Color Cry Len Lye (1952)

Lye continued to develop new kinds of direct film (films made without a camera). In Color Cry, his first major American film, he found a striking new way to use Man Rays rayogram or shadow cast process, arranging a variety of fabrics and stencils on strips of film. Strips of film with sprocket holes were also used as stencils. Lye synchronised his film to some haunting music by bluessinger Sonny Terry, which he imagined to represent the anguished cry of a runaway slave. Lye used the 16mm format for this and for his other American films.