A Colour Box (1935) ***

Len Lye’s hand-painted film. It combines popular Cuban dance music with abstract designs. Color was still a novelty at the time and Lye’s direct painting on celluloid creates exceptionally vibrant effects. The film won several major awards, though some festivals had to invent a special category for it, and in Venice, the Fascists disrupted screenings because they saw the film as ‘degenerate’ modern art. "A Colour Box" was financed and distributed by John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on the condition that Lye include postal messages at the end.