Abstronic
Overview
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.”
Release date
01/07/1952
Votes
9
Popularity
1.2
Original Soundtrack
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MUTE
A Mistaken Haert
Coney
Silence
The Town of Forgotten Things
Diva Viva
Last Rumba in Rochdale
Promesses
Doctor Dolittle and His Animals
Observing the Tardigrades
Camille
As if Swallowed by Earth
Friendly Shadow
Suburbia
Clockwork Heart
Beastie Boys: Video Anthology
Eden
Penelope
I Saw the Future
Catastrophe