Full Name:

Mary Ellen Bute

Occupation / Title:

, , , , ,

Date of birth:

21/11/1906

Date of death:

17/10/1983

Birthplace:

Houston, Texas, USA.

Associated studios:

Tom Nemeth Studios

Biography


Mary Ellen Bute was an American animator, director, and producer known as one of the first female experimental filmmakers and the creator of some of the first electronically generated film images. Bute was a pioneer of visual music and electronic art inspired by abstract work and the properties of light. She would also use everyday objects in her films, adding to the experimental repertoire of her career. Bute died of heart failure in New York on October 17, 1983.

Family and early life


Bute was born in Houston, Texas as the first of six children in a socially prominent family.

In 1940, she married cinematographer Ted Nemeth, who was her cameraman for all of her films after Rhythm in Light. Nemeth opened his own studio where Bute often wrote scripts for his documentary and advertising films. They had two sons: Theodore Jr. (1940) and James (1947), and had five grandchildren.

Career outline


Bute trained as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1920s, where she decided that painting was too limited a medium to represent her modernist avant-garde style.

Following her graduation, Bute moved to New York City where she continued to push the limitations of painting and attended the Yale School of Drama. Following graduation in 1925, Bute traveled the world as a drama director for a “floating university.” Through her travels she began working with Leon Theremin and Joseph Schillinger on new musical keyboard instruments that could simultaneously produce and create moving colors on a screen.

She collaborated with Joseph Schillinger, who wanted to make a film to demonstrate that his system could illustrate music with visual images. Bute took on the task to create the visuals for Schillinger’s film, which was known as Experimental Cinema No. 5 (1934), but the film was left unfinished due to the immense complexity of the animation which made it evidently impossible for a single animator to complete by hand.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, she extended painterly concerns to music and light so as to represent the kinetics of modern, fast-paced, highly technologized life.

Bute’s first film was Rhythm In Light in collaboration with Melville Webber and Theodore “Ted” Nemeth in 1934. It was an experimental film that shot everyday objects and materials such as cardboard, ping-pong balls, and bracelets through prisms to create abstract shapes with light and shadow.

After making two more films in the same vein, Synchromy No. 2 (1936) and Parabola (1938), she began to use more traditional animation techniques in her films as she also began working in colour. However, she continued to experiment with light and early special effects.

She worked with Canadian animator and filmmaker Norman McLaren to make the film Spook Sounds in 1940. They drew directly on film in time with the music it served as a visual accompaniment, Camille Saint Saëns’ Danse Macabre. She reused some of McLaren’s drawings in her other films, most notably Tantarella (1941), which similarly used the concept of visual imagery complimenting a musical track composed by Edwin Gerchefski.

Influences


She was drawn to pursue filmmaking after working with Joseph Schillinger, who was a pioneer in music composition using mathematical processes known as the Schillinger System of Music Composition, and she continued to use the Schillinger system in her subsequent films. Although she moved away from black-and-white light-based experimental films in the switch to colour in the 1940s, Schillinger’s work remained a prominent influence in her filmography, and she eventually went back to experimenting with light in the 1950s.

Filmography


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References:


Davis, Josh. “A Houston-Born Artist Created Some of the Earliest (and Trippiest) Forms of Visual Music.” Houstonia, 2018.

“MARY ELLEN BUTE, FILM MAKER.” The New York Times, 1983, p. 25.

Moritz, William. “Mary Ellen Bute: Seeing Sound.” Animation World Network, 1996.

Rabinovitz, Lauren. “Film Essay for ‘Tarantella’.” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/tarantella.pdf.

Starr, Cecile. “Mary Ellen Bute.” Centre De Cultura Contemporània De Barcelona (CCCB), 13 June 2018, https://www.cccb.org/en/participants/file/mary-ellen-bute/18143.




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