Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
119-617: Leonard Charles Huia Lye ( / l aɪ / ; 5 July 1901 – 15 May 1980) was a New Zealand artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture . His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive , British Film Institute , Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley . Lye's sculptures are found in
238-526: A 2000 edition of the art journal Art in America . It examined structural-formalism as a conservative philosophy of filmmaking. In the 1970s, Conceptual art pushed even further. Robert Smithson , a California-based artist, made several films about his earthworks and attached projects. Yoko Ono made conceptual films. The most notorious of these is Rape, which centers on a woman's life being invaded with cameras, as she attempts to flee. Around this time,
357-436: A British Council commission and a bi-lingual production. These Are The Men (1943) was a more ambitious piece in which Thomas's verse accompanies Leni Riefenstahl 's footage of an early Nuremberg Rally . Conquest of a Germ (1944) explored the use of early antibiotics in the fight against pneumonia and tuberculosis . Our Country (1945) was a romantic tour of Britain set to Thomas's poetry. Thomas continued to work in
476-473: A DVD of Lye's talks illustrated with slides: Len Lye Talks about Art . Experimental film While some experimental films have been distributed through mainstream channels or even made within commercial studios, the vast majority have been produced on very low budgets with a minimal crew or a single person and are either self-financed or supported through small grants. Experimental filmmakers generally begin as amateurs, and some use experimental films as
595-645: A Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred (1941) - and for child victims of incendiary bombing raids in Ceremony After a Fire Raid (1944) and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London (1945). They were collected in Deaths and Entrances , the fourth volume of his poetry, published in 1946. The sentiments expressed in his war poems were, according to Walford Davies, representative of “the real temper of
714-633: A Hollywood Extra (1928), by Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey . However, much pre-war experimental film culture consisted of artists working, often in isolation, on film projects. In the early 1930s, Painter Emlen Etting (1905–1993) directed dance films that are considered experimental. Commercial artist ( Saturday Evening Post ) and illustrator Douglass Crockwell (1904–1968) made animations with blobs of paint pressed between sheets of glass in his studio at Glens Falls, New York . In Rochester, New York , medical doctor and philanthropist James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber directed The Fall of
833-746: A Trust Deed resulted in the Len Lye gift to the gallery. The Len Lye Collection and Archive consists of all non-film works in Lye’s possession at the time of his death in 1980, as well as several items that have been given to or otherwise acquired by the Foundation since. This body of work is extended by Len Lye works in the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision (formerly the New Zealand Film Archive)
952-656: A cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature. Brakhage 's Dog Star Man (1961–64) exemplified a shift from personal confessional to abstraction, and also evidenced a rejection of American mass culture of the time. On the other hand, Kenneth Anger added a rock sound track to his Scorpio Rising (1963) in what is sometimes said to be an anticipation of music videos , and included some camp commentary on Hollywood mythology. Jack Smith and Andy Warhol incorporated camp elements into their work, and Sitney posited Warhol's connection to structural film. Some avant-garde filmmakers moved further away from narrative. Whereas
1071-857: A collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since 1934, appeared as The Map of Love . Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), were based less on lavish fantasy than those in The Map of Love and more on real-life romances featuring himself in Wales. Sales of both books were poor, resulting in Thomas living on meagre fees from writing and reviewing. At this time he borrowed heavily from friends and acquaintances. Hounded by creditors, Thomas and his family left Laugharne in July 1940 and moved to
1190-695: A congenial drinking companion whose advice Thomas cherished. On 29 September 1946, the BBC began transmitting the Third Programme , a high-culture network which provided opportunities for Thomas. He appeared in the play Comus for the Third Programme, the day after the network launched, and his rich, sonorous voice led to character parts, including the lead in Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Satan in an adaptation of Paradise Lost . Thomas remained
1309-525: A degree of fame, while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma. He died on 9 November, and his body was returned to Wales. On 25 November, he was interred at St. Martin's churchyard in Laugharne , Carmarthenshire. Although Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language , he has been acknowledged as one of
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#17327801149501428-855: A dentist, Randy Fulleylove. The young Dylan also holidayed with them in Abergavenny , where Fulleylove had his practice. Thomas's paternal grandparents, Anne and Evan Thomas, lived at The Poplars in Johnstown, just outside Carmarthen . Anne was the daughter of William Lewis, a gardener in the town. She had been born and brought up in Llangadog , as had her father, who is thought to be "Grandpa" in Thomas's short story A Visit to Grandpa's , in which Grandpa expresses his determination to be buried not in Llansteffan but in Llangadog. Evan worked on
1547-547: A few months before his birth. Thomas has written a number of accounts of his childhood growing up in Swansea, and there are also accounts available by those who knew him as a young child. Thomas wrote several poems about his childhood and early teenage years, including "Once it was the colour of saying" and "The hunchback in the park", as well as short stories such as The Fight and A Child's Christmas in Wales . Thomas's four grandparents played no part in his childhood. For
1666-572: A form of mash-up cinema that has strong socio-political undertones. Chris Marker 's La Jetée (1962) consists almost entirely of still photographs accompanied by narration, while Jonás Cuarón 's Year of the Nail (2007) uses unstaged photographs which the director took of his friends and family combined with voice acting to tell a fictional story. Other examples of films created in the 21st century with this technique are Lars von Trier 's Dogville and David Lynch 's filmography . Animated films in
1785-702: A highly original way in his essays (collected in the book Figures of Motion ). Many of his kinetic works can be found at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth , Taranaki including a 45-metre high Wind Wand near the sea. The Water Whirler , designed by Lye but never realised in his lifetime, was installed on Wellington 's waterfront in 2006. His "Tangibles" were shown at MOMA in New York in 1961 and are now found worldwide. In 1977, Len Lye returned to his homeland to oversee
1904-516: A history of bringing up blood and mucus - proved to be the grounds for the military authorities to allocate him a C3 category medical exemption which meant that he would be among the last to be called up for service. He would subsequently be recognised as engaged in essential war work through his role in broadcasting for the BBC and documentary film making, work he took up in 1941 after he and Caitlin moved to London, leaving their son with Caitlin’s mother at Blashford . Thomas produced film scripts for
2023-401: A huge debt to the photography of Edward Weston , Paul Strand , and others, and in fact celebrate illusion. Further, while many filmmakers began making rather academic "structural films" following Film Culture ' s publication of an article by P. Adams Sitney in the late 1960s, many of the filmmakers named in the article objected to the term. A critical review of the structuralists appeared in
2142-501: A large collection of films of that period were restored and re-released on DVD, titled Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941 . With Slavko Vorkapich, John Hoffman made two visual tone poems, Moods of the Sea (aka Fingal's Cave , 1941) and Forest Murmurs (1947). The former film is set to Felix Mendelssohn 's Hebrides Overture and was restored in 2004 by film preservation expert David Shepard . Meshes of
2261-485: A lifelong friendship. Thomas introduced Watkins, working at Lloyds Bank at the time, to his friends, now known as The Kardomah Gang . In those days, Thomas used to frequent the cinema on Mondays with Tom Warner who, like Watkins, had recently suffered a nervous breakdown . After these trips, Warner would bring Thomas back for supper with his aunt. On one occasion, when she served him a boiled egg, she had to cut its top off for him, as Thomas did not know how to do this. This
2380-438: A mainstream film genre . Many of its more typical features—such as a non-narrative, impressionistic , or poetic approaches to the film's construction—define what is generally understood to be "experimental". In the 1920s, two conditions made Europe ready for the emergence of experimental film. First, the cinema matured as a medium, and highbrow resistance to the mass entertainment began to wane. Second, avant-garde movements in
2499-592: A new generation was entering the field, many of whom were students of the early avant-gardists. Leslie Thornton , Peggy Ahwesh , and Su Friedrich expanded upon the work of the structuralists, incorporating a broader range of content while maintaining a self-reflexive form. Andy Warhol , the man behind Pop Art and a variety of other oral and art forms, made over 60 films throughout the 1960s, most of them experimental. In more recent years, filmmakers such as Craig Baldwin and James O'Brien ( Hyperfutura ) have made use of stock footage married to live action narratives in
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#17327801149502618-429: A number experimental queer filmmakers such as G.B. Jones (a founder of the movement) in the 1990s and later Scott Treleaven , among others. With very few exceptions, Curtis Harrington among them, the artists involved in these early movements remained outside the mainstream commercial cinema and entertainment industry. A few taught occasionally, and then, starting in 1966, many became professors at universities such as
2737-419: A pair of stone cottages to which his mother's Swansea siblings had retired, and with whom the young Thomas and his sister, Nancy, would sometimes stay. A couple of miles down the road from Blaencwm is the village of Llansteffan, where Thomas used to holiday at Rose Cottage with another Welsh-speaking aunt, Anne Williams, his mother's half-sister who had married into local gentry. Anne's daughter, Doris, married
2856-681: A patriarchal gaze. Their response was to resist narrative in a way to show its fissures and inconsistencies. Chantal Akerman and Sally Potter are just two of the leading feminist filmmakers working in this mode in the 1970s. Video art emerged as a medium in this period, and feminists like Martha Rosler and Cecelia Condit took full advantage of it. In the 1980s feminist, gay and other political experimental work continued, with filmmakers like Barbara Hammer , Su Friedrich , Tracey Moffatt , Sadie Benning and Isaac Julien among others finding experimental format conducive to their questions about identity politics. The queercore movement gave rise to
2975-482: A period of fertility that recalls the earliest days…[with a] great outpouring of poems", as well as a good deal of other material. His second biographer, Paul Ferris , agreed: "On the grounds of output, the bungalow deserves a plaque of its own." Thomas's third biographer, George Tremlett , concurred, describing the time in New Quay as "one of the most creative periods of Thomas's life." Walford Davies, who co-edited
3094-610: A popular guest on radio talk shows for the BBC, who regarded him as "useful should a younger generation poet be needed". He had an uneasy relationship with BBC management and a staff job was never an option, with drinking cited as the problem. Despite this, Thomas became a familiar radio voice and within Britain was "in every sense a celebrity". By late September 1945, the Thomases had left Wales and were living with various friends in London. In December, they moved to Oxford to live in
3213-548: A popular poet during his lifetime, though he found earning a living as a writer difficult. He began augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention, and he was frequently featured by the BBC as an accessible voice of the literary scene. Thomas first travelled to the United States in the 1950s; his readings there brought him
3332-525: A recurring event in the family's history, and it's said that she herself had lost a child soon after her marriage. But if Thomas was protected and spoiled at home, the real spoilers were his many aunts and older cousins, those in both Swansea and the Llansteffan countryside. Some of them played an important part in both his upbringing and his later life, as Thomas's wife, Caitlin, has observed: "He couldn't stand their company for more than five minutes... Yet Dylan couldn't break away from them, either. They were
3451-727: A relationship with Pamela Glendower, one of several affairs he had during his marriage. The affairs either ran out of steam or were halted after Caitlin discovered his infidelity. In March 1943, Caitlin gave birth to a daughter, Aeronwy , in London. They lived in a run-down studio in Chelsea, made up of a single large room with a curtain to separate the kitchen. The Thomas family also made several escapes back to Wales. Between 1941 and 1943, they lived intermittently in Plas Gelli, Talsarn , in Cardiganshire. Plas Gelli sits close by
3570-432: A selection of Lye's writings, which are just as surprising and experimental as his work in other media. One of his theories was that artists attempt to reproduce themselves in their works, which he exposited in an essay complete with visual examples. Lye was also an important kinetic sculptor and what he referred to as "Tangibles". He saw film and kinetic sculpture as aspects of the same "art of motion", which he theorised in
3689-420: A springboard into commercial film-making or transition into academic positions. The aim of experimental filmmaking may be to render the personal vision of an artist, or to promote interest in new technology rather than to entertain or to generate revenue, as is the case with commercial films. The term experimental film describes a range of filmmaking styles that frequently differ from, and are often opposed to,
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3808-628: A teacher. His father had a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth , and ambitions to rise above his position teaching English literature at the local grammar school . Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles (1906–1953), who was eight years his senior. At the 1921 census, Nancy and Dylan are noted as speaking both Welsh and English. Their parents were also bilingual in English and Welsh, and Jack Thomas taught Welsh at evening classes. One of their Swansea relations has recalled that, at home, "Both Auntie Florrie and Uncle Jack always spoke Welsh." There are three accounts from
3927-445: A theory". Despite this, many of the group, including Henry Treece , modelled their work on Thomas's. In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1930s Thomas's sympathies were very much with the radical left, to the point of his holding close links with the communists ; he was also decidedly pacifist and anti-fascist. He was a supporter of the left-wing No More War Movement and boasted about participating in demonstrations against
4046-550: A wood and asbestos bungalow on the cliffs overlooking Cardigan Bay. It was there that Thomas wrote a radio piece about New Quay, Quite Early One Morning , a sketch for his later work, Under Milk Wood . Of the poetry written at this time, of note is Fern Hill , started while living in New Quay, continued at Blaencwm in July and August 1945 and first published in October 1945 Thomas's nine months in New Quay, said first biographer, Constantine FitzGibbon, were "a second flowering,
4165-763: Is Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí 's Un chien andalou (1929). Hans Richter's animated shorts, Oskar Fischinger 's abstract films, and Len Lye 's GPO films are examples of more abstract European avant-garde films. Working in France, another group of filmmakers also financed films through patronage and distributed them through cine-clubs, yet they were narrative films not tied to an avant-garde school. Film scholar David Bordwell has dubbed these French Impressionists and included Abel Gance , Jean Epstein , Marcel L'Herbier , and Dimitri Kirsanoff . These films combine narrative experimentation, rhythmic editing and camerawork, and an emphasis on character subjectivity. In 1952,
4284-542: Is also an account of the young Thomas being taught how to swear in Welsh. His schoolboy friends recalled that "It was all Welsh—and the children played in Welsh...he couldn't speak English when he stopped at Fernhill...in all his surroundings, everybody else spoke Welsh..." At the 1921 census, 95% of residents in the two parishes around Fernhill were Welsh speakers. Across the whole peninsula, 13%—more than 200 people—spoke only Welsh. A few fields south of Fernhill lay Blaencwm,
4403-741: Is known to a relatively small number of practitioners, academics and connoisseurs, it has influenced and continues to influence cinematography , visual effects and editing . Experimental film reached mainstream audiences at world exhibitions, especially those in Montreal, Expo 67 , and Osaka, Expo 70 . The genre of music video can be seen as a commercialization of many techniques of experimental film. Title design and television advertising have also been influenced by experimental film. Many experimental filmmakers have also made feature films, and vice versa. Dylan Thomas Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953)
4522-524: Is portrayed more accurately in his short story, The Peaches . Thomas also spent part of his summer holidays with Jim's sister, Rachel Jones, at neighbouring Pentrewyman farm, where he spent his time riding Prince the cart horse, chasing pheasants and fishing for trout. All these relatives were bilingual, and many worshipped at Smyrna chapel in Llangain where the services were always in Welsh, including Sunday School which Thomas sometimes attended. There
4641-726: Is the repository of Lye’s film prints that are owned by the Len Lye Foundation, and viewing prints are also in the Collection at the Govett-Brewster. The Len Lye Centre a dedicated gallery for the Len Lye collection connected to the Govett-Brewster was opened on 25 July 2015. This is the first gallery in New Zealand to be dedicated to a single artist. There are two documentaries about Lye: Flip and Two Twisters , directed by Shirley Horrocks and Doodlin' , and
4760-890: The British Film Institute in London, the National Film Board of Canada and the Collective for Living Cinema. Some of the more popular film festivals, such as Ann Arbor Film Festival , the New York Film Festival 's "Views from the Avant-Garde" Side Bar, the International Film Festival Rotterdam , and Media City Film Festival prominently feature experimental works. The New York Underground Film Festival , Chicago Underground Film Festival ,
4879-572: The British Union of Fascists . Bert Trick has provided an extensive account of an Oswald Mosley rally in the Plaza cinema in Swansea in July 1933 that he and Thomas attended. In early 1936, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara (1913–1994), a 22-year-old dancer of Irish and French Quaker descent. She had run away from home, intent on making a career in dance, and aged 18 joined the chorus line at
Len Lye - Misplaced Pages Continue
4998-890: The Centre Pompidou in Paris often include historically significant experimental films and contemporary works. Screening series no longer in New York that featured experimental work include the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, Ocularis and the Collective for Living Cinema . All these associations and movements have permitted the birth and development of national experimental films and schools like "body cinema" ("Écoles du corps" or "Cinéma corporel") and "post-structural" movements in France, and "structural/materialism" in England for example. Though experimental film
5117-821: The LA Freewaves Experimental Media Arts Festival, MIX NYC the New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Toronto's Images Festival also support this work and provide venues for films which would not otherwise be seen. There is some dispute about whether "underground" and "avant-garde" truly mean the same thing and if challenging non-traditional cinema and fine arts cinema are actually fundamentally related. Venues such as Anthology Film Archives , San Francisco Cinematheque , Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California , Tate Modern, London and
5236-547: The Lettrists avant-garde movement, in France, caused riots at the Cannes Film Festival , when Isidore Isou 's Traité de bave et d'éternité (also known as Venom and Eternity ) was screened. After their criticism of Charlie Chaplin at the 1952 press conference in Paris for Chaplin's Limelight , there was a split within the movement. The Ultra-Lettrists continued to cause disruptions when they announced
5355-537: The Llansteffan peninsula, a Welsh-speaking part of Carmarthenshire. In the land between Llangain and Llansteffan, his mother's family, the Williamses and their close relatives, worked a dozen farms with over a thousand acres between them. The memory of Fernhill, a dilapidated 15-acre farm rented by his maternal aunt, Ann Jones, and her husband, Jim Jones, is evoked in the 1945 lyrical poem " Fern Hill ", but
5474-549: The London Film-Makers' Co-op , and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center. Following the model of Cinema 16, experimental films have been exhibited mainly outside of commercial theaters in small film societies , microcinemas , museums , art galleries , archives and film festivals . Several other organizations, in both Europe and North America, helped develop experimental film. These included Anthology Film Archives in New York City, The Millennium Film Workshop,
5593-547: The London Palladium . Introduced by Augustus John , Caitlin's lover, they met in The Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place in London's West End . Laying his head in her lap, a drunken Thomas proposed. Thomas liked to assert that he and Caitlin were in bed together ten minutes after they first met. Although Caitlin initially continued her relationship with John, she and Thomas began a correspondence, and in
5712-763: The Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry; it was also the year in which New Directions offered to be his publisher in the United States. In all, he wrote half his poems while living at Cwmdonkin Drive before moving to London. During this time Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed. By the late 1930s, Thomas was embraced as the "poetic herald" for a group of English poets, the New Apocalyptics . Thomas refused to align himself with them and declined to sign their manifesto. He later stated that he believed they were "intellectual muckpots leaning on
5831-664: The Pompidou Centre , Paris in 2000, an Australian touring exhibition organised in 2001 by the Art Gallery of NSW , Sydney, at ACMI , Melbourne in 2009, and at Ikon Gallery , Birmingham , UK in 2010. Similarly, in New Zealand, surveys have been shown at the Gus Fisher Gallery , Auckland in 2009, and City Gallery Wellington in 2013. The University of Auckland staged an opera Len Lye the opera , composed by Eve de Castro-Robinson , about his life in 2012. Lye
5950-475: The River Aeron , after whom Aeronwy is thought to have been named. Some of Thomas's letters from Gelli can be found in his Collected Letters whilst an extended account of Thomas's time there can be found in D. N. Thomas's book, Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow (2000). The Thomases shared the mansion with his childhood friends from Swansea, Vera and Evelyn Phillips. Vera's friendship with
6069-928: The State Universities of New York , Bard College , California Institute of the Arts , the Massachusetts College of Art , University of Colorado at Boulder , and the San Francisco Art Institute . Many experimental-film practitioners do not in fact possess college degrees themselves, although their showings are prestigious. Some have questioned the status of the films made in the academy, but longtime film professors such as Stan Brakhage , Ken Jacobs , Ernie Gehr , and many others, continued to refine and expand their practice while teaching. The inclusion of experimental film in film courses and standard film histories, however, has made
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#17327801149506188-683: The mythopoetic film , the structural film, the trance film and the participatory film, in order to describe the historical morphology of experimental cinema in the American avant-garde from 1943 to the 2000s. The film society and self-financing model continued over the next two decades, but by the early 1960s, a different outlook became perceptible in the work of American avant-garde filmmakers. Filmmakers like Michael Snow , Hollis Frampton , Ken Jacobs , Paul Sharits , Tony Conrad , and Ernie Gehr , are considered by P. Adams Sitney to be key models for what he calls " structural film ". Sitney says that
6307-626: The "Art in Cinema" series of experimental films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , where Oskar Fischinger's films were featured in several special programs, influencing artists such as Jordan Belson and Harry Smith to make experimental animation. They set up "alternative film programs" at Black Mountain College (now defunct) and the San Francisco Art Institute . Arthur Penn taught at Black Mountain College, which points out
6426-472: The "Warmley Broadcasting Corporation". This group of writers, musicians and artists became known as " The Kardomah Gang ". This was also the period of his friendship with Bert Trick, a local shopkeeper, left-wing political activist and would-be poet, and with the Rev. Leon Atkin , a Swansea minister, human rights activist and local politician. In 1933, Thomas visited London for probably the first time. Thomas
6545-532: The "dull one". When he broadcast on Welsh BBC early in his career, he was introduced using this pronunciation. Thomas favoured the Anglicised pronunciation and gave instructions that it should be Dillan / ˈ d ɪ l ən / . The red-brick semi-detached house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (in the respectable area of the Uplands ), in which Thomas was born and lived until he was 23, had been bought by his parents
6664-551: The 1940s of Dylan singing Welsh hymns and songs, and of speaking a little Welsh. Thomas's father chose the name Dylan, which could be translated as "son of the sea" after Dylan ail Don , a character in The Mabinogion . His middle name, Marlais, was given in honour of his great-uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles . Dylan, pronounced ˈ [ˈdəlan] (Dull-an) in Welsh, caused his mother to worry that he might be teased as
6783-521: The 1995 definitive edition of the play, has noted that New Quay "was crucial in supplementing the gallery of characters Thomas had to hand for writing Under Milk Wood ." Thomas’s horror of war, adumbrated in some of his poems of the 1930s and fuelled by his lived experience of the of bombing raids and fire storms of the Blitz in London, received full expression in his poems of the war period. These include elegies for an elderly man - Among Those Killed in
6902-507: The 21st century such as Don Hertzfeldt 's It's Such a Beautiful Day , a 2012 American comedy-drama film, and Frederick C.G. Borromeo's film debut Distortion , a 2023 non-narrative film made in RPG Maker engine, are landmark examples of experimental animated films. Laura Mulvey 's writing and filmmaking launched a flourishing of feminist filmmaking based on the idea that conventional Hollywood narrative reinforced gender norms and
7021-737: The 90 poems he published, half were written during these years. The stage was also an important part of Thomas's life from 1929 to 1934, as an actor, writer, producer and set painter. He took part in productions at Swansea Grammar School, and with the YMCA Junior Players and the Little Theatre , which was based in the Mumbles . It was also a touring company that took part in drama competitions and festivals around South Wales. Between October 1933 and March 1934, for example, Thomas and his fellow actors took part in five productions at
7140-406: The Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid is an early American experimental film. It provided a model for self-financed 16 mm production and distribution, one that was soon picked up by Cinema 16 and other film societies . Just as importantly, it established an aesthetic model of what experimental cinema could do. Meshes had a dream-like feel that hearkened to Jean Cocteau and
7259-444: The BBC, it was a minor and intermittent source of income. In 1943, he wrote and recorded a 15-minute talk titled "Reminiscences of Childhood" for the Welsh BBC. In December 1944, he recorded Quite Early One Morning (produced by Aneirin Talfan Davies , again for the Welsh BBC) but when Davies offered it for national broadcast BBC London turned it down. On 31 August 1945, the BBC Home Service broadcast Quite Early One Morning and, in
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#17327801149507378-423: The British General Post Office, for the GPO Film Unit . He reinvented the technique of drawing directly on film, producing his animation for the 1935 film A Colour Box , an advertisement for "cheaper parcel post", without using a camera for anything except the title cards at the beginning of the film. It was the first direct film screened to a general audience. It was made by painting vibrant abstract patterns on
7497-512: The British people of the time - the resilience and the guts”. From September 1941 Thomas worked for the Strand Film Company in London. Strand produced films for the Ministry of Information and Thomas produced film scripts for six such films in 1942: This is Colour (on aniline dye processing), New Towns for Old , Balloon Site 568 (a recruitment film), CEMA (on arts organisation), Young Farmers and Battle for Freedom . He also scripted and produced Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain ,
7616-419: The House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933). Harry Smith , Mary Ellen Bute , artist Joseph Cornell , and Christopher Young made several European-influenced experimental films. Smith and Bute were both influenced by Oskar Fischinger, as were many avant garde animators and filmmakers. In 1930, the magazine Experimental Cinema appeared. The editors were Lewis Jacobs and David Platt. In October 2005,
7735-548: The Mumbles theatre, as well as nine touring performances. Thomas continued with acting and production throughout his life, including his time in Laugharne, South Leigh and London (in the theatre and on radio), as well as taking part in nine stage readings of Under Milk Wood . The Shakespearian actor, John Laurie , who had worked with Thomas on both the stage and radio thought that Thomas would "have loved to have been an actor" and, had he chosen to do so, would have been "Our first real poet-dramatist since Shakespeare." Painting
7854-403: The National Art Gallery but was rejected. The director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Bob Ballard and local engineer John Matthews were more receptive resulting in Thorburn and Matthews going to New York to discuss an exhibition and the construction of a large work Trilogy with Lye. In 1977 Hamish Keith, Matthews and Thorburn set in motion the formation of a non-profit foundation and in 1980
7973-436: The New American Cinema was marked by an oblique take on narrative, one based on abstraction, camp and minimalism, structural filmmakers like Frampton and Snow created a highly formalist cinema that foregrounded the medium itself: the frame, projection, and most importantly, time. It has been argued that by breaking film down into bare components, they sought to create an anti-illusionist cinema, although Frampton's late works owe
8092-429: The Strand Film Company, work which provided him with a much needed financial mainstay throughout the war years and his first regular source of income since working for the South Wales Daily Post . In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the Luftwaffe in a "three nights' blitz". Castle Street was one of many streets that suffered badly; rows of shops, including the Kardomah Café, were destroyed. Thomas walked through
8211-500: The Surrealists, but equally seemed personal, new and American. Early works by Kenneth Anger , Stan Brakhage , Shirley Clarke , Gregory Markopoulos , Jonas Mekas , Willard Maas , Marie Menken , Curtis Harrington , Sidney Peterson , Lionel Rogosin , and Earle M. Pilgrim followed in a similar vein. Significantly, many of these filmmakers were the first students from the pioneering university film programs established in Los Angeles and New York . In 1946, Frank Stauffacher started
8330-472: The Swansea Little Theatre (see below) with the parts they were playing. Thomas's parents' storytelling and dramatic talents, as well as their theatre-going interests, could also have contributed to the young Thomas's interest in performance. In October 1925, Thomas enrolled at Swansea Grammar School for boys, in Mount Pleasant , where his father taught English. There are several accounts by his teachers and fellow pupils of Thomas's time at grammar school. He
8449-439: The Thomases in nearby New Quay is portrayed in the 2008 film The Edge of Love . In July 1944, with the threat in London of German flying bombs , Thomas moved to the family cottage at Blaencwm near Llangain , Carmarthenshire, where he resumed writing poetry, completing "Holy Spring" and "Vision and Prayer". In September that year, the Thomas family moved to New Quay in Cardiganshire (Ceredigion), where they rented Majoda,
8568-497: The age of 39 in New York City. By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet". Dylan Marlais Thomas was the son of David John Thomas, a school master, and Florence Hannah Williams who married in 1903 and were living in Sketty Avenue, Sketty, Swansea when the 1911 Census was taken. Their daughter Nancy, born 1906, was not at home with them on Census Day. Dylan Thomas
8687-471: The background from which he had sprung, and he needed that background all his life, like a tree needs roots.". Thomas's formal education began at Mrs Hole's dame school , a private school on Mirador Crescent, a few streets away from his home. He described his experience there in Reminiscences of Childhood : Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with
8806-567: The basis of this work, Lye was later offered work for The March of Time newsreel in New York. Leaving his wife and children in England, Lye moved to New York in 1944. In Free Radicals he used black film stock and scratched designs into the emulsion. The result was a dancing pattern of flashing lines and marks, as dramatic as lightning in the night sky. In 2008, this film was added to the United States National Film Registry . Lye continued to experiment with
8925-503: The blues singer Sonny Terry . As a writer, Len Lye produced a body of work exploring his theory of IHN (Individual Happiness Now). He also wrote a large number of letters and poems. He was a friend of Dylan Thomas , and of Laura Riding and Robert Graves (their Seizin Press published No Trouble , a book drawn from Lye's letters to them, his mother, and others, in 1930). The NZEPC (New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre) website contains
9044-426: The bombed-out shell of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". Thomas later wrote a feature programme for the radio, Return Journey , which described the café as being "razed to the snow". The programme, produced by Philip Burton , was first broadcast on 15 June 1947. The Kardomah Café reopened on Portland Street after the war. In early 1943, Thomas began
9163-755: The cinema in Uplands, took walks along Swansea Bay , and frequented Swansea's pubs , especially the Antelope and the Mermaid Hotels in Mumbles. In the Kardomah Café , close to the newspaper office in Castle Street, he met his creative contemporaries, including his friend the poet Vernon Watkins and the musician and composer, Daniel Jones with whom, as teenagers, Thomas had helped to set up
9282-691: The collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art , the Art Institute of Chicago , the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Berkeley Art Museum. Although he became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950, much of his work went to New Zealand after his death, where it is housed at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth . As a student, Lye became convinced that motion could be part of
9401-435: The cultural field. While "experimental" covers a wide range of practice, an experimental film is often characterized by the absence of linear narrative, the use of various abstracting techniques—out-of-focus, painting or scratching on film, rapid editing—the use of asynchronous ( non-diegetic ) sound or even the absence of any sound track. The goal is often to place the viewer in a more active and more thoughtful relationship to
9520-577: The death of cinema and showed their new hypergraphical techniques; the most notorious example is Guy Debord 's Howlings in favor of de Sade ( Hurlements en Faveur de Sade ) from 1952. The Soviet filmmakers, too, found a counterpart to modernist painting and photography in their theories of montage . The films of Dziga Vertov , Sergei Eisenstein , Lev Kuleshov , Alexander Dovzhenko , and Vsevolod Pudovkin were instrumental in providing an alternative model from that offered by classical Hollywood . While not experimental films per se, they contributed to
9639-853: The discovery of American avant-garde in 1958 with Brakhage's films and many others European and American filmmakers. From 1947 to 1963, the New York-based Cinema 16 functioned as the primary exhibitor and distributor of experimental film in the United States. Under the leadership of Amos Vogel and Marcia Vogel, Cinema 16 flourished as a nonprofit membership society committed to the exhibition of documentary, avant-garde, scientific, educational, and performance films to ever-increasing audiences. In 1962, Jonas Mekas and about 20 other film makers founded The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City. Soon similar artists cooperatives were formed in other places: Canyon Cinema in San Francisco,
9758-472: The film Ballet Mécanique (1924), which has been described as Dadaist , Cubist , or Futurist . Duchamp created the abstract film Anémic Cinéma (1926). Alberto Cavalcanti directed Rien que les heures (1926), Walter Ruttmann directed Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), and Dziga Vertov filmed Man with a Movie Camera (1929), experimental " city symphonies " of Paris , Berlin , and Kiev , respectively. One famous experimental film
9877-433: The film industry Thomas produced 28 film scripts (not all of which reached production) as well as acting as producer and director in some cases. When recession overtook the film industry in the late 1940s he lost his most reliable source of income. The experience he gained in his film work was a significant factor, according to Walford Davies, in the maturation of Under Milk Wood . Although Thomas had previously written for
9996-565: The film industry after the war, working on feature film scripts which included: No Room at the Inn (1948), The Three Weird Sisters (1948), The Doctor and the Devils (1944 - not produced until 1985) and Rebecca's Daughters (1948 - not produced until 1992). His screenplay for The Beach of Falesá , not produced as a film, received a BBC Radio 3 production in May 2014. Altogether in his work in
10115-694: The film itself, synchronizing them to a popular dance tune by Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra. A panel of animation experts convened in 2005 by the Annecy Film Festival put this film among the top ten most significant works in the history of animation (his later film Free Radicals , not completed until 1979, was also in the top 50). Lye also worked for the GPO Film Unit's successor, the Crown Film Unit producing wartime information films, such as Musical Poster Number One . On
10234-410: The film language of the avant-garde. Italy had a historically difficult relationship with its avant-garde scene, although, the birth of cinema coincided with the emerging of Italian Futurism . Potentially the new medium of cinema was a perfect match for the concerns of futurism, a renowned for promoting new aesthetics, motion, and modes of perception. Especially, given the futurist fascination with
10353-430: The film. At least through the 1960s, and to some extent after, many experimental films took an oppositional stance toward mainstream culture. Most experimental films are made on very low budgets, self-financed or financed through small grants, with a minimal crew or, often a crew of only one person, the filmmaker. Some critics have argued that much experimental film is no longer in fact "experimental" but has in fact become
10472-404: The first New Zealand exhibition of his work at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery at that time under the directorship of Ron O'Reilly . Shortly before his death in 1980, Lye and his supporters established the Len Lye Foundation, to which he gave his work. The gallery is the repository for much of this collection, employing a full-time curator to ensure its preservation and appropriate exhibition. Lye
10591-580: The first ten years or so of his life, Thomas's Swansea aunts and uncles helped with his upbringing. These were his mother's three siblings, Polly and Bob, who lived in the St Thomas district of Swansea and Theodosia, and her husband, the Rev. David Rees, in Newton, Swansea, where parishioners recall Thomas sometimes staying for a month or so at a time. All four aunts and uncles spoke Welsh and English. Thomas's childhood also featured regular summer trips to
10710-427: The futurists were amongst the first avant-garde filmmakers group devoted to the potential of the image, praising motion and aiming towards an anti-narrative aesthetic. As an example, Marinetti's quote: "The cinema is an autonomous art. The cinema must therefore never copy the stage. The cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfil the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from
10829-481: The graceful and solemn..." As exemplified in the quote, the image is the real subject, not the story or the acting, an approach and attitude that remain true for the whole history of experimental filmmaking. Anton Giulio Bragaglia is undoubtedly the most known filmmaker from the futurist movement. The United States had some avant-garde films before World War II , such as Manhatta (1921), by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand , and The Life and Death of 9413:
10948-842: The home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield near Chippenham in Gloucestershire . There Thomas collaborated with Davenport on the satire The Death of the King's Canary , though due to fears of libel the work was not published until 1976. At the outset of the Second World War , worried about conscription , Thomas unsuccessfully sought employment in a reserved occupation with the Ministry of Information . However, an “unreliable lung”, as he described his chronic condition - coughing sometimes confined him to bed, and he had
11067-404: The key elements of structural film are a fixed camera position, flicker effect, re-photography off screen, and loop printing. Artist Bruce Conner created early examples such as A Movie (1958) and Cosmic Ray (1962). As Sitney has pointed out, in the work of Stan Brakhage and other American experimentalists of early period, film is used to express the individual consciousness of the maker,
11186-548: The language of art, leading him to early (and now lost) experiments with kinetic sculpture, as well as a desire to make film. Lye was also one of the first Pākehā artists to appreciate the art of Māori, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Island and African cultures, and this had great influence on his work. In the early 1920s Lye travelled widely in the South Pacific. He spent extended periods in Australia and Samoa, where he
11305-473: The most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. He is noted for his original, rhythmic, and ingenious use of words and imagery. His position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, and he remains popular with the public. Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea , the son of Florence Hannah ( née Williams; 1882–1958), a seamstress , and David John 'Jack' Thomas (1876–1952),
11424-399: The popular misconception in both the art world and Hollywood that the avant-garde and the commercial never meet. Another challenge to that misconception is that late in life, after their Hollywood careers had ended, both Nicholas Ray and King Vidor made avant-garde films. Film theorist P. Adams Sitney offers a concept of "visionary film", and he invented a few genre categories, including
11543-409: The possibilities of direct film-making to the end of his life. In various films he used a range of dyes, stencils, air-brushes, felt tip pens, stamps, combs and surgical instruments, to create images and textures on celluloid. In Color Cry , he employed the "photogram" method combined with various stencils and fabrics to create abstract patterns. It is a 16mm direct film featuring a searing soundtrack by
11662-434: The practices of mainstream commercial and documentary filmmaking . Avant-garde is also used, for the films of the sort shot in the twenties in France, Germany or Russia, to describe this work, and " underground " was used in the sixties, though it has also had other connotations. Today the term "experimental cinema" prevails, because it's possible to make experimental films without the presence of any avant-garde movement in
11781-486: The publication of Thomas's first book, 18 Poems , in December 1934. The anthology was published by Fortune Press , in part a vanity publisher that did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. 18 Poems was noted for its visionary qualities which led to critic Desmond Hawkins writing that the work was "the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years". The volume
11900-455: The railways and was known as Thomas the Guard. His family had originated in another part of Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire, in the farms that lay around the villages of Brechfa , Abergorlech , Gwernogle and Llanybydder , and which the young Thomas occasionally visited with his father. His father's side of the family also provided the young Thomas with another kind of experience; many lived in
12019-591: The school's mile race, held at St. Helen's Ground ; he carried a newspaper photograph of his victory with him until his death. In 1931, when he was 16, Thomas left school to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post , where he remained for some 18 months. After leaving the newspaper, Thomas continued to work as a freelance journalist for several years, during which time he remained at Cwmdonkin Drive and continued to add to his notebooks, amassing 200 poems in four books between 1930 and 1934. Of
12138-539: The second half of 1936 were courting. They married at the register office in Penzance , Cornwall, on 11 July 1937. In May 1938, they moved to Wales, renting a cottage in the village of Laugharne , Carmarthenshire. They lived there intermittently for just under two years until July 1941, and did not return to live in Laugharne until 1949. Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January 1939. In 1939,
12257-434: The sensation of speed and the dynamism of modern life. However, what is left of futurist cinema is mostly on paper, many films very lost, and other never got made. Amongst those literatures it is worth noting The Futurist Cinema (Marinetti et al., 1916), Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912), The Variety Theatre (1913), The Futurist Synthetic Theatre (1915), and The New Religion – Morality of Speed (1916). Perhaps,
12376-722: The sets at the Little Theatre was just one aspect of the young Thomas's interest in art. His own drawings and paintings hung in his bedroom in Cwmdonkin Drive, and his early letters reveal a broader interest in art and art theory. Thomas saw writing a poem as an act of construction "as a sculptor works at stone," later advising a student "to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone...hew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them..." Throughout his life, his friends included artists, both in Swansea and in London, as well as in America. In his free time, Thomas visited
12495-570: The sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime – the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature. Alongside dame school, Thomas also took private lessons from Gwen James, an elocution teacher who had studied at drama school in London, winning several major prizes. She also taught "Dramatic Art" and "Voice Production", and would often help cast members of
12614-533: The three years beginning in October 1945, Thomas made over a hundred broadcasts for the corporation. Thomas was employed not only for his poetry readings, but for discussions and critiques. In the second half of 1945, Thomas began reading for the BBC Radio programme, Book of Verse , broadcast weekly to the Far East. This provided Thomas with a regular income and brought him into contact with Louis MacNeice ,
12733-552: The town's estuarine bleakness, and the dismal lives of the women cockle pickers working the shore around him. From 1933 onwards, poet Victor Neuburg edited a section called "The Poet's Corner" in a British newspaper, the Sunday Referee . Here he encouraged new talent by awarding weekly prizes. One prize went to the then-unknown Thomas, and the publisher of the Sunday Referee sponsored and Neuburg arranged for
12852-484: The towns of the South Wales industrial belt, including Port Talbot , Pontarddulais and Cross Hands . Thomas had bronchitis and asthma in childhood and struggled with these throughout his life. He was indulged by his mother, Florence, and enjoyed being mollycoddled, a trait he carried into adulthood, becoming skilled in gaining attention and sympathy. But Florence would have known that child deaths had been
12971-452: The visual arts flourished. The Dadaists and Surrealists in particular took to cinema. René Clair 's Entr'acte (1924) featuring Francis Picabia , Marcel Duchamp , and Man Ray , and with music by Erik Satie , took madcap comedy into nonsequitur. Artists Hans Richter , Jean Cocteau , Marcel Duchamp, Germaine Dulac , and Viking Eggeling all contributed Dadaist/Surrealist shorts. Fernand Léger , Dudley Murphy , and Man Ray created
13090-572: The work more widely known and more accessible. Beginning in 1946, Frank Stauffacher ran the "Art in Cinema" program of experimental and avant-garde films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art . From 1949 to 1975, the Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival [ fr ] —located in Knokke-Heist , Belgium —was the most prominent festival of experimental cinema in the world. It permits
13209-403: Was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems " Do not go gentle into that good night " and " And death shall have no dominion ", as well as the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood . He also wrote stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog . He became widely popular in his lifetime; and remained so after his death at
13328-593: Was a maverick, never fitting any of the usual art historical labels. Although he did not become a household name, his work was familiar to many film-makers and kinetic sculptors – he was something of an "artist's artist", and his innovations have had an international influence. He is also remembered for his colourful personality, amazing clothes, and highly unorthodox lecturing style (he taught at New York University for three years). The 21st century has seen renewed international interest in Lye's career with retrospectives held at
13447-663: Was a teenager when many of the poems for which he became famous were published: " And death shall have no dominion ", "Before I Knocked" and "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". "And death shall have no dominion" appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933. In May 1934, Thomas made his first visit to Laugharne, "the strangest town in Wales", as he described it in an extended letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson , in which he also writes about
13566-460: Was an undistinguished pupil who shied away from school, preferring reading and drama activities. In his first year one of his poems was published in the school's magazine, and before he left he became its editor. Thomas's various contributions to the school magazine can be found here: During his final school years he began writing poetry in notebooks; the first poem, dated 27 April (1930), is entitled "Osiris, come to Isis". In June 1928, Thomas won
13685-495: Was because his mother had done it for him all his life, an example of her coddling him. Years later, his wife Caitlin would still have to prepare his eggs for him. In December 1935, Thomas contributed the poem "The Hand That Signed the Paper" to Issue 18 of the bi-monthly New Verse . In 1936, his next collection Twenty-five Poems , published by J. M. Dent , also received much critical praise. Two years later, in 1938, Thomas won
13804-457: Was born in Uplands, Swansea , in 1914, leaving school in 1932 to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post . Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager. In 1934, the publication of "Light breaks where no sun shines" caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara ; they married in 1937 and had three children: Llewelyn, Aeronwy , and Colm. He came to be appreciated as
13923-580: Was critically acclaimed, netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir . When "Light breaks where no sun shines" appeared in The Listener in 1934, it caught the attention of three senior figures in literary London, T. S. Eliot , Geoffrey Grigson and Stephen Spender . The following year, in September 1935, Thomas met Vernon Watkins, thus beginning
14042-672: Was expelled by the New Zealand colonial administration for living within an indigenous community. Working his way as a coal trimmer aboard a steam ship , Lye moved to London in 1926. He quickly entered modernist circles, exhibiting with the Seven and Five Society from 1927 until 1934, and becoming affiliated with the Footprints Studio . Most notably, Lye exhibited in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition and began to make experimental films. Following his first animated film Tusalava , Lye began to make films in association with
14161-536: Was married twice. His first wife was Jane (Florence Winifred) Thompson with whom he had two children: In Reno, Nevada, in May 1948, Lye married his second wife, Annette "Ann" Zeiss (born 1910, Minnesota) on the same day he obtained a divorce from Jane. Ann was formerly married to Tommy Hindle, a British journalist. He died in Warwick, New York , in 1980. In 1971 artist Ray Thorburn met with Len Lye and on his return to New Zealand attempted to arrange an exhibition at
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