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Interior Screen

Interior Screen 2018: Mary Ellen Bute

Audiovisuals

Free

“Interior Screen” is a programme of free screenings in the foyer of the CCCB, devoted to artistes who use the cinema as an instrument to express the world of dreams or the imagination. This August offers a selection of works by US filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983), a pioneer in the experimental film forms of visual music and electronic art.

The first edition of “Interior Screen” is organised in collaboration with the Center for Visual Music  of Los Angeles.

Between the nineteen-thirties and fifties, Mary Ellen Bute made over a dozen short abstract animations, set to classical music, full of coloured lines and forms in constant movement and composed using mathematical formulas. The programme presents three of her major films in a nonstop projection:

Programme:

- Polka Graph, 1947, colour, 5 minutes. Award-winner at the Venice Film Festival, this film is based on the “Polka” from The Age of Gold by Shostakovich, in which Bute applies cel animation on a graph pattern, using the Schillinger system, with layered cut-outs and cellophane.

- Color Rhapsodie, 1948, colour, 6 minutes. With the music of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”, Bute uses paint on glass and images of fireworks and coloured clouds.

- Abstronic, 1952, colour, 7 minutes. Images generated by the oscilloscope, superimposed on Bute’s hand-drawn backgrounds, dance to the rhythm of Aaron Copland’s “Hoe Down” and Don Gillis’s “Ranch House Party”.

Digital screening. Copies courtesy of Center for Visual Music.

More information on Mary Ellen Bute.

Directors: Mary Ellen Bute

This activity is part of Interior Screen

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Interior Screen: Mary Ellen Bute

We have set up a new screen devoted to artistes who use the cinema as an instrument to express the world of dreams or the imagination. The programme of this first edition (August 2018), organised in collaboration with the Center for Visual Music of Los Angeles, is a tribute to the avant-garde ...

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