Poster
Abstronic  (1952)


6.6|1 Jul, 1952|6 min
Released
IMDb
A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, 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.”
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Keywords
woman director
abstract
short film
experimental
visual music

Crews

Don Gillis
Music
Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland
Music
Ted Nemeth
Ted Nemeth
Director
Mary Ellen Bute
Mary Ellen Bute
Director