N. or N.W.

(Len Lye, UK, 1937)

Lye of the Land

In 2002, I saw a wonderful Len Lye show at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). It was not a vast exhibition, but rather a well-selected showcase of a few different facets in the extraordinarily prolific œuvre of this protean, New Zealand-born artist (1901-1980). There were samples of his photographic works, his kinetic sculpture, and a small room set aside for continuous screening of a selection of his film works.

One of these films has never left me. N. or N.W. (1937) is one of several short pieces Lye was commissioned to make for the UK postal service. If the title strikes you as oddly familiar, you may be thinking of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959) – and Hitch himself, at one point, hoped to utilise Lye’s talents in some shape or form for a feature film project.

Lye, who never lost any opportunity for formal, technological or lyrical experimentation, merrily played with many techniques in his early, commissioned works: animation, graphic design (printed words and overlaid shapes) in motion, the rhythmic fusion of image and music (often an eclectic mix of popular musical styles), and the vibrant exploration of colour. All this we know from Lye’s more famous films, such as A Colour Box (1935) and Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939).

But N. or N.W. tackles something different and rare in Lye’s career: narrative. And its narration (in the fullest sense) is wonderfully scattershot: all the codes of character exchange, cross-cutting, scene-setting and so forth are exposed, as Lye tries to briskly whip them into shape and into service. This is all set off by a wonderfully everyday, even daggy drama: an exchange of letters.

In fact, the piece is, today, strikingly modern: a forerunner, for instance, to Jean-Luc Godard’s dazzling fantasia on modern communications systems for France Telecom in the short video Puissance de la parole (1988): For Godard, as for Lye, the media of connection inspire a barrage of cinematic disconnection – amid a plaintive vignette of everyday, humble communication via letter.

Perhaps Lye himself, at the time and ever after, regarded N. or N.W. as something of a failed experiment. Posterity has (hélas!) tended to treat it that way, too. Nonetheless, the film seems today like a tantalising path not taken in Lye’s career. (2022 Postscript: Cristina Álvarez López, in 2018, composed a stunning analysis of N. or N.W. in her MUBI Notebook series on short films, “Foreplays”. The film also rates some attention in Des O’Rawe’s fascinating 2016 book Regarding the Real.)

Seven years after the Monash experience came the ACMI spectacular, Len Lye: An Artist in Perpetual Motion (July–October 2009), an exhaustive and exhausting survey show drawn (as all Lye events great and small are) from the archives held by the Len Lye Foundation in New Zealand. And, for me, a curious detail: N. or N.W. was overlooked. It’s a small but emblematic omission: what this film prophesised of a certain avant-garde style of narrative tinkering is glossed over for the sake of a certain Modern Fine Art vision of Lye.

Lye’s work was a remarkable example of unity in diversity. All his various researches and experiments led back to his bedrock interests in the engineering of states of bliss, happiness, ecstasy – and, in this, he was surprisingly close to Sergei Eisenstein. Every blast of light, colour and sound in Lye, in whatever medium (from batik to film, via painting and doodling), led back to this conceptual matrix of sense-experience heading ultimately (he hoped) for a better, more joyous world. The vision, taken in its totality, is truly infectious.

© Adrian Martin October 2009