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Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.
Seeing Sound
She studied stage craft for lighting, learned music and electronics with Leo Theremin, and investigated Thomas Wilfred's "lumia" color-organ projections. She turned to film in the early 1930s when musicologist Joseph Schillinger asked for her help animating an experimental film. Schillinger had developed a theory that reduced all music to a series of mathematical formulae, and he wanted to prove it by making a film that illustrated music with animated Kandinsky-like images. After work on that film (which was never completed), Bute was convinced by Melville Webber, a director of live-action experimental films, that abstract effects could be produced by means other than drawing. He assisted her on her first completed film, the 1935 Rhythm in Light, which used light and shadows reflected from cellophane, ping-pong balls, sparklers, egg beaters, bracelets and barber poles (all close-up, fragmented, distorted or out of focus so one never recognizes the source), along with bits of drawn animation -- all tightly synchronized to music by Edvard Grieg (she had seen Fischinger's Study No.5 as part of the Universal newsreels). Her cameraman was always her husband, Ted Nemeth, who worked on documentaries and advertising films professionally. Bute managed to rent her "Seeing Sound" films to theater owners and chains, and they played for months with first-run features across America. Millions saw her work - many more than most other experimental animators - and the income from the screenings allowed Bute to make ten more abstract films over the next 20 years. The 1939 Escape, synchronized to the same Bach "Toccata" that Fischinger was working on simultaneously at the Disney Studios, was her first color film. It was also her first use of some cel animation, along with mirror reflections of a comb and cut celluloid to suggest vaults and alleyways. For the 1940 Spook Sport she hired Norman McLaren to prepare drawn-on-film "characters" of ghosts and goblins and a crowing cock for the "Danse Macabre." Her finest film, the 1941 Tarantella, uses Edwin Gerschefski's modernist music, for which she carefully drew her most exacting animations, following the eccentric and dissonant turns of the dance with zigzags and irregular changes of direction. She also used cut-outs, some light effects and re-used some of McLaren's drawn-on-film effects. Her 1953 Pastorale is also very lovely, synchronizing moving colored lights in soft focus and amorphous flows of "vapors" with Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze." In 1954, Bute began using oscilloscope patterns to create her main "figures," although she surrounded them with drawn backgrounds and subtle lighting effects so they would be more exciting than the rather repetitive and primitive electronic shapes (which in fact were less interesting than those McLaren and Hy Hirsch had used). After 1956, she made live-action films, including a prize-winning feature of James Joyce's Finnegann's Wake. Moritz, William. "History of Experimental Animation." Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997). |
