by Melville Webber, Mary Ellen Bute, and Theodore Nemeth, 1934, 5 minutes
Music: „Peer Gynt Suite“ by Edvard Grieg
Courtesy: Mary Ellen Bute, Theodore Nemeth, Anthology Film Archives

Bute used Webber’s experience with making cardboard models and with photographing in soft focus and through prisms to produce multiple refractions and reflections. In addition, she used cellophane, ping-pong balls, sparklers, eggbreaters, and bracelets to create a work that, while pushing toward abstraction, does not completely leave the objective world behind. (R. Bruce Elder)

by Rutherford Boyd, Mary Ellen Bute, and Theodore Nemeth, 1936-38, 9 minutes
Music: „La Creation du Monde” by Darius Milhaud
Courtesy: Mary Ellen Bute, Theodore Nemeth, Anthology Film Archives

Sculptor Rutherford Boyd worked in collaboration with Nemeth and Bute, whose NYC production facilities were placed at his disposal. Filmed, frame by frame, in a sequence of stills that varied the arrangement of sculptural pieces under controlled illumination, Parabola introduced the potential of an new design technique. (Douglas Dreishpoon)

Sculptor Rutherford Boyd

Parabola
Nature’s Poetry of Motion
Written with a Single Line
Parabola
Path of Every Ball and Bullet,
headlight’s Curve and Brige’s Cable,
Fountain’s Jet and Falling Star
Always follow this Contour,
Parabola
A Captive Curve, Earthbound by Gravity,
Set Free by Man for all the Arts
Parabola

Every Curve Formed by Passing
a Plane through a Cone Parallel
to its Slope is a Parabola.

by Mary Ellen Bute and Theodore Nemeth, 1936, 6 minutes
Music: „The Evening Star“ by Richard Wagner sung by Reinald Werrenrath
Courtesy: Mary Ellen Bute, Theodore Nemeth, Anthology Film Archives

While German absolute filmmakers often drew on J. S. Bach for their understanding of form, Bute derived hers from mathematician Joseph Schillinger, as the Synchromy series shows. The visuals are reflections and refractions of light from glass colanders. The music is Wagner’s O’ Evening Star – a Venus statue represents the star. (R. Bruce Elder)

This film is a pioneer effort in a new art form – It is a modern artist’s impression of what goes on in the mind while listening to music.

SEEING SOUND
Music, in addition to pleasing the EAR
brings something to the EYE.
The following film is designed
by a modern artist to create
MOODS THROUGH THE EYE
as music creates
MOODS THROUGH THE EAR.

SEEING SOUND
Do you see anything like this when
SEEING SOUND

I came to New York and tried to find the technical means. The most developed thing at the time was stage lighting . I went to an art school where we did many things with lighting, but it wasn’t adequate, an art medium per se. Then, by a fluke, I got into Yale… and they had a fabulous switchboard, and of course I became one of its runners, reaching for my kinetic art form.

From Yale I got the job of taking drama around the world. .. and got to see, oh, the Noh drama of Japan, and the Taj Mahal in India [where gems surrounded the building] . I looked into the gems and saw reflected the Taj Mahal, and the lake, and the whole thing appealed to me enormously. .. because it was romantic and because it was a kinetic, visual thing. I started entertaining myself by imagining these designs and patterns all in movement.

Back in New York I related all of this to Thomas Wilfred, who by that time had developed a color organ. This was in 1929 .. . Then I heard about Leon Theremin.. . and apprenticed myself to his [sound] studio to learn more about composition. He became interested in my determination to develop a kinetic visual art form, [and helped me with experiments]. We submerged tiny mirrors in tubes of oil, connected to an oscillator, and drew where these points of light wereflying . The effect was thrilling for us-it was so pure. But it wasn’t enough. Finally we got a Bolex camera, and started analyzing, to make my first film, Rhythm in Light (1934) . It was mostly three-dimensional animation . Pyramids, and ping pong balls, and all interrelated by light patterns-, and I wasn’t happy unless it all entered and exited exactly as I had planned.
(Articulated Light Harvard Film Archive – Anthology Film Archives, 1956 )

PHOTOGRAPHIC + BLACK & WHITE

*Synchromy No. 1 (Synchronization) 1932
in cooperation with Lewis Jacobs and Joseph Schillinger (not realised, only sketches)

*Rhythm in Light 1934/1935 35mm, 4,5 min
–>> film

*Synchromy No. 2 1935/36 35mm, sound 6 min
–>> film

*Dada (Universal Clip) 1936 35mm 3 min

*Parabola 1937 35mm, special release, 9 min
–>> film

NARRATIVE ANIMATION + COLOR

*Escape (Synchromy No. 4) 1938/39 35mm, limited release, 4 min

*Spook Sport 1939/41 35mm, 8 min
–>> film

ABSTRACT ANIMATION + COLOR

*Tarantella (Synchromy No. 9) 1940/41 35mm, 4,5 min 15 sec

*Polka Graph (Fun With Music) 1947/1952, 35mm, 4,5 min

*Color Rhapsodie 1948/51 35mm, color 6 min

*Pastoral 1950/53 35mm, 6 min

USE OF OSCILLOSCOPE + COLOR

*Abstronic 1952/54 35mm, 6 min

*Mood Contrasts 1953/56 35mm, color 7 min

*Imaginations 1957 (Compilation for Steve Allen Show, NBC) 35mm, 3 min

*New Sensations in Sound 1959 (RCA Commercial), 3 min

LIFE ACTION + BLACK & WHITE

*The Boy Who Saw Through 1956/58 25 min (only Production)
*Passages from Finnegans Wake 1965/1967, 97 min

*The Skin of Our Teeth from 1966, unfinished

*Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking from 1976, unfinished

The iota Center is the main spot dedicated to “The dream of creating a color music for the eye, comparable with auditory music for the ear, dates to antiquity…
http://www.iotacenter.org/

and for Mary Ellen Butes Site there:
http://www.iotacenter.org/program/publication/bute

an interetsing link with a lot of texts to the topic: http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org
especially:
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Library.html

article by Christine Lee Gengaro on Fischinger and Bute: http://www.usc.edu/libraries/partners/resonance/2006/Spring/gengaro/

light as a medium is covered in the current issue (39) of artcrush see:
http://www.artkrush.com/mailer/issue39/index.html

about the history of women in informatics – german website:
http://www.frauen-informatik-geschichte.de/

One more link to lichtmusik:
http://www.roberthaller.com/firstlight

Mary Ellen Bute hatte immer einen sehr pragmatischen Ansatz, bei der Auswahl der Musik zu ihren Animationen. Sie hielt die Absrakten Filme für schwer vermittelbar und benutzte die Musik als Hilfsmittel/Transportmittel um die Radikalität ihrer Animationsfime einem größeren Publikum zugänglich zu machen. Sie war nach der Heirat mit Ted Nemeth stark in die Produktionsfirma ihres Mannes eingebunden. Die Animationsfilme wurden mit der dem US-amerikanischen Raum eigentümlichen Selbstverständlichkeit vermarktet. Als der Markt es verlangte, drehte sie TV-Filme. Trotzdem ist ihr letztes filmisches Werk (Finnegans Wake) ja auch nicht gerade als Massenkost zu bezeichnen. Um ihren Nachlass kümmert sich die Filmhistorikerin Cecile Star.

Ein sehr guter Artikel ist der von Christine Lee Gengaro
http://www.usc.edu/libraries/partners/resonance/2006/Spring/gengaro/

This art is the interrelation of light, form, movement, and sound-combined and projected to stimulate an aesthetic idea. lt is unassociated with ideas of religion, literature, ethics or decoration. Here light, form, and sound are in dynamic balance with kinetic space relations.

The Absolute Film addresses the eye and the ear. Other motion pictures, although making use of sensations of sight and sound, address not the eye and the ear but the intellect. For example, in realistic films, the medium is subordinate to story, symbol or representation. We view an Absolute Film as a stimulant by its own inherent powers of sensation, without the encumbrance of literary meaning, photographic Imitation, or symbolism. Our enjoyment of an Absolute Film depends solely on the effect it produces: whereas, in viewing a realistic film, the resultant sensation is based on the mental image evoked.

Cinematographers, painters and musicians find a common enthusiasm in the absolute film. Through using the motion picture camera creatively, cameramen find a seemingly endless source of new possibilities and means of expression undreamed of while the camera was confined to use merely as a recording device. But we must tum back to painters and musicians to find the ideas which probably motivated the Absolute Film into a state of being.

Work in the field of the Absolute Film is accelerating both here and abroad. The foundations for it were laid years ago, and it was more recently anticipated by Cezanne and his followers with whom we have an abstract art of painting taking form. Cezanne used the relationships between color and form, discarding the former mixture of localized light and shade by stressing relationship, he lifted color from imitating objective nature to producing a visual sensation in itself. His paintings of still lives: apples and tablecloth, are not conceived in a spirit of objective representation; they are organized groups of forms having relationships, balanced proportions and visual associations. His use of color on a static surface reaches a point where the next step demanded an introduction of time sequence and a richer textural range.

The Cubists tried to produce on a static surface a sensation to the eye, analogous to the sensation of sound to the ear. That is, by the device of presenting simultaneously within the same visual field the combined aspects of the same object views from many different angles or at different intervals. They tried to organize forms distantly related to familiar objects to convey subjective emotions aroused by the contemplation of an objective world.

The element of music appears in the paintings of Kandinsky. He painted abstract compositions based on an arbitrary chromatic scale of the senses.

The word color appears often in the writing of Wagner. In the “Reminis of Amber” (1871) he writes: “Amber made his music reproduce each contrast, every blend in contours and color–we might almost fancy we had actual music paintings.”

There is simply no end to the examples which we might cite. Some musicians have gone on record as having color associations with specific instruments.

These experiments by both musicians and painters, men of wide experience with their primary art material, have pushed this means of combining the two mediums up into our consciousness. This new medium of expression is the Absolute Film. Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) being subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.