Mary Ellen Bute: Seeing Sound
As with many pioneer animators, Mary Ellen Bute is hardly known today, primarily
because her films are not easily available in good prints. This was not
always true. During a 25-year period, from 1934 until about 1959, the 11
abstract films she made played in regular movie theaters around the country,
usually as the short with a first-run prestige feature, such as Mary
of Scotland, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or Hans Christian
Andersen--which means that millions saw her work, many more than most
other experimental animators.
The diminutive Mary Ellen grew up in Texas, and retained a soft southern
accent and genteel demeanor throughout her life. She studied painting in
Texas and Philadelphia, but felt frustrated by the inability to wield light
in a flowing time-continuum. She studied stage lighting at Yale in an attempt
to gain the technical expertise to create a "color organ" which
would allow her to paint with living light-and also haunted the studios
of electronic genius Leo Theremin and Thomas Wilfred whose Clavilux instrument
projected sensuous streams of soft swirling colors.
She was drawn into filmmaking by a collaboration with the musician Joseph
Schillinger, who had developed an elaborate theory about musical structure,
which reduced all music to a series of mathematical formulae. Schillinger
wanted to make a film to prove that his synchronization system worked in
illustrating music with visual images, and Mary Ellen undertook the project
of animating the visuals. The film was never completed, and a still published
with an article by Schillinger in the magazine Experimental Cinema No.
5 (1934) makes it clear why: the intricate image, reminiscent of Kandinsky's
complex paintings, would have taken a single animator years to redraw thousands
of times.
Mary Ellen continued to use the Schillinger system in her subsequent films,
often to their detriment, for Schillinger's insistence on the mathematics
of musical quantities fails to deal with musical qualities, much as John
Whitney's later Digital Harmony theories. Many pieces of music may share
exactly the same mathematics quantities, but the qualities that make one
of them a memorable classic and another rather ordinary or forgettable involves
other non-mathematical factors, such as orchestral tone color, nuance of
mood and interpretation. In Mary Ellen's weakest works, like the 1951 Color
Rhapsodie, she is betrayed precisely by this problem, using gaudily-colored,
percussive images of fireworks explosions during a soft, sensuous passage--perfectly
timed mathematically, but unsuited to mood and tone color.
Egg Beaters, Bracelets and Sparklers Mary Ellen made two more similar black-and-white films, Synchromy No.
2 (1936) and Parabola (1938), which also are not exactly animation,
nor completely abstract in the sense of Oskar Fischinger's films. Synchromy
No. 2, synchronized to the "Evening Star" aria from Wagner's
Tannhäuser, uses a statue of Venus to represent the star. The
effect of constant flowing forms, however, is quite striking, especially
in Parabola, which is a bit long at nine minutes, and could well
drop the jazzy finale since the lovely middle slow section provides a satisfying
closure.
In 1931, Universal had run one of Oskar Fischinger's Studies as a
novelty item in their newsreel. Mary Ellen had seen it, and proposed to
Universal that they use one of her films in a similar fashion. Since they
could use only two or three minutes, Mary Ellen made a special piece, Dada,
which Universal distributed in 1936.
Mary Ellen made her own first film, Rhythm in Light, together with
Melville Webber, who had collaborated with James Watson on two classic live-action
experimental films, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot
in Sodom (1933). Webber contributed his experience on those films with
making models of paper and cardboard and filming them through such things
as mirrors and a cut-glass ashtray to get multiple parallel reflections
of the shape. The cameraman, Ted Nemeth, who worked commercially on advertising
and documentary films, would soon marry Mary Ellen, and worked on all her
subsequent films. Rhythm in Light, with black-and-white images tightly
synchronized to "Anitra's Dance" from Grieg's music for Peer
Gynt, uses not only Webber's models, but also cellophane, ping-pong
balls, egg beaters, bracelets and sparklers to create abstract light forms
and shadows. Many of these images are "out of focus" or filmed
reflected on a wall for soft nuance and distortion that conceals the origin
of the abstract apparition.
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment