Mary Ellen Bute
(1906-1983)
Contents: About the Centennial Program - About the Films - Finnegans Wake - Selected Statements by Bute About her Films
plus a Selected Bibliography
CVM presented a Centennial Program honoring Pioneer Animator Mary Ellen Bute (2006)
presented at Los Angeles Filmforum & USC, organized by CVM in association with Cecile Starr and the Women's Independent Film Exchange
A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s to the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saens or Shostakovich, and filled with colorful forms, elegant design and sprightly, dance-like-rhythms, Bute's filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute's films were "composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment." Bute herself wrote that she sought to "bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music." (Ed Halter)
Mary Ellen Bute Program, Saturday, Nov. 18, 2006 at 7:30 pm, at Los Angeles Filmforum: Known for her pioneering early abstract films (some of which were screened regularly at Radio City Music Hall, New York in the 1930s), Bute also made a series of Visual Music films which she called "Seeing Sound." This Program features all 14 of her short abstract films, including some rarely-seen films, in 16mm prints: Rhythm in Light, 1934; Synchromy No. 2, 1935; Dada, 1936; Parabola, 1937; Escape, 1937; Spook Sport (animated by Norman McLaren), 1939; Tarantella, 1940; Polka Graph, 1947; Color Rhapsody, 1948; Imagination, 1948; New Sensations in Sound, 1949 (RCA Commercial); Pastorale, 1950, Abstronic, 1952 and Mood Contrasts. Program curated by Film Scholar Cecile Starr. Introduction to the program by Cindy Keefer of Center for Visual Music.
Filmforum is located in the Egyptian Theatre complex at 6712 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA. Filmforum will take reservations the week before the screenings (but they are not required, this is only a courtesy), by email: lafilmforum (at) yahoo.com. For additional program information regarding the films, please contact CVMaccess (at) gmail.com
Plus: Thursday, November 16, 2006, 7 pm at University of Southern California, Cinematheque 108. Mary Ellen Bute's rarely-screened feature film, Passages from Finnegans Wake. 1965-67, 92 mins, 16mm, b/w. Lucas Bldg. 108, USC, University Park Campus, Los Angeles. SPECIAL GUEST: Cast member Peter Haskell ("Shem") speaks about the film and working with Bute.
Prints courtesy Cecile Starr, Women's Film Preservation Fund and Yale University Film Study Center. Thanks to Adam Hyman, LA Filmforum, David James, USC Division of Critical Studies, and Young-min Son.
About Bute's Films in the Centennial Program
A. Abstract Program, November 18, 2006 at Los Angeles Filmforum
Rhythm in Light, 1934, b/w. Music: Grieg's "Anitra's Dance." Collaboration with Melville Webber and Ted Nemeth. Premiered at Radio City Music Hall, 1935. In the "Rhythm in Light," the artist uses visual materials as the musician uses sound. Mass and line an brilliant arabesques from the inexhaustible imagination of the artist perform a dance to the strains of Edward Grieg's music. The visual and aural materials are related both structurally and rhythmically - a mathematical system being used to combine the two means of expression. (promotional flyer, Ted Nemeth Studios). Review in Time Magazine, Dec. 3, 1934.
Synchromy No. 2, 1935, b/w. Music: Wagner's "Evening Star." Premiered at Radio City Music Hall. "Something pretty advanced and amusing" - New York Times.
Dada, 1936. For Universal Newsreel. "Animated with Dada humor to a waltz tune. Witty and delightful, it flashes off the screen too soon." - CUE magazine.
Parabola, 1937, b/w. Music: Darius Milhaud's "La Creation du Monde." Based on Rutherford Boyd's extraordinary sculpture elaborating the parabolic curve.
Escape, 1937, color. Music: Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor." Escape was based on a simple plot set against a musical background, and employed geometric figures for the action. (Bute)
Spook Sport (animated by Norman McLaren), 1939, color. Music: Saint-Saen's
"Danse Macabre." A new abstract movie in the 'Seeing Sound' series
by M.E. Bute. "Fun abstract movie that PEOPLE are TALKING ABOUT, filled
with disembodied spooks, bats and bones." -Allene Talmey, Vogue. Online
clip (excerpt) at the National Film Board of Canada website is
here.
Tarantella, 1940, color. Piano music by Edwin Gershefsky. "An exciting new technique...Unusual and amusing..." (Film Daily)
Polka Graph (Fun with Music), 1947, color. Began as an actual chart of Shostakovich's Polka from "The Age of Gold." Award winner at Venice Film Festival.
Color Rhapsody, 1948, color. Music: Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No.
2." Premiered at Radio City Music Hall 1951. "[Bute] transcends her
influences; her visual imagination triumphs. I like the romantic flair of COLOR
RHAPSODY, its visual density...I think it is time to re-see and re-evaluate
all of Bute's work in a new light." - Jonas Mekas, Soho Weekly News
(9/23/76)
Imagination, 1948, color. Produced for Steve Allen. "...surrealist film...unreal and delectable shapes floating about...the work of Mary Ellen Bute - a pioneer in this sort of thing whose talents should be more often used." - Gilbert Seldes, Saturday Review
New Sensations in Sound, 1949, color. Produced for RCA TV commercial programs.
Pastorale, 1950, color. Music: J.S. Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze." A pictorial accompaniment in abstract forms.
Abstronic, 1952, color. Music: Aaron Copland's "Hoe Down" and Don Gillis's "Ranch House Party." These electronic pictures of the music are a natural phenomena which take place in the sub-atomic world; they are then captured on the Cathode Ray Oscilloscope and filmed with the motion picture camera. The colored backgrounds are hand done and superimposed on the electronic animation of the musical themes. In this movie, film artist Mary Ellen Bute combines Science an Art to create "Seeing Sound." (Press release from Ted Nemeth Studios)
Mood Contrasts, color, 1953. Music: "Hymn to the Sun" from The Golden Cockerel
and "Dance of the Tumblers" from The Snow Maiden by Rimsky-Korsakov. Premiered
at Radio City Music Hall. "An abstract film made in this fashion provides,
in the making as well as the seeing and listening, one of the most thrilling
experiences the motion picture affords." (Jesse Zunser, "Kinetic Space,"
CUE Magazine.)
B. Bute's rarely-screened feature film, Passages from Finnegan's Wake. 1965-67, 92 mins, 16mm, b/w. November 16, 2006 at University of Southern California, Cinematheque 108 (USC Campus, Lucas Bldg. 108)
Harvard Film Archive Program Notes: "Mary Ellen Bute, a true poet of cinema, created a joyously Joycean, fascinating, and imaginative film, a mixture of the aural—for Joyce’s words are not only spoken but seen in subtitles—and the visual. A delight to critics, Joyceans, and lovers of film, Passages from Finnegans Wake suggested a new orientation for students of Joyce as well as for cineastes. Time magazine wrote that “its dream sequences . . . featuring reverse footage, collages and montages . . . frequently are as challenging and witty as Joyce’s prose.”
Review by Leonard Maltin: Finnegan's Wake (1965) 97 m ***1/2 D: Mary Ellen Bute. Stars: Page Johnson, Martin J Kelly, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell. James Joyce's classic story of Irish tavern-keeper who dreams of attending his own wake is brought to the screen with great energy and control.
New York Times Review: "Finnegan's Wake was the first attempt to cinematize the works of Irish author James Joyce. Based more on a stage adaptation by Mary Manning than the Joyce novel itself, the film concentrates on Dublin pubkeeper Finnegan (Martin J. Kelly), who while in the throes of inebriation has a vision of his own death. As the bemused Finnegan lies in his coffin, his friends gather for his wake. The "corpse" tries to cut through the keening and platitudes by probing the innermost thoughts of those closest to him. The surprising aspect of Finnegan's Wake is that so much of its difficult text works on screen--a tribute to the loving care of scripter/director/editor Mary Ellen Bute, who while preparing this film spent her waking hours picking the brains and burrowing through the resource materials of the James Joyce Society." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
"Passages is a trove of superimpositions, flashbacks, varied angles, slow motion, intercutting, rapid motion, stop action, negative images, documentary footage, and finally sub-titles ... It brings in television, the H-bomb, the twist, interplanetary rockets. Bute believed that Joyce would have accepted the modern elements in a film based on his 1939 novel, and she even quoted a line from Finnegans Wake that mentions television." Lillian Schiff, "The Education of Mary Ellen Bute" in Film Library Quarterly 17:2 (1984). Rpt., abr. in Women and Animation: A Compendium. Ed. Jayne Pilling. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
NOTE: An interview with Mary Ellen Bute about Finnegans Wake, including clips from the film, is available through the CVM Store here.
Bute on her Films
"We need a new kinetic, visual art form - one that unites sound, color and form. We can take a mathematical formula and develop a whole composition exactly synchronized - the sound and the color following a chromatic scale. Or we can take two themes, visual and aural, and develop them at times in counterpoint." Bute quoted in "Color, Sound, Light Dance with Harmonious Steps in "Synchromy," Art Form Created by Texas Girl." New York World-Telegram, July 20, 1936.
"For years I have tried to find a method for controlling a source of light to produce images in rhythm. I wanted to manipulate light to produce visual compositions in time continuity much as a musician manipulates sound to produce music." from "Abstronics" in Films in Review, June-July 1954. Reprinted in Russett, Robert and Cecile Starr, Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976)
"Ted Nemeth, ace cinematographer and film producer, photographed RHYTHM IN LIGHT. He not only filmed my first productions but taught me enough about motion picture photography so that I now expend only about 97-1/2 % of my vital energy on the technical realization of my ideas and have a full 2-1/2 % left over for creative work." from "New Film Music for New Films" (M.E. Bute)
Reaching for Kinetic Art, reprinted in Program Notes for Harvard Independent Film Group (originally published in Field of Vision, No 13, Spring 1985)
"I am often asked how I moved from abstract films to Finnegan's Wake? It's plausible...Joyce's premise: "One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wide-awake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot." Is, like abstract films, about our 'inner' landscape. Joyce, like Whitman, and much Art, is about the essence of our Being; so, we're traveling on the same terrain." from NYFA Biography (biographical notes written by Bute), n.d.
Selected Bibliography
Bute, Mary Ellen. "New Film Music for New Films." Film Music, Vol 12.4 (1953).
-- “Abstronics: An Experimental Filmmaker Photographs the Esthetics of the Oscillograph.” Films in Review, Henry Hart, ed. Vol. 5, No. 6 (June-July 1954).
-- "Light-Form-Movement-Sound." Design (1956).
-- "Oscilloscope Art." Electronics 1 (Nov. 1957).
-- "Abstract Films." unpublished typescript, n.d. Collection of Cecile Starr (copy in Collection of Center for Visual Music).
-- Interview. AFI Report Vol 5, 2 (1974).
-- "Reaching for Kinetic Art." Field of Vision, No 13 (Spring 1985)
-- "Statement I." and "Statement II." in Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America. Gerald O'Grady, Bruce Posner, eds. Boston: Harvard Film Archive, 1995.
Jacobs, Lewis. "Experimental Cinema in America, Part I." Hollywood Quarterly 2 (Winter 1947-48).
Moritz, William. Mary Ellen Bute: Seeing Sound. Animation World Magazine, 1996
Rabinovitz, Lauren. "Mary Ellen Bute." Lovers of Cinema: the First American Film Avant-garde, 1919-1945. Jan-Christopher Horak, ed. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
Russett, Robert and Cecile Starr, eds. Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976)
Starr, Cecile. "Restoring Women to Film History." Women Artist News, Vol. 7.2 (1981):
Schiff, Lillian. “The Education of Mary Ellen Bute,” Film Library Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2 (1984). Rpt., abr. in Women and Animation: A Compendium. Ed. Jayne Pilling. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
Schillinger, Joseph. "A Theory of Synchronization." Experimental Cinema 5 (1934).
Weinberg, Gretchen. "An Interview with Mary Ellen Bute on the Filming of Finnegans Wake." Film Culture 35 (1964-1965).
Zunser, Jesse. "Kinetic Space." Cue: The Weekly Magazine of New York Life (26 Aug. 1939).
Previous CVM screening of Mary Ellen Bute's work:
Thursday March 24, 2005 - An Evening of Visual Music Films curated by CVM, Presented by CVM and MOCA. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ahmanson Auditorium, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. 6:30 pm. Revelatory moments from the history of visual music, an exploration into the true lives of the kinetochromatic scientists, and a breathtaking leap into the now-and-beyond of an art form passionately devoted to purified sound and light. This event includes film and video by Fischinger, Belson, Bute, Brakhage, McLaren, Dwinnell Grant, Dockum, Neubauer, Baily, Ellis, and others. (More about this show)
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