Seeing Sound: The Films of Mary Ellen Bute
Apr 10, 2010
(Mary Ellen Bute, USA, 1934-52, 16mm, 70 min)
Program presented in association with the Center for Visual Music, in association with Cecile Starr and the Women's Independent Film Exchange.
Introduced by Cindy Keefer, Director of the Center For Visual Music
American filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983) is an important and often overlooked pioneer of visual music and electronic art. Beginning in the 1930s, Bute produced short films that translated music (often classical music including Bach and Shostakovich) into choreographed shapes, ever-changing lights and shadows, brilliant colorful forms, and elegant design. Critic and curator Ed Halter has called her films “a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies.” Although little-known today, many of her films reached wide audiences at the time through screenings before feature films at Radio City Music Hall and movie theaters around the country.
This retrospective program features all of Bute’s pioneering abstract animations, from her first film, Rhythm in Light (1934) to later works such as Mood Contrasts (1956), an early use of electronic oscilloscope patterns. The program will be preceded by a short, work-in-progress documentary on Bute, made by Cecile Starr with Kit Basquin and Larry Mollot.
