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-Saens or Shostakovich, and filled with colorful forms, elegant design and sprightly, dance-like-rhythms, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. “Beginning with Escape, Mary Ellen began to work in color, and used more conventional animation for the main themes in the music, but still combining it with ‘special effect’ backgrounds– sometimes swirling liquids, clouds or fireworks, other times light effects created with conventional stagelighting, such as imploding or exploding circles made by rising in or out of a spotlight.” (William Moritz)
