Len Lye’s films aren’t just historical artifacts; they’re technical treasure troves. The New Zealand avant-garde artist was among the first to create direct animations painted and stencil-colored onto film strips, running daring experiments in Gasparcolor, Dufaycolor, and Technicolor that pushed laboratory processes to their limits.

Restoring that work today is its own feat of collaboration and innovation. San Francisco Film Preserve, the Len Lye Foundation, and the British Film Institute National Archive have joined forces with Scan2Screen’s multi-spectral scanning workflow to bring these films into the digital domain, staying true to the material properties of the surviving elements.

Join us Friday, September 11 for this month’s edition of ONLINE WITH SFFP, a free virtual talk with Dr. Barbara Flueckiger — professor emerita, founder and CEO of Scan2Screen US, co-founder of Scan2Screen Switzerland, and creator of the Timeline of Historical Colors in Photography and Film — as she walks through Lye’s artistic methods and the conceptual and technical work of bringing them to the screen.

Register for the free talk

Want to see the results on the big screen? Six of Lye’s restored shorts screen as part of Re:Vision — Festival of Restoration and Rediscovery, September 24–27 at the Roxie Theater.

Explore the program.