion sketches or Balla’s Futurist paintings a vivid step further. In such scenes Lye could also be seen taking his revenge on the English climate - transforming rain and gloom into outdoors scenes with a South Pacific sense of colour and sunlight. [10] The bold poster effects of Rainbow Dance have become familiar features of music videos today but in 1936 they were still a startling novelty. Some viewers were disconcerted by the lack of realism - for example, the transformation of the traveller into a pair of brightly coloured asterisks rolling across the screen. Rainbow Dance combined a whimsical sense of humour with a streamlined approach to story-telling. The railway train was blatantly toy-like, and the boat was in the style of a child’s paper cut-out, superimposed over footage of actual waves. Rain was shown as darting dashes of colour accompanied by percussion sounds. This was typical of Lye’s desire to replace the clichés of realistic representation with what he called ‘moving hieroglyphics’.[11] In a stunning transition near the end of the film, the tennis player settles down to rest on the tennis court which suddenly became a bed. Lye could switch backgrounds in this rapid way (as an alternative to editing) because he had filmed everything with the colour-separation process in mind. This was also a new way to use matte effects (masking and superimposition). The care with which he planned every aspect of the film's colour imagery was made unmistakably clear by the theoretical essay about it that he wrote for World Film News.[12]

Rainbow Dance was premiered at the 1936 Venice Film Festival then screened by film societies in various parts of Europe. Critics sympathetic to experimental film-making cheered its innovations, including the painter Paul Nash.[13] In January 1937 the film received its first cinema release as part of a controversial programme of ‘Surrealist and Avant-Garde Films’ at the Everyman Cinema in London. Only in 1938 did it gain a more general cinema release in Britain, and the reviews were proof of how puzzling and unfamiliar its effects seemed at the time. Many described it as ‘an abstract film’. The Evening Standard reviewer commented: ‘I was unable to follow it without my anti-dazzle glasses’.[14] To-Day's Cinema found it ‘peculiar’ and ‘garish’ but recommended it as a ‘challenging’ film for ‘specialised’ cinemas.[15] Although the public response was initially mixed Rainbow Dance was eventually seen all over the world [16] and some of its visual effects entered the common vocabulary of film-making. Not every aspect has worn well but its colour and style still carry a strong impact, as Barbara Ker-Seymer noted years later when the film turned up on British television: ‘The other evening there was a programme of 1930s documentaries, all very worthy and very dull films of miners down the pits and trains puffing through the night, when suddenly the screen lit up with a burst of colour, design, and movement. It made you sit up as though you had suddenly drunk a very strong cocktail, and I recognised Rainbow Dance. It was amazing, it was as though there had been a mixup in the projection room and an extract from a contemporary avant-garde film had got in by mistake!’ [17]

A few months after completing Rainbow Dance, Lye obtained another commission from Grierson - Trade Tattoo - which allowed him to develop his colour-separation ideas in an even more extreme form. The brief, mundane script for Trade Tattoo read as follows: ‘The rhythm of work-a-day Britain / The furnaces are fired / Cargoes are loaded / Markets are found / By the power of correspondence / The rhythm of trade is maintained by the mails / Keep in rhythm by posting early / You must post early to keep in rhythm / Before 2 p.m.’ This time Lye chose to work with out-takes - left-over material - from G.P.O. documentary films. [18] He selected shots of mail-sorting, welding, cargo loading, steel milling and other types of work. This black-and-white documentary footage was transformed in astonishing ways as though an energetic team of Cubists and Futurists had given it the once-over. There was no disrespect involved - in fact, Lye was treating the Post Office's message more seriously than usual because he was intrigued by the idea that work-a-day Britain had an underlying rhythm. Was there a figure of motion for an entire society? As one possible answer to this question, Trade Tattoo can be related to films such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (a 1927 documentary that Lye admired). While Lye was never as involved with working class politics as some of the left-wing film-makers associated with Grierson, he was interested in their ideas and commented in a letter that he wanted Trade Tattoo to convey ‘a romanticism about the work of the everyday, in all walk / sit works of life’. [19]

Not satisfied with the uneven results he had obtained from Gasparcolor, Lye decided this time to try the rival process Technicolor, which had just established a lab in England. At this time Technicolor was also a three-strip (or ‘subtractive’) process. Ellitt recalls that ‘Len got a colour chart from Humphries Laboratories which showed 32 different colour changes which could be made on the printing camera. He worked out frame by frame what colours he wanted’. [20] The final prints were made from three strips or matrices but Lye saw no reason why each of the matrices should not be itself complex. This re-working made Trade Tattoo one of the most intricate exercises in multiple-printing ever attempted. He sought to include as many different kinds of visual material as possible. At the beginning of the film a hand-painted drum sequence served to warm up the audience. Later there were cartoon-style drawings of letters and clouds, a green comet and a red planet Saturn. Much of the live footage was printed in a contrasty way or reversed as a negative so that figures and objects became silhouettes. Lye used those silhouettes as a background for brightly coloured stencil patterns so that a plane in flight was filled with a buzz of polka dots and a signalling railway guard had his arm covered with dashes like Morse code. The stencil patterns (dashes, dots, asterisks and stars) were always in motion, growing larger or smaller, changing from one colour to another, dancing in counterpoint to other movements on the screen. During the steel furnace sequence, for example, a container of hot metal passed through a series of subtle colour changes as it swung gracefully through the air while a changing pattern of dots pulsed in the background.

Periodically the lab staff lost their patience and it took all of Lye's charm, together with John Grierson's negotiating skills, to talk the technicians into once more attempting the impossible. Bernard Happe and Leslie Oliver of Technicolor Ltd were struck by Lye’s amazing ability to visualise in detail the effects that could be obtained by such complex printing procedures.[21] Lye saw the job as ‘simply a matter of knitting - two pearls, one plain, etc’. [22] This knitting was shaped not only by visual ideas but also by the patterns of the music. For the soundtrack Jack Ellitt drew on five recordings of dance music by the Lecuona Band, a group which was then playing in England on the variety circuit. [23] Trade Tattoo was more wordy than most of Lye's films but it was also perhaps his most successful experiment in combining words with images. He avoided using a voice-over commentary by transferring the words in the script directly onto the screen, in a mix of styles from hand-painting to typewriting. He presented the words in rhythmic bursts, moved them round the screen and kept changing their colours. In one sense Lye was returning to the use of words on screen in silent films but he found new ways to play with these intertitles.[24]

Ellitt received about 80 pounds for his three months' work on the film, and Lye about 200 pounds for five months work. Although the laboratory costs of Trade Tattoo may have grown to several thousand pounds - a lot of money by Lye and Ellitt’s standards – the two men must have roared with laughter when an American journalist was so impressed by the intricacy of the film that he estimated the budget at a million dollars.[25] During 1937 there were previews of Trade Tattoo for special interest groups. The film had several working titles - including ‘Post Early’ and ‘In Tune With Industry’ - but Lye liked the word ‘Tattoo’ because of its association with drumming and large rhythmic displays. In 1938 the film was released through British cinemas but it made its greatest impact at specialised venues in Europe. In Paris, for example, it was shown at the Palais des Beaux Arts, the Paris Exhibition, and the Cinémathèque Francaise.[26]


Notes
[1] Gretchen Weinberg, ‘Interview with Len Lye’, Film Culture, no 29, Summer 1963, p 42.
[2] See ‘ Experiment in Colour’ and ‘Voice and Colour’, Figures of Motion, pp 42-49.
[3] Quoted in Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary, p 84.
[4] Coloured Light p.xxxix. N.b. Another Gasparcolor project that Lye began around this time (October 1936) but did not complete was ‘Fireworks’ (of which a few frames have survived).
[5] e.g. Kinematograph Weekly, 28 January 1937.
[6] ‘Len Lye speaks at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque’, reprinted Figures of Motion, p 54.
[7] Cavalcanti, p 135.
[8] See Christie’s essay ‘Colour, Music, Dance, Motion: Len Lye in England, 1927-44’ in Len Lye, p 189.
[9] Interview with Richard McNaughton, 1988.
[10] Compare Pat Hanly’s `Figures in Light’ series of paintings (after his return to New Zealand from England).
[11] ‘Voice & Colour’, Figures in Motion, p 45.
[12] See ‘Experiment in Colour’, Figures of Motion (first published in the December 1936 issue of World Film News).
[13] ‘The Colour Film’ in Footnotes To The Film ed Charles Davy, London, Lovat Dickson, 1937, p 133.
[14] ‘The L.C.C. Permits’, 16 January 1937.
[15] 2 October 1936.
[16] Edgar Anstey, Experiment In The Film, London, Gray Walls Press, 1949, p 249.
[17] Letter, 25 March 1981.
[18] Such as Night Mail, 1936.
[19] Letter from Lye to John Halas, 15 January 1958.
[20] Griffiths interview with Jack Ellitt, 1987.
[21] John Happe, quoted in a letter from John Halas to Len Lye, 2 January 1958.
[22] Letter from Lye to John Halas, 15 January 1958; see also Happe's memories of the film in John Halas & Roger Manvell's The Technique of Film Animation, London, Focal Press, 1976, pp 87-88.
[23] Letter from Barbara Ker-Seymer, 29 June 1981. The recordings were: `Anacaona’, ‘La Havane à Paris’, ‘Conga dans la Nuit’, ‘Pour Toi Madonne’ and ‘Adieu Mon Amour’.
[24] Of course, film makers during the silent period (such as Eisenstein) used to experiment in various ways with the rhythmic use of intertitles.
[25] The original source is not known but the figure still gets quoted from time to time - e.g. University Art Museum Calendar (Berkeley, California), vol 3 no 7, February 1981, p 3.
[26] A review in January 1938 by the Amsterdam newspaper Het Volk illustrates the enthusiastic reception of the film by audiences interested in experimental films: `The chief attraction of the evening was undoubtedly Len Lye's Trade Tattoo....All the advantages of the trick film from Méliès and Murnau to Ruttmann, Richter, Maholy Nagy and Fischinger were used in an amazing manner.... Geometrical figures, photographic fragments and typographical material mixed and flashed past in a wild race, but at the same time with a steady and clearly defined rhythm, combined with the most cunning sound effects.... Absolutely amazed, we...ask if after this there are still new inventions possible in the field of film technique’ (‘An Evening of Short English Films’, Het Volk, evening edition, 27 Jan 1938 – English translation). We may add that the historical importance of Trade Tattoo and Rainbow Dance also rests - as Malcolm LeGrice has pointed out - on the ‘extraordinarily versatile and accomplished way’ in which they advance one of the major tendencies in later experimental film-making - ‘that based on the transformation of film images through printing and developing techniques’ (Abstract Film and Beyond p 71).