• 7
    watchers
  • 10
    plays
  • 427
    collected
  • 14
    lists

Swinging the Lambeth Walk 1940

  • 1940-02-01
  • 4m
  • Len Lye
  • United Kingdom
  • English
  • Music, Animation
Lye edited together “swing” versions of the popular Lambeth Walk (including Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stephane Grapelli on violin), combining them with a particularly diverse range of direct film images, scratched as well as painted. He was particularly pleased with a final guitar solo (with a vibrating horizontal line) and double bass solo (with a stomping vertical line). For this film Lye did not have to include any advertising slogans; friends at the Tourist and Industrial Development Association, shocked to learn that Lye and his family had become destitute, arranged for TIDA to sponsor the film – to the horror of government bureaucrats who could not understand why a popular dance was being treated as a tourist attraction. - Harvard Film Archive

If you like Swinging the Lambeth Walk, check out...

Loading...