During most of the ten-years period in which James Whitney was laboriously producing the intricate images of Yantra (1950) by hand, his brother had developed the analogue computer, which could produce images of far greater complexity in a fraction of the time. After Yantra was finished the brothers assembled another mechanical analogue computer, and it was in this device that Lapis was created. Whitney began work on Lapis in 1963 and completed it in 1966. Much of this time was consumed, however, in the construction of the analogue computer that programmed the extremely intricate mandala-like structure of the film. The opening sequence of Lapis is startlingly beautiful: a pure white frame into which, very slowly, moves a ring of thousands of tiny particles. They manifest as though out of the air itself, gathering and converging around a central sphere of light, gradually tightening, growing more complex, until they become a vast synretistic man dale of intricate geometrical patterns.

To achieve this effect, Whitney hand-painted glass plates with fields of dot-patterns that began sparsely and collected into high concentration toward the center. These were placed on rotating tables beneath a vertically-mounted camera. The tables spun on their own axes while simultaneously revolving around another axis, and at the same moving horizontally across camera range. It’s difficult to see these films outside a special screening at a gallery or arts cinema. The Keith Griffiths documentary Abstract Cinema is an excellent introduction, including both Lapis and James Whitney’s Yantra among many other short works. Whether a given viewer likes or dislikes James Whitney's film LAPIS, it would be unimaginable that anyone can argue against the incredible achievement this experimentally animated piece presents.