Mary Ellen Bute was "one of the first female experimental filmmakers, and was the creator of some of the first electronically generated film images."
Possible flashing lights warnings for all videos in these links.
(h/t yesterday's post linking to the New Yorker State of Mind, which introduced me to her, in which John Mosher's review called her "uncanny Miss Bute!")
Bute used a number of different techniques, including
oscilloscope photography, to create abstract visualizations of musical compositions-- "visual music"-- that
played at Radio City Music Hall and to millions of audience members as shorts before main films in theaters across the United States. "By turning knobs and switches on a control board I can 'draw' with a beam of light with as much freedom as with a brush," she wrote. Her imagery, assisted by her husband Ted Nemeth the cinematographer and by animators at times, formed part of the surprisingly large body of visual music
sweeping (Oskar Fischinger) the
avant-garde (Len Lye) and the
general public (Norman McLaren) (and, of course, widely popularized in Fantasia).
Rhythm in Light (with Melville Webber, 5 minutes):
"Finally we got a Bolex camera, and started... to make my first film, Rhythm in Light. It was mostly three-dimensional animation. Pyramids, and ping pong balls, and all interrelated by light patterns -- and I wasn't happy unless it all entered and exited exactly as I had planned. "
Spook Sport (with Norman McLaren, 8 minutes, 5 seconds):
"Animated by McLaren, utilizing his adroit ink-on-film technique, Bute's film visualizes Saint Säen's music. It features colored globes, ellipses, and triangles that move ghost-like over monochromatic backgrounds, communicating the notion of spirits rising from a graveyard. Commercially Bute's most successful animation, it ran for months at Radio City Music Hall." - Jan-Christopher Horak
Tarantella (reusing images from the previous work by Norman McLaren, 4 minutes, 51 seconds, and please note this is by far the most atonal music which is not really my thing but I can't resist the animation)
"Color freed Bute's talent – where before she had been constrained by a quasi-scientific conception of the parallels between musical and visual dynamics. In TARANTELLA, she takes a more intuitive approach linked closer to Kandinsky, making it among Bute's most avant-garde productions. The animation used drawings illuminated in various wondrous ways." – R. Bruce Elder
Abstronic (6 minutes, 10 seconds):
"'Beautiful Lissajous curves, can be put through a choreography that inspires – and startles – the imagination,' writes Mary Ellen Bute of her quest to visualize invisible rhythms. In ABSTRONIC, she uses a cathode ray oscilloscope combined with conventional animation techniques and two tart musical numbers to generate a lively 'seeing-sound' experience." - Bruce Posner
"I wanted to manipulate light to produce visual compositions in time continuity much as a musician manipulates sound to produce music. It was particularly while I listened to music that I felt an overwhelming urge to translate my reactions and ideas into visual form that would have the ordered sequence of music." - Mary Ellen Bute (1954)
(I like the second movement especially.)
And bonus:
The Boy Who Saw Through (1958) (24 minutes, 36 seconds):
"You must tell Ernest not to stare at people," hisses the father of an adolescent boy to his mother. The command is understandable if you know Ernest's piercing stare belongs to a 14-year-old Christopher Walken. Billed as "Ronnie," Walken plays the title character, who has developed the ability to see through walls, much to the consternation of his stuffy Victorian parents. In this stultifying, bourgeois environment, the ability to see what people are secretly doing—and reveal the hypocrisy of supposedly upstanding citizens—is a dangerous one. Ernest's parents take him to a wise but cynical doctor, who encourages Ernest tell "a lie in defense of truth."
She also did a
widely acclaimed adaptation of Passages from Finnegan's Wake which I have not yet watched.
The
Center for Visual Music regularly presents Bute's work in museums and film festivals, including currently in Zurich and (beginning September 22) Los Angeles.
Login
