Kaleidoscope, 1935

Kaleidoscope, 1935, 4 mins

Lye’s second direct film was sponsored by Churchman Cigarettes. At the same time his friend Oskar Fischinger in Germany was also financing his great experimental films by making cigarette commercials. In Kaleidoscope Lye animated stencilled cigarette shapes and is said to have experimented with cutting out some of the shapes so that the light of the projector hit the screen directly. He developed a number of stencils such as “a yin-yang, a diamond shape, a wheel, a star” to complement his hand-painted images. The way these shapes spun and rolled across the screen anticipated the movements of his later kinetic sculptures. Like A Colour Box, this film had music by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra.