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“This new medium of expression is the Absolute Film. Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement, and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) being subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.” – Mary Ellen Bute
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“While German absolute filmmakers often drew on J. S. Bach for their understanding of form, Bute derived hers from mathematician Joseph Schillinger, as the SYNCHROMY series show. The visuals are reflections and refractions of light from glass colanders. The music is Wagner’s O’Evening Star – a Venus statue represents the star.” – R. Bruce ElderRead More »
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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 Edvard 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)Read More »
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“One of the livelist of Mary Ellen Bute’s abstract films, DADA was intended to be part of a Universal Newsreel segment, showing Bute and her partner Ted Nemeth at work in their tiny New York studio. No copies of the newsreel itself are known to exist at this time.” – Cecile StarrRead More »
“Mary Ellen Bute’s first color film tells a story in abstraction of an orange/red triangle imprisoned behind a grid of vertical and horizontal lines under a sky-blue expanse, perhaps representing freedom. J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fuge in D Minor adds dramatic tension to the visual variables in motion.” – Cecile StarrRead More »
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A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion – 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances – she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.Read More »
Quote:
This new medium of expression is the Absolute Film. Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) being subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification. – Mary Ellen ButeRead More »
Bosley Crowther, NY Times, January 6, 1959 wrote:
Also on the bill at the theatre is a whimsical and amusing three-reel film, entitled “The Boy Who Saw Through,” about a lad who can see through walls. The ability is implied to be symbolic of a child’s tendency toward candor and truth. It is based on a story by John Pudney and produced by Mary Ellen Bute.Read More »
(From Wikipedia)
Mary Ellen Bute (November 21, 1906 – October 17, 1983) was a pioneer film animator who did much of her work in visual music. She was one of the first female experimental filmmakers in the U.S. From 1934 until 1953, she made 14 short, musical abstract films, working in New York. Many of these were seen in regular U.S. movie theaters, such as Radio City Music Hall, often before a prestigious film. Several of her films were also called “Seeing Sound” films.Read More »