SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 at 8:00 PM
(Mary Ellen Bute, 1934-52, USA, 16mm, 70min)

Program presented in association with the Center for Visual Music, in association with Cecile Starr and the Women’s Independent Film Exchange.

All prints 16mm.  Program approx 70 minutes.

Introduced by Cindy Keefer, Director of Center for Visual Music

Still from Mary Ellen Bute's "Color Rhapsodie." (Courtesy of Center for Visual Music.)

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.

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 which translated music — often classical music by the likes of 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.

For more information about Mary Ellen Bute, visit www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Bute.htm See also the illustrated essay “Mary Ellen Bute” by Lauren Rabinovitz, included in the book The Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945 (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1995) edited by Jan-Christopher Horak. Rabinovitz worked extensively from Bute’s own papers, housed at Yale University.

PROGRAM

Image courtesy of Center for Visual Music.

All films had sound and were from 16mm prints provided by Cecile Starr. Restorations by Cecile Starr, except for Mood Contrasts restored by Cindy Keefer.

Short Documentary (work-in-progress)
Screened as video.
A fund-raising reel for an unfinished film, made by Cecile Starr with Kit Basquin and Larry Mollot.

Synchromy No. 2 (1935)
B/W, 5 min.
Music: Wagners’s “Evening Star.” Premiered at Radio City Music Hall.

Rhythm in Light (1934)
B/W, 5 min.
Music: Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance.” Collaboration with Melville Webber and Ted Nemeth. Premiered at Radio City Music Hall in 1935.

Dada (1936)
B/W, 3 min.
Produced for Universal Newsreel.

Parabola (1937)
B/W
Music: Darius Milhaud’s Le Creation du Monde.

Escape (1937)
Color, 5 min.
Music: Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.”

Tarantella (1940)
Color, 5 min.
Piano music by Edwin Gershefsky

Polka Graph (Fun With Music) (1947)
Color, 5 min.
Began as an actual chart of Shostakovich’s Polka from “The Age of Gold.” Award winner at Venice Film Festival.

Color Rhapsody (1948)
Color, 6 min.
Music: Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” Premiered at Radio City Music Hall in 1951.

New Sensations in Sound (ca. 1949)
Color
An in-house advertisement produced for RCA.

Pastorale (1950)
Color
Music: J.S. Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.”

Mood Contrasts (1953)
Color
Music: “Hymn to the Sun” from The Golden Cockerel and “Dance of the Tumblers” from The Snow Maiden by Rimsky-Korsakov. Premiered at Radio City Music Hall.

Imagination (1948)
Color, 3 min.
Produced for the Steve Allen show. Animated to a song of the same title.

(Scheduled but not shown due to circumstances beyond our control:)
Abstronic (1952)
Color, 7 min.
Music: Aaron Copeland’s “Hoe Down” and Don Gillis’s “Ranch House Party.”