Mary Ellen Bute

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Mary Ellen Bute (born November 21, 1906 in Houston , † October 17, 1983 in New York City ) was a pioneer of American animated films . She is also one of the first female directors of experimental films .

Life

Mary Ellen Bute studied painting in Texas and Philadelphia , then stage lighting at Yale University . She studied the tradition of color organs to paint with light. She worked with Leon Theremin and Thomas Wilfred and was influenced by the abstract animated films by Oskar Fischinger .

Bute began her filmmaking career in collaboration with Joseph Schillinger in the animation of visuals. Her later films were made in collaboration with her cameraman Ted Nemeth, whom she married in 1940. Her last film, inspired by James Joyce , was based on passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake , a live-action film that was made over a period of nearly three years (1965-67).

In the 1960s and 1970s, Bute worked on two films that were never finished: an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth and a film about Walt Whitman with the working title Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.

Her specialty was visual music. While working in New York between 1934 and 1953, she made fourteen short, abstract music films (abstract animation). Many of them have been shown in cinemas, such as B. Radio City Music Hall , and usually preceded a prestigious film. Some of her later abstract films have been categorized as part of her Seeing Sound series.

Bute was a founding member of the Women's Independent Film Exchange. She chose the film historian Cecile Starr to distribute her short films.

Mary Ellen Bute died of heart failure at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City five weeks before her 77th birthday. Six months earlier, on April 4th, she received a special honor and a retrospective of her films at the Museum of Modern Art.

An archive of some of Bute's personal papers is in the Kniecke Library at Yale University . Film historian Cecile Starr's extensive collection of bute papers is located in Yale. A smaller collection is located in the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles. Several of her films are located at the Yale Film Study Center, Center for Visual Music, George Eastman House , Museum of Modern Art in New York, Anthology Film Archives, and a number of other institutions and archives. A traveling retrospective film program with all its abstract short visual music films has been presented by the Center for Visual Music in the USA, Australia and Europe with prints from the Cecile Starr Collection since 2006. Several of her films, in new HD transfers, can be seen on CVM's vimeo VOD channel and on the current Visual Music 1947–1986 from the CVM Archive DVD.

Filmography

There have been discrepancies in the accuracy of Mary Ellen Bute's films, largely due to inaccuracies in publication in online articles and websites. The following dates are confirmed by documents from their distributor Cecile Starr and Butes' promotional materials and programs in the collection of the Center for Visual Music.

  • 1933: Synchromy, collaboration with Joseph Schillinger and Lewis Jacobs [unfinished].
  • 1934: Rhythm in Light (b / w, 5 min.) In collaboration with Melville Webber and Ted Nemeth
  • 1935: Synchromy No. 2 (b / w, 5.5 min.) Music: Abendstern from Tannhäuser by Richard Wagner
  • 1936: Dada (b / w) - 3-minute short films for Universal Newsreel.
  • 1937: Parable (b / w, 9 min.) Music: Création du monde by Darius Milhaud .
  • 1937: Escape (color, 4.5 min.) Music: Toccata in D minor by JS Bach .
  • 1939: Spook Sport (color, 8 min.) Music: Dance macabre with Camille Saint-Saëns . Animation by Norman McLaren .
  • 1940: Tarantella, color, 5 minutes. Animation by Norman McLaren .
  • 1947: Polka graphics, color, 4.5 minutes. Dmitri Shostakovich's polka from the age of gold
  • 1948: Color Rhapsody (also known as Color Rhapsody), color, 6 minutes.
  • 1948: imagination, color
  • 1949: New sensations in sound, color, 3 minutes. (Commercial for RCA)
  • 1950: Pastoral, color, 9 minutes. Bach's sheep can graze safely
  • 1952: Abstronic, color, 7 minutes. Aaron Copland 's Hoe Down and Don Gillis ' Ranch House Party.
  • 1953: Mood contrasts, color, 7 minutes.
  • 1956: The Boy Who Saw Through (producer), b / w, 25 minutes. Stars a young Christopher Walken . (not abstract)
  • 1965–1967: Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake , b / w, 97 minutes. (Director and Co-Writer) [not abstract] Screening at the Cannes International Film Festival

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Center for Visual Music. Retrieved December 15, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Bute, Mary Ellen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American director of animation and experimental films
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Houston
DATE OF DEATH 17th October 1983
Place of death New York City