Mary Ellen Bute Trailers
Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake TrailerMood Contrasts TrailerNew Sensations in Sound by RCA Victor Trailer
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)
Known for her pioneering early abstract films (some of which were screened regularly at Radio City Music Hall, New York in the 1930s), Bute made a series of Visual Music films which she called "Seeing Sound."
Most Popular Mary Ellen Bute Trailers
Total trailers found: 16
01 January 1956
A young boy has developed an ability to see through walls, much to the consternation of his stuffy Victorian parents.
31 December 1940
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) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.
05 September 1937
To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground.
05 March 1934
Screen titles introduce the film as a modern artist's impressions of what goes on in the mind while listening to music.
21 April 1958
A short film from Mary Ellen Bute, showcasing her trademark animations set to music.
01 January 1947
Short film by Mary Ellen Bute
01 January 1956
"Bute’s most compact abstract film energizes a jazzy ad jingle to promote RCA’s new stereo recordings! The barrage of visuals features a panoply of animated techniques among which eloquent oscilloscope patterns dance in complex synchronization to the music.
17 June 1936
A (barely) two minute short is that it was made specially for a Paramount newsreel segment on Bute and Nemeth making films in their teensy New York apartment.
01 January 1940
It's midnight in a graveyard. The principal characters are spooks, ghosts, bats, bells, and, at the end, the sun.
09 April 1935
Synchromy No. 2, synchronized to the "Evening Star" aria from Wagner's Tannhäuser, uses a statue of Venus to represent the star.
01 January 1950
Pastorale is one of the lively, abstract animation films made by pioneering animator Mary Ellen Bute between 1934 and 1953 and features an appearance by Leopold Stokowski and the music of Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.
07 April 1967
Based on the stage play Passages from Finnegans Wake, itself based on random passages from Finnegans Wake, Mary Ellen Bute's adaptation is a comical, avant-garde kaleidoscope about a man named Finnegan who dreams about his wake and then wakes up from his dream.
01 July 1952
A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s.
05 September 1937
Parabola is a celebration of film’s ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creating juxtapositions between light/shadow, stasis/motion, and form/music, this black-and-white short invites us to see the parabolic curve, or “nature’s poetry,” as both invigorating and beguiling.
01 January 1948
Mary Ellen Bute, Color Rhapsodie (1948)
01 January 1934
A film by Mary Ellen Bute, Joseph Schillinger, and Lewis Jacobs
