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Mary Ellen Bute

Mary Ellen Bute

Director, Producer, Writer

Born November 21, 1906 in Houston, Texas

Died October 17, 1983

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Biography

A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute directed along with her husband Ted Nemeth 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."

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Filmography

Actor

2

Type

Year

Remembering Mary Ellen Bute Video2008Self

The New Cinema Documentary1984Self

Director

16

Type

Year

Abstronic Poster

Abstronic Short Film2021

Color Rhapsodie Poster

Color Rhapsodie Short Film2021

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Poster

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Feature Film1966

RCA: New Sensations in Sound Poster

RCA: New Sensations in Sound Short Film1959

Imaginations Short Film1958

Mood Contrasts Poster

Mood Contrasts Short Film1958

Pastoral Short Film1950

Polka Graph Poster

Polka Graph Short Film1947

Spook Sport Poster

Spook Sport Short Film1940

Tarantella Poster

Tarantella Short Film1940

Escape Short Film1937

Parábola Poster

Parábola Short Film1937

Dada Short Film1936

Synchromy No. 2 Poster

Synchromy No. 2 Short Film1936

Rhythm in Light Poster

Rhythm in Light Short Film1935

Synchromy No. 1 Short Film1934

Producer

2

Type

Year

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Poster

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Feature Film1966

The Boy Who Saw Through Poster

The Boy Who Saw Through Short Film1956

Writer

1

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Poster

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Feature Film1966

Editor

1

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Poster

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Feature Film1966

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