In a sense he was one of the earliest moving-image makers (by which I mean both film and video makers) to have attempted to produce a visual music directly onto film. As such he presages the work of the Ubu film-makers and the work of those video artists for whom synthetic video and visual music were important early forms. For his films Lye used a multitude of shapes and lines which might have been scratched, stencilled or painted onto the film surface presenting mobile geometric shapes in a flow of bright colour. Many of these elements came to stand for the sound of a particular instrument and danced or vibrated according to the kind of sound that instrument made. For example a saxophone was represented by a thick vertical line that broke up into clusters of fibres or a guitar became a horizontal line that would quiver and twang. [18]

A Colour Box (1935) consists in a background laid down with paint through a variety of dot screens of the type used in printing photographs in books plus the occasional geometric object impressed onto the surface, usually as some sort of mask to the painted background, plus single or multiple wiggling vertical lines and other squiggles painted to represent and synchronize with the timing of the instruments: percussion, string base, trumpet, piano and mandolin, played by a classic dance band of the time. Towards the end a series of frames of text announce the costs of parcel post with the British Post Office. For music, he used a piece played by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra. The film was shown widely and won a prize at the 1935 Brussels Film Festival. [19]

A later GPO film, Rainbow Dance (1936) is a combination of live action and painted and scratched film. The live action is usually used as a colour mask. The film begins with rain over mountain ranges seen in pastel colours in the background. The rain is a series of diagonal lines painted on the frame. The camera tilts down to a man in a raincoat who is standing in the rain at the entrance of an ally with his umbrella held high. He is seen in flat solid colours. When the rain has stopped a rainbow appears opposite him and he closes his umbrella only to be swept away by a couple of asterisks and taken on a holiday. The man, now in holiday clothes of flat solid colours, dances and leaps over the landscape. He goes to the seaside which is made from cut-out fishes, sail-boat masks and scratched wavy lines. The countryside is seen in a series of pastels consisting of maps and then mountains followed by a tennis court, where he plays tennis and dances off into a village represented by a single house, a road that was once the tennis court paving stones, and trees at the side of the road. He then rests from all his exertion. It's all an ad for the Post Office Savings Bank, the Brighton (Beach) branch of course.

Overall, Lye sought to express an empathy between the perceiving body, the musical instruments of the soundtrack and the movement of lines, shapes and colours on the screen echoing the density and variations in pitch and harmonics of the sounds of the instruments.

Now, in the early 1960s Australia was culturally isolated but the Australian government was greatly in support of American adventurism in Vietnam and the cinema was swamped by the populism of Hollywood. The visual arts were dominated by two strongly inter-connected debates, one over style and the other over regionalism. The question of style was deeply associated with a vociferous debate as to whether Australian art was merely parochial in its realism and should thus take on a greater recognisance of international styles as represented particularly by abstraction; or whether it should be seen as a manifestation of a national identity responding to, for example, the harsh qualities of the landscape and thus maintain the figurative modernism of the Antipodeans. [20] This debate raged to and fro for many years, well into the 1980s, [21] with the leading art critic of the 1960s, Bernard Smith, arguing for the figurative and against abstraction. [22] However in the later years of that decade, abstraction made substantial inroads within Australia through exhibitions like Two Decades of American Painting that toured here in 1967 and The Field at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968, and by journals like Studio International out of Britain.

It felt, to many outside the debates over style in painting, that Australia's isolation ought not be preserved. The so called cultural cringe [23] could only be defeated by being unself-consciously ourselves [24] thus promoting a kind of art that in its own internal strength would stand with the work of the rest of our international peers. Within the universities in Sydney, where a small group of students took an independent stance, exposure to European avant-garde traditions in theatre and film as well as experimental attitudes in architecture [25] began to produce a new experimental culture outside of the traditional visual arts. With the appearance of the satirical Oz magazine in April 1963, produced by Martin Sharp, Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and with graphical contributions by Mick Glasheen and Sharp, a confident, irreverent political and social reappraisal of the culture was launched. This was the real beginning of the 60s in Australia. [26] At the same time the university film societies were showing new animation, including the work of the Canadian animator, Norman McLaren, and Len Lye, as well as the films of the European and (by the late 1960s) the American avant-garde.

Albie Thoms and Ubu Films

Meanwhile, videotape was just becoming available in Australia in the form of the 2-inch quadruplex machine developed by Ampex in the US in 1965. Albie Thoms, who in 1965 was studying theatre at the University of Sydney and working as a production trainee at the ABC, tells his part in the story:

“In 1965 I was employed as a production trainee at ABC television, and I was introduced to videotape recording processes using 2-inch Ampex machines. Basically they were just using this to record programs at that stage. In the subsequent year, they acquired a couple more ended up having about four machines, but originally they only had a couple. In '66 I was assistant producer on a comedy show called Nice and Juicy. The producer was a guy named Eric Tayler who, though he had worked at the BBC for years and obviously videotaped a lot of his programs, wasn't at all au fait with videotape editing. And because I'd been introduced to the possibility of that as part of my training, I then became the person that... Well first of all, he started recording the program as a continuous run, a half hour comedy show. It was a dismal failure. It was pointed out to him that he could videotape it in segments and improve the performances and correct the mistakes and things. And because he wasn't au fait in video, and I'd just had a little bit of training, I then became the person that assembled the programs from the video segments that he recorded. And we were using the big Ampex machine, big as a bloody refrigerator almost, and we had to use 10 to zero countdowns, and there was no electronic editing.

“But it occurred to me while we were doing that, that you could go a lot further. So the following year I got one of my first directing jobs, and I was directing a TV series called Contrabandits (1967). It was a cops and robbers sort of thing. And I started recording the segments and then transferring some of the things onto a second machine and mixing them through a vision mixer back in the studio.

It was very complex, you had to get all these departments to agree, and that. But anyway we were able to remix the programs and so I could get dissolves between scenes and things, up till then it was just butt edits, right. Then it occurred to me also that I could mix the soundtrack. If I could find the time when three machines were available, I could lift the sound off, remix it and re-stripe it, right.

"So I was able to do a lot of stuff then that was new to the ABC. I suspect that other people had long before discovered it and... but basically they had a pretty conservative attitude to videotape. It was just mainly a recording device, you know. And because the two-inch tapes were horribly expensive, they were reusing them, so that they were wiping the programs. Luckily they were kinescoping some of them and some of them were preserved. But basically they had very few tapes.

"Then as the ABC's programming schedules increased, they were putting more and more stuff to air off videotape, and it suddenly became very difficult to get machine time. And that little window of opportunity closed down a bit then.

"But with that video training... I was still mainly working in film both at the ABC, and then of course with Ubu, which was running parallel to that. Then we read about the new Sony half-inch machines that were going to become available.

"But I hadn't got too excited about that, mainly due to David Perry. He reckoned that the resolution was going to be so poor that it's not going to compete with film and it's not going to... We'd actually been thinking of putting some of our films onto Super-8 and trying to sell them as home... the way they sell DVDs now, you know. But because very few people had a Super-8 projector with sound there was not much point. We'd be selling mute copies of our films and we abandoned that. And I thought maybe video is going to be the way. But David was doubtful.

"My first encounter with the actual half-inch Sony Portapak [27] was in 1969 and Phil Noyce had it at Sydney University. Sydney University had by then set up a closed circuit TV thing for lectures, and I don't know who it was who'd acquired this, whether it was the film society or whether it was the university television service. But someone had acquired a half-inch machine. And when I showed Marinetti at the law school in the city, he did an interview with me on the portapak, and then played it through the closed circuit to promote the screening. And it was much better than I'd thought in terms of quality and all that." [28]

An avant-garde theatre was also developing. While working at the ABC in 1965 Thoms was producing The Theatre of Cruelty, his review of European avant-garde theatre [29] for the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS) [30]. He asked David Perry to shoot two films for him. One was a version of The Spurt of Blood, an Artaud script which required some apparently magical effects, and the other was a version of Schwitters’ Poem 25, in which a series of frames with numbers were written directly onto film stock. [31] This led to the beginning of their collaboration, with Perry shooting Thoms’ films as well as his own. Also in the production crew was Aggy Read who was the stage mechanist. Shortly after The Theatre of Cruelty performance, on August 28, 1965 [32] Thoms, Perry, Read and John Clark established Ubu Films, named after Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. [33]

Ubu Films became a production and exhibition group that was occasionally wildly controversial, regularly attracted the opprobrium of the Commonwealth Film Censor for the nudity and sexual freedom of their films, and variously excited and bored their audiences with an astonishing range of work. [34] However their role was not merely absurdist and subversive given that their leadership in the underground culture meant that to a large extent the period of the later 1960s became the era of experimental film in Australia. This was also stimulated by seasons like the 1967 touring exhibition of American avant-garde film, New American Cinema [35], in much the same way that Two Decades of American Painting provoked Australian visual art.[36] There were also two articles on underground films, one in Time (1967) [37] and one in Newsweek (1967) [38] that legitimised [Ubu's] work and encouraged widespread experiment. [39]

Ubu Films turned out to have been a most important development in non-commercial film-making in Australia; leading to the Sydney Film-maker's Co-op and generally encouraging the re-development of an interest in locally made films in Australia. They supported the exhibition of experimental and avant-garde film in general, distributing films offered to them by the likes of Frank Eidlitz, Ludwig Dutkiewicz and Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski [40] while also taking on Australian distribution of some of the American avant-garde film introduced to Australia through the Sydney Film Festivals and the New American Cinema program. Ubu Films ran for five years, branching into light-shows for the happenings that had become a part of the hippie scene in Sydney.