Colour Flight is a commercial, plain and simple (sponsorship by Imperial Airways.) Countering that potentially alarming thought is another, kind of implausible plain-and-simple, that’s almost like the lamb and the lion lying down together. At one point in this commercial film there’s a very brief spike into the objective, as Lye’s usual array of dancing shapes turns for an instant into an airplane. Other than that, for the entirety of the rest of the film, we’ve got pure abstraction. The most notable thing is how successfully these abstract shapes or objects are synchronized with the music. Like Oscar Fischinger’s contemporaneous An Optical Poem, this is pure mickey mousing, a perfect blending of music and movement. Here are all the satisfactions of the dance, and yet with no ardent young lovers to put up with.
Fischinger, thanks to TCM: http://bit.ly/1CTjgUp