Born in Houston in 1906, Mary Ellen Bute passed away in New York, her long-time residence, in 1983. Her obituary in the New York Times underscored the pioneering nature of her “use of electronic imagery in films.” Although her 1965 feature film Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake earned her an award at the Cannes Film Festival, it represented a challenge of a decidedly narrative nature compared to her two previous decades of experimenting with form. From the early 1930s to the early 1950s, working primarily in short formats, Bute sought to liberate abstract painting, “too confined within its frame,” by translating it into “a visual form that would have the ordered sequence of music”. Her aim was to produce synaesthetic sensations, a confluence of eye and ear. Melding abstraction with melody meant projecting Vassily Kandinsky’s Compositions—initiated in the 1910s—onto a then-nascent idea of cinema, responding already to the calls upon which kinetic cinema, one of the high points of experimental film, would build itself in the 1960s in a bid to amplify the retinal experience with the total engagement of a broadened corporeal field.

Peter Weibel included Bute’s first abstract film, Rhythm in Light (1934), in his 2022 exhibition KINETISMUS: 100 YEARS OF ELECTRICITY IN ART at Kunsthalle Praha. In doing so, he acknowledged a debt: while Bute may be one of the “less well-known artists” in his selection, it was she who coined the term “expanded cinema”—a term later used by Gene Youngblood for the title of his seminal 1970 publication, which, paradoxically, omits any mention of Bute, even in its second part, which follows “the history of conventional film language to its limit” and “a detailed analysis of synaesthetic cinema.” Weibel, in the introduction to KINETISMUS, positions himself as a direct inheritor of Bute’s “expanded cinema;” and Sandra Naumann’s assessment of Rhythm in Light emphasizes the quasi-scientific precision of Bute’s synaesthetic cinema and her methodical weaving of visual and musical threads throughout the film, while also noting its aims of reaching “a mainstream audience unfamiliar with modern art.” Such a strange omission almost naturally called for rediscovery.

Among Bute’s chief works from her experimental years, Tarantella, a five-minute film first presented to the public in 1940, stands out as a masterpiece in itself. In Elles font l’abstraction, Christine Macel exhibited it alongside Abstronic (1952): the monographic entry on Bute emphasized that Tarantella “extends the filmmaker’s visual research by opening it to colour experimentation.” As “the only woman filmmaker invited to present her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as early as 1940 alongside her European contemporaries,” Bute had already ventured into colour in 1937 with Escape, her fourth “Synchromy”: a cinematic rendition of J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue
in D minor. The grid patterns saturating Escape—evoking depth and spatial illusions before converging toward that moiré effect which would later become emblematic of kinetic cinema—were soon abandoned. This choice likely reflects an evolution in Bute’s goals, signalled by her systematic use of introductory texts explaining her project before each film. The necessity of a preamble, ushering audiences into the novel terrain of abstraction and its myriad possibilities, speaks to the groundbreaking nature of Bute’s cinematic endeavours. While Escape might be called “visual music,” her 1939 second colour film Spook Sport (in between Escape and Tarantella) is a “ballet film,” where each visual element is a character; their interactions generate a narrative which Tarantella, a “fast-paced dance,” reorients toward the body, captured in a way hitherto unseen in Bute’s work.

The film opens with a dictionary definition: that of its referent, the tarantella, a Neapolitan dance, the choreography of which, because it codifies the dancer’s response to music, being indeed at a crossroads between rhythm and narrative. From this starting point, Bute could have aligned the film’s visual logic with the choreographic pattern of the tarantella—synchronizing the abstract ele- ments to the already codified rhythm of the bodies.
But while Tarantella’s elements do carry illustrative power, they serve the imagination rather than translation: the source for the film is not the choreography itself, but rather “a series of original drawings by the filmmaker.” The film generates a choreography that truly has no other source than the music itself. That abstract choreography is peculiar in the sense that it invites comparison with the concrete choreography of the tarantella: a dance that is at once collective, repetitive, and circular. This comparison only stands because Bute’s film feels like a construct, like something articulated, expressing itself from multiple places at once—because it feels, in fact, like a body. This abstract body, wrought from oscillating fusions of geo- metric and biomorphic forms—a Kandinskian aesthetics indeed—unfolds in the temporalized space of cinema, so fast that any attempt at detailed description would be futile. What we are left with is a general impression: this body, at times shrill, at times soothing in Tarantella, swiftly oscillates between calm and exuberant, ecstatic, electrifying states; as if nearly alive.

— Guillaume Oranger (translated by Antoine Rumelhart)