Radical conformity: Len Lye and the theorisation of film practice

This paper examines the way in which visual music practice, as exemplified by the animated films of Len Lye, has been marginalised within histories of the modernist avant-garde. The synaesthetic fusion of sound and image that characterises Lye’s work in animation largely falls outside the critical frameworks proposed by dominant theories of modernist poetics, which arguably place greater value on the inscription of difference than on figures of mutual interaction, interdependence and dissolution. Lye proposed an original theoretical framework for the interpretation of his work, based around his ideas of the old brain. In this paper I argue that while outwardly conforming to the need to theorise film practice, Lye’s interpretive schema proposed a model of theory that radically challenged dominant modernist discourse on the poetics of cinema.