On Tuesday 6 July the Auckland Art Gallery present a one-off screening of the recently reconstructed Len Lye film All Souls Carnival (1957). It's the film's first public screening in Auckland.

Working in Britain, then New York, Len Lye was an experimental filmmaker, a pioneer of "direct films" (films made without a camera by painting or scratching the celluloid). New Zealand audiences are very familiar with the expatriate's finely wrought short-short films closely
synchronised to music - they are often considered forerunners of the music clip. So All Souls Carnival comes as a surprise. It's long - 16 minutes. And it isn't synchronised with its soundtrack. On Tuesday 6 July the Auckland Art Gallery present a one-off screening of the recently reconstructed Len Lye film All Souls Carnival (1957). It's the film's first public screening in Auckland.

Working in Britain, then New York, Len Lye was an experimental filmmaker, a pioneer of "direct films" (films made without a camera by painting or scratching the celluloid). New Zealand audiences are very familiar with the expatriate's finely wrought short-short films closely
synchronised to music - they are often considered forerunners of the music clip. So All Souls Carnival comes as a surprise. It's long - 16 minutes. And it isn't synchronised with its soundtrack.A collaboration with composer Henry Brant, All Souls Carnival was originally developed as a live cinema event. Lye painted the film using lacquer paint, newly available marker pens and wet dye. His patterns, washes, blobs and colour bands recall the painterly abstraction of contemporary American "action-painters" such as Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Sam Francis, Philip Guston and Helen Frankenthaler. Brandt worked in isolation from Lye, producing his carnivalesque score for piano, flute, cello and accordion. Music and visuals only came together "on the night", and as interaction rather than accompaniment.

The piece was presented at New York's Carnegie Recital Hall on 3 March 1957, with the film backprojected behind the musicians. Until recently Lye's film languished in bits in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art Film Department. Lye biographer Roger Horrocks reconstructed the film with assistance from MoMA and the New Zealand Film Archive, adding a soundtrack of Brant music.

Always intended to be presented with live music, this version of All Souls Carnival can only approximate the original experience, but it is a great opportunity to see another side of Len Lye, Lye at his most loose and painterly.

All Soul's Carnival will be preceded by two of Lye's greatest American films, his photogram film Color Cry (1953) and his best known scratch film Free Radicals (1958/79).

The screening will be introduced by Roger Horrocks and by painter Max Gimblett, another New York based expat and a close friend of Lye's. Gimblett will speak of Lye's work from his perspective as a painter grounded in the action painting tradition. Horrocks and Gimblett are trustees of the Len Lye Foundation.

Robert Leonard, Curator, Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery

Presented in conjunction with the New Zealand Film Archive Nga Kaitiaki o Nga Taonga Whitiahua, the Len Lye Foundation and the Academy Cinema.

Len Lye All Souls Carnival
plus Color Cry and Free Radicals
One screening only

Tuesday 6 July 5.30pm
Academy Cinema, Lorne Street, under the library, $8