Dada

A (barely) two minute short is that it was made specially for a Paramount newsreel segment on Bute and Nemeth making films in their teensy New York apartment. Paramount apparently never got round to including the filmmakers in any newsreel, but their own film survived in the Bute-Nemeth Archive. (weirdwildrealm.com) To the rhythm of music that sounds a bit like a Busby Berkeley tune, lines and circles appear against a black background. Then triangles, in groups. Black and white squares move in tandem. Sparkling forms turn in kaleidoscopic p...

Abstronic

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...