Color Cry, 1953

Color Cry, 1952, 3 mins

Lye continued to develop new kinds of “direct film” (films made without a camera). In Color Cry, his first major American film, he found a striking new way to use Man Ray’s “rayogram” or “shadow cast” process, arranging a variety of fabrics and stencils on strips of film. Strips of film with sprocket holes were also used as stencils. Lye synchronised his film to some haunting music by blues-singer Sonny Terry, which he imagined to represent the anguished cry of a runaway slave. Lye used the 16mm format for this and for his other American films.