RAINBOW DANCE (1936)
Article 5310 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-30-2016
Directed by Len Lye
Featuring Rupert Doone
Country: UK
What it is: Experiment film advertisement

No plot.

If you start watching experimental films of this sort, you will sooner or later start being able to pick out favorites (that is, if you don’t hate the whole form altogether). I’ve decided that Len Lye is one of those that I really like. At least partially the reason is that the examples I’ve seen have also been advertisements (in this case, it’s for the General Post Office), and this tends to add a little more sense of purpose. Also, instead of relying on pure abstraction, Lye likes to play around with concrete images as well; among all the colorful hand drawn abstraction, we have a silhouette dancer performing such actions as opening an umbrella and playing (and watching) tennis. Another plus is that Lye tends to keep his films a bit short; I get the sense that he knows when enough is enough. I liked this one, though I should point out that I didn’t see a version with the original musical soundtrack; apparently, this is a film that is often used by composers as an inspiration for soundtrack writing, so there are several copies out there on YouTube with music by various individuals.