A Colour Box, 1935.

[DavidM]

From that hotbed of creative minds, the Post Office, a short film from 1935;

http://www.archive.org/details/A_Colour_Box

(As if more evidence were needed after Gary Booth's excellent work on the No Reason podcast.)

Wikipedia tells me that the music is Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra.

Here is more information about the creator, a New Zealander, Len Lye;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Lye

P.S. For those with more time to spare, there is a huge amount of film and music to trawl through on this website, The Internet Archive. I mean, how much Grateful Dead can you stand ?

[NormanD]

The very opening frame tells a story in itself: "The G.P.O. Film Unit".

The General Post office developed its own corporate advertising arm (despite being a state monopoly), and produced novel, experimental films. Its classic work was "Night Mail", combining the talents of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden. Fascinating stuff.

[uiwangmike]

Its classic work was "Night Mail", combining the talents of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden. Fascinating stuff.

And some fascinating trivia about the film from Imdb:
The shots of the interior of the carriage where the mail is sorted were filmed in a studio. An impression of movement was given by gently swinging the string that was hanging down from the top of the sorting boxes before each shot was filmed and telling the postal workers to walk with a rolling gait.

The sound recordist's equipment was unable to record a realistic sound of the mail train clattering over the joints in the track during the "two bridges and 45 beats" trackside mailbag collection sequence. Eventually they resorted to recording the sound of a model train being pushed back and forth over joints in a model railway track in time to the film of the man on the train counting the beats.

[garth cartwright]

Len Lye is now considered NZ's first (only?) modernist visual artist of international renown - not that he ever got very famous but he made a bit of an impression here in the 1930s with his witty and innovative use of film stock then shifted to New York where he worked on experimental film and kinetic sculptures. As ever, he's much more famous back home than anywhere else - same for Francis Hodgkins, the superb post-impressionist painter (work in the Tate and V&A but not often noted here - in NZ pretty much the local Van Gogh). Kiwis love to know that a few of us get recognised by the big bad world - thus All Blacks who win tournaments, Neil Finn and Sir Peter Jackson are treated like gods back home. Those who pretend to be Australian - Russell Crowe and many others - are viewed as traitors of sorts.