Color Rhapsodie

Mary Ellen Bute, Color Rhapsodie (1948)

Polka Graph

Short film by Mary Ellen Bute

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Based on the stage play Passages from Finnegans Wake, itself based on random passages from Finnegans Wake, Mary Ellen Bute's adaptation is a comical, avant-garde kaleidoscope about a man named Finnegan who dreams about his wake and then wakes up from his dream.

Tarantella

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) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.

Synchromy No. 4

To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates an...