In the mid 1930s, Mary Ellen Bute was the first American to make abstract motion pictures, and in the early 1950s along with Norman McLaren and Hy Hirsh was among the first to explore electronic imagery in film. Starting as a Rosa Bonheur-style painter in Texas, she came east at age 15 to study painting in Philadelphia. Later she studied stage lighting at Yale, made a round-the-world dance and drama tour as a teacher-lecturer, worked with Joseph Schillinger on his mathematical projections and with Leon Theremin on his electronic musical invention.
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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. Beginning with the 1939 Escape, Mary Ellen began to work in color, and used more conventional animation for the main themes in the music, but still combining it with "special effect" backgrounds - sometimes swirling liquids, clouds or fireworks, other times light effects created with conventional stage lighting, such as imploding or exploding circles made by rising in or out a spotlight. |
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| Mary Ellen Bute “Light Form Movement Sound” NY 1935 |
Mary Ellen is also quite important as a formative influence on Norman McLaren. The kind of titles Mary Ellen used to preface her films, explaining them to an average audience as a new kind of art linking sight and sound prefigure McLaren's similar audience friendly prefaces to his National Film Board experiments. For the 1940 Spook Sport, Mary Ellen hired Norman McLaren (living in New York before he went to Canada) to draw directly on film strips the "characters" of ghosts, bats, etc. Even though Bute undertook a lot of pioneering work in avant-garde film, and greatly succeeded in her time, she today remains little recognized compared to her male counterparts. Bute is rarely mentioned in film encyclopedia, and if so, only in passing and with perpetually wrong dates and facts. Later in the early 1950’s along with Norman McLaren and Hy Hirsh, Bute was among the first artists to explore electronic imagery in film.
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| 1940 Spook Sport by Norman McLaren & Mary Ellen Bute (Conventional cel animation). |
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In 1954, Mary Ellen began using oscilloscope patterns to create the main "figures" in her films. She claimed to be the first person to combine "science and art" in this way, and she sold her last two films Abstronic (1954) and Mood Contrasts (1956) on their novelty. Actually, Norman McLaren used oscilloscope patterns in 1950 to generate abstract images for his Around is Around, which was screened at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and described in technical detail in American Cinematographer. Hy Hirsh also used oscilloscope imagery in his 1951 Divertissement Rococo in his 1953 Eneri and Come Closer. The sort of shapes that Mary Ellen captured from the cathode ray tube for her films seems somewhat simpler or weaker than the forms McLaren and Hirsh use in their films. But she makes up for the "slinky" look of her main figures by imaginative backgrounds and animation supplements. In the 1954 "Abstronic", Mary Ellen uses her own paintings, with a kind of surrealist depth perspective, zooming in and out in rhythmic pulsations synched with the beat of "hoe down" music. These electronic pictures of the music are a natural phenomena which take place in the sub-atomic world; they are then captured on the Cathode Ray Oscilloscope and filmed with a motion picture camera. The colored backgrounds are hand done and superimposed on the electronic animation of the musical themes. In this film, Mary Ellen Bute combines Science an Art to create "Seeing Sound." |
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| 1954 Abstronic (1954, color, 7 min.) Mary Ellen experimented with the oscilloscope, creating a spectacle of movements that changed shape and tempo at will, while also alluding to three dimensional space. |
In her next film "Mood Contrasts" (1956, color, 7 min.) incorporating animation from a 1947 film Mood Lyric), she created her most complex collage of animation and special effects, including a striking sequence of colored lights refracting through glass bricks in oozing soft grid patterns. Mood Contrasts is another very early example of the use of oscilloscope patterns, but unlike those found in Hirsh's films, Mary Bute's wave-forms are "uncontrolled," shimmering figures that function as "dancers," with conventional animation providing the background. Her use of oscilloscope patterns she regarded as the direct and most physical visualization of sound as well as a unique fusion of art and science.
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| 1956 Mood Contrasts. |
Mary Ellen made two more commercial shorts, a 1958 Imagination number for the Steve Allen television show, and a 1959 commercial for RCA, New Sensations in Sound, both of which are clever, sharply edited collages of effects from her previous films. In 1956 she made a live-action short The Boy Who Saw Through and spent the next decade working on a live-action feature based on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. In the 1970s, feminists "rediscovered" Mary Ellen as a pioneer woman filmmaker, but by that time many of her abstract films were no longer available in good prints, and the original nitrates were dispersed to archives in Wisconsin, Connecticut and New York. She was still, however, celebrated justly for a major achievement in making her films and distributing them herself, against all odds, successfully. Spending the last years of her life in a Salvation Army residence in New York she died impoverished in 1983.
Related reading: Bute, Mary Ellen . Abstronics: An Experimental Filmmaker Photographs The Esthetics of the Oscillograph. Films in Review New York: National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Inc., June-July 1954. Journal Article |
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