Mary Ellen Bute - Filmography

Filmography

There have been discrepancies over the dating of Mary Ellen Bute's films, primarily due to inaccuracies in published in online articles and websites. The dates below are verified by documents from her distributor and the Center for Visual Music.

• Synchromy – 1933, collaboration with Joseph Schillinger and Lewis Jacobs
• Rhythm in Light – 1934 (b&w, 5 min.) in collaboration with Melville Webber and Ted Nemeth
• Synchromy No. 2 – 1935 (b&w, 5.5 min.) Music: Evening Star from Tannhäuser by Richard Wagner
• Dada – 1936 (b&w) – 3-minute short for Universal Newsreel.
• Parabola – 1937 (b&w, 9 min.) Music: Création du monde by Darius Milhaud.
• Escape – 1937 (color, 4.5 min.) Music: Toccata in D Minor by J.S. Bach.
• Spook Sport – 1939, (color, 8 min.) Music: Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns. Animation by Norman McLaren.
• Tarantella – 1940, color, 5 mins.
• Polka Graph – 1947, color, 4.5 mins. Dmitri Shostakovich's Polka from The Age of Gold
• Color Rhapsody (aka Color Rhapsodie) – 1948, color, 6 mins.
• Imagination – 1948, color
• New Sensations in Sound – 1949, color, 3 mins.
• Pastorale – 1950, color, 9 mins. Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze
• Abstronic – 1952, color, 7 mins. Aaron Copland's Hoe Down and Don Gillis's Ranch House Party
• Mood Contrasts – 1953, color, 7 mins.
• The Boy Who Saw Through – 1956 (producer), b/w, 25 mins. Stars a young Christopher Walken.
• Passages from Finnegans Wake – 1965-67, b&w, 97 mins. (director and co-writer) Screened at the Cannes Film Festival