Lye edited together “swing” versions of the popular Lambeth Walk (including Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stephane Grapelli on violin), combining them with a particularly diverse range of direct film images, scratched as well as painted. He was particularly pleased with a final guitar solo (with a vibrating horizontal line) and double bass solo (with a stomping vertical line). For this film Lye did not have to include any advertising slogans; friends at the Tourist and Industrial Development Association, shocked to learn that Lye and his family had become destitute, arranged for TIDA to sponsor the film – to the horror of government bureaucrats who could not understand why a popular dance was being treated as a tourist attraction. - Harvard Film Archive
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Reviews
Simply A Masterpiece
I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.
There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.
This short film was released by the British Council in recent years and it is a curio of an animation based on when and how it was made; it is also one of those very specific short films where if you took one of the aspects away, it would leave very little. The animated shapes and colors dance across the film, not by virtue of a camera but by direction painting of the celluloid – I don't know but one assumes cell by cell, which must have been painstaking if you think about the amount of movement and color there was in the short.A jazzed up version of the Lambeth Walk plays across the 3 minute running time and it is cheering and upbeat, fitting the atmosphere of the images well, but also mostly their movement and pacing, with key changes in the images at certain points fitting the music well. Together they make for an interesting little animation done with an usual and difficult technique, however I am not sure there is too much more reason to watch it some 75 years later other than as a historical curiosity.
Another Len Lye animated short which has paint abstracted directly on film. The music is, as usual, an excellent score for its period. It begins and ends with a silhouette of a hand with its thumb pointed up. I guess all I can say after having seen so many of these Len Lye shorts on YouTube is if you've got a taste for the unusual, or the possibly bizarre, or a collage of colors, white lines, and shadows, if you don't mind seeing something that makes you think you're in some kind of mind trip, then anything by Len Lye should be what you're looking for. Swinging the Lambeth Walk can be one of the most trippiest experiences you've ever have without taking any controlled substances. So by all means, seek this one out!
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