"Len Lye (is) the living myth of the experimental animated cinema, the creator of drawing directly on the frame, the inventor of new forms and new rhythms, the one who made use of the film not actually as a photographic support for imagery, but rather as raw material, as a technical and expressive substance of the image itself...Len Lye, when a young man, had been a restless artist, an experimenter of new techniques, an explorer of dynamic spaces. Finally he had found, after a sound and intense contact with Maori culture, with the habits and the forms of a 'primitive' civilization revisited in the light of the present-day experience, the privileged means to express, or better to 'visualize' the inner mutability of reality, the endlessly elapsing time, the uncatchable self-moving reality: he had found all that in cinema..." (Gianni Rondolino). Tonight's program features a selection of Len Lye's films spanning fifty years, and a recent documentary exploring Lye's creative work as a kinetic artist using painting, sculpture, writing and film. Born and raised in New Zealand, Lye also worked in England--exhibiting paintings with the Surrealists in the late thirties, and in New York. (Quotations from catalog, Te Ao Marami: The Cinema of New Zealand.)