Mary Ellen BUTE

(1906-1983)
Nationality: American

"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
"Infatuated with the new non-objective paintings of Kandinsky and others, Texas debutante Bute devoted twenty years (1932-1952) to creating thirteen abstract motion pictures in black-and-white and color, with familiar classical music accompaniments. Many were shown at New York’s Radio City Music Hall." - Cecile Starr

12 MOVIES IN DISTRIBUTION

NEW SENSATIONS IN SOUND BY RCA VICTOR
1956 / 35mm / color / sound / single screen / 1' 26 / 16 €
distribution: Digital file on server
MOOD CONTRASTS
1953 / 16mm / color / sound / single screen / 7' 12 / 37 €
distribution: Digital file on server
  ABSTRONIC
1952 / 35mm / color / sound / single screen / 6' 10 / 32 €
distribution: DCP on server or Digital file on server
COLOR RHAPSODIE
1948 / 35mm / color / sound / single screen / 6' 00 / 37 €
distribution: Digital file on server
POLKA GRAPH
1947 / 16mm / color / sound / single screen / 4' 25 / 26 €
distribution: Digital file on server
  TARANTELLA
1940 / 35mm / color / sound / single screen / 4' 51 / 32 €
distribution: DCP on server or Digital file on server
  SPOOK SPORT
1939 / 35mm / color / sound / single screen / 7' 54 / 34 €
distribution: Digital file on server
  SYNCHROMY NO. 4 - ESCAPE
1937-1938 / 35mm / color / sound / single screen / 4' 29 / 32 €
distribution: Digital file on server
  PARABOLA
1936-1938 / 35mm / b&w / sound / single screen / 8' 48 / 38 €
distribution: Digital file on server
  DADA - Universal Clip
1936 / 35mm / b&w / sound / single screen / 1' 15 / 21 €
distribution: Digital file on server
  SYNCHROMY NO. 2 - O EVENING STAR
1936 / 35mm / b&w / sound / single screen / 5' 40 / 32 €
distribution: Digital file on server
  RHYTHM IN LIGHT
1934 / 35mm / b&w / sound / single screen / 5' 00 / 32 €
distribution: Digital file on server