Tusalava
Plot
Tusalava is a purely visual, abstract-animated meditation on organic evolution and transformation. Split asymmetrically across the screen, the film shows simple cell-like forms multiplying, stretching, colliding, and mutating into more elaborate structures that evoke both microscopic life and symbolic or tribal imagery. As the process continues, the two sides of the composition appear to interact like competing life forces, with one absorbing, attacking, or merging with the other in a constantly shifting balance of opposition and attraction. The film culminates in a final state of uneasy symbiosis, leaving the viewer with the impression of a cyclical and perhaps regenerative biological or spiritual order rather than a conventional narrative resolution.
Director
Len LyeAbout the Production
Tusalava was created by Len Lye over a long and labor-intensive period beginning in New Zealand and completed after his move to London, where it was finished in 1929. It is one of the earliest major works in modernist abstract animation and was not produced by a commercial studio system. The film was hand-made frame by frame, using cut-out and drawn imagery, and is closely associated with Lye’s interest in combining movement, pattern, and non-representational art. Its imagery was deeply informed by biological observation, modernist abstraction, and Polynesian/Maori visual ideas as filtered through Lye’s broader artistic imagination. Because of its experimental nature, there is no reliable contemporary commercial record of budget or box office.
