Introduced by guest curator Peter Lucas

As early as the 1930s, inventive artists began using the medium of film to fuse the visual art forms of abstract painting and collage with the rhythms, melodies, and improvisations of jazz music. For this special program, Lucas will speak about the history of visual music and jazz, and screen rarely seen films made between the 1930s and 1960s by pioneering film artists Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Harry Smith, and Hy Hirsh–all made with jazz soundtracks. The colors, patterns, textures, and kinetic collages of these historic films create a vibrant visual jazz experience.

Kaleidoscope and Colour Flight (Len Lye; 1938; 8 minutes)  Len Lye, pioneer kinetic artist, sculptor and experimental filmmaker, died in May 1980 in New York. He had emigrated to the United States from England in 1944. Between 1951 and his death, he worked on a number of films. Of the five films he made in the USA, several are considered to be his finest. These powerful "American Films" develop the techniques of "direct" filmmaking in new directions; together they constitute a major body of "direct" filmmaking. Len Lye lost interest in gaining public screenings for his work, and went "underground." These films were therefore known only to a small group of filmmakers and a few audiences. The films gained a legendary reputation .... They have hitherto been largely inaccessible and are therefore virtually unknown. - Canyon Cinema

Mirror Animations (Harry Smith; 1979; 11 minutes)   "If, (as many suppose), the unseen world is the real world and the world of our senses but the transient symbols of the eternal unseen, ad limiting ourselves to the aesthetic experience's well-known predilection for the eyes and ears, we could logically propose that any one projection of a film is variant from any other. This is particularly true of MIRROR ANIMATIONS. Although studies for this film were made in the early 1960s, the non-existence of suitable printing equipment until recently, my inability to locate the original camera footage until 1979, and particularity, the lack of an audience ready to evaluate L. Wittgenstein's "Ethics and Aesthetics Are One and the Same", in the light of H.C. Agrippa's earlier, "there is no form of madness more dangerous than that arrived at by rational means' have all contributed to delaying until now the availability of a print in the full mirror-reverse from originally envisioned. I hope you like it." - Harry Smith

Autumn Spectrum (Hy Hirsh; 1957, 7 minutes) A lyrical cine-poem whose images are carefully controlled reflections on water, resulting in sometimes abstract, sometimes concretely recognizable visuals.

La Coleur de la Forme (Hy Hirsh; 1960; 7 minutes) With his last film, Hirsh more than ever justifies a critic's description as "the Matisse of the Cinema." Partly collage, partly a study of movement, Hirsch's technique does on film what kinetic art does in sculpture. Mixing positives and negatives, solarization, double exposure etc., to produce a mental freewheeling of images, a brilliant kaleidoscope dreamworld. With its tangerine skies it might be subtitled Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds'.

Scratch Pad (Hy Hirsh; 1960, 10 minutes)  Scratch Pad mixes graffiti on film stock and live-action, while Gyromorphosis frames the close-up of a metallic structure as a three-dimensional sculpture, and enriches it with superpositions.

Peter Lucas is an independent film/video curator and arts organizer based in Houston. He has created exhibitions, film screening series, and public programs in association with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Menil Collection, Aurora Picture Show, Northwest Film Forum, Seattle International Film Festival, Experience Music Project, Earshot Jazz Festival, Sound Unseen, and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. Lucas was named “Best Curator, 2012” by Houston Press, and was recently profiled in their “100 Creatives” series. He has been a guest speaker at Rice University, University of Houston, and Cornish College of the Arts, and is also a regular contributor to Glasstire online arts journal.