Spook Sport

United States

1939

8 Min

Color

1.37:1

None

Currently 3.6/5 Stars.
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DIR Norman McLaren, Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth

It’s midnight in a graveyard. The principal characters are spooks, ghosts, bats, bells, and, at the end, the sun. As midnight strikes, 12 spooks appear, then two ghosts. They move to the music’s rhythm. Against the black night, they are blue and yellow. Bats appear as does a xylophone of bones. Mist rises, spooks swirl. A bell tolls. The sky turns light blue, the ghosts’ dance slows. Then black night returns bringing intimations of frenzy. Bones play snare drums; spooks peek out of square graves. Scary faces appear. Frenetic movement takes over. A rooster crows and all return to earth as the sun’s light appears. —IMDb

Director

Norman McLaren

Norman McLaren, CC, CQ (11 April 1914 – 27 January 1987) was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and film director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).

McLaren was born in Stirling, Scotland and studied set design at the Glasgow School of Art. His early experiments with film and animation included actually scratching and painting the film stock itself, as he did not have ready access to a camera. His earliest extant film, Seven Till Five (1933), a “day in the life of an art school” was influenced by Eisenstein and displays a strongly formalist attitude.

McLaren’s next film, Camera Makes Whoopee (1935), was a more elaborate take on the themes explored in Seven Till Five, inspired by his acquisition of a Ciné-Kodak camera, which enabled him to execute a number of ‘trick’ shots. McLaren used pixilation effects, superimpositions and animation not only to display the staging of an art school ball, but also to tap into the aesthetic sensations supposedly… read more

Norman McLaren, CC, CQ (11 April 1914 – 27 January 1987) was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and film director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).

McLaren was born in Stirling, Scotland and studied set design at the Glasgow School of Art. His early experiments with film and animation included actually scratching and painting the film stock itself, as he did not have ready access to a camera. His earliest extant film, Seven Till Five (1933), a “day in the life of an art school” was influenced by Eisenstein and displays a strongly formalist attitude.

McLaren’s next film, Camera Makes Whoopee (1935), was a more elaborate take on the themes explored in Seven Till Five, inspired by his acquisition of a Ciné-Kodak camera, which enabled him to execute a number of ‘trick’ shots. McLaren used pixilation effects, superimpositions and animation not only to display the staging of an art school ball, but also to tap into the aesthetic sensations supposedly produced by this event.

His two early films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where fellow Scot and future NFB founder John Grierson was a judge.

Grierson, who was at that time head of the GPO Film Unit, hired him for the GPO as soon as McLaren completed his studies. After making a few films for the GPO in London, McLaren moved to New York City in 1939, just as World War II was about to begin in Europe.

At the invitation of Grierson, he moved to Canada in 1941 to work for the National Film Board, to open an animation studio and to train Canadian animators. During his work for the NFB, McLaren created his most famous film, Neighbours (1952), which has won various awards around the world, including the Canadian Film Award and the Academy Award. Besides the brilliant combination of visuals and sound, the film has a very strong social message against violence and war. In addition to film, McLaren worked with UNESCO in the 1950s and 1960s on programs to teach film and animation techniques in China and India. His five part “Animated Motion” shorts, produced in the late 1970s, are an excellent example of instruction on the basics of film animation. —wikipedia

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Mary Ellen Bute

Mary Ellen Bute (November 21, 1906—October 17, 1983) was a pioneer American film animator significant as one of the first female experimental filmmakers. Her specialty was visual music and, while working in New York between 1934 and 1953, made fourteen short, abstract musical films. Many of these were seen in regular movie theaters, such as Radio City Music Hall, usually preceding a prestigious film. Several of her later abstract films were categorized as part of her Seeing Sound series.

A native of Houston, Mary Ellen Bute studied painting in Texas and, subsequently, Philadelphia, then stage lighting at Yale University, focusing her primary interest on the tradition of color organs, as a means of painting with light. She worked with Leon Theremin and Thomas Wilfred and was also influenced by the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger.

Bute began her filmmaking career collaborating with Joseph Schillinger on the animation of visuals. Her later films were made in partnership… read more

Mary Ellen Bute (November 21, 1906—October 17, 1983) was a pioneer American film animator significant as one of the first female experimental filmmakers. Her specialty was visual music and, while working in New York between 1934 and 1953, made fourteen short, abstract musical films. Many of these were seen in regular movie theaters, such as Radio City Music Hall, usually preceding a prestigious film. Several of her later abstract films were categorized as part of her Seeing Sound series.

A native of Houston, Mary Ellen Bute studied painting in Texas and, subsequently, Philadelphia, then stage lighting at Yale University, focusing her primary interest on the tradition of color organs, as a means of painting with light. She worked with Leon Theremin and Thomas Wilfred and was also influenced by the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger.

Bute began her filmmaking career collaborating with Joseph Schillinger on the animation of visuals. Her later films were made in partnership with her cinematographer Ted Nemeth whom she married in 1940. Her final film, inspired by James Joyce, was Passages from Finnegans Wake, a live-action feature made over a nearly three-year period in 1965-67.

In the 1960s and 1970s Bute worked on two films which were never completed: an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth, and a film about Walt Whitman with the working title Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.

Bute was a founding member of the Women’s Independent Film Exchange.

Mary Ellen Bute died of heart failure at New York City’s Cabrini Medical Center. She was five weeks short of her 77th birthday. Six months earlier, on April 4, she received a special tribute and a retrospective of her films at the Museum of Modern Art.

An archive with some of Bute’s personal papers is at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. A finding aid describes this collection. Film historian Cecile Starr has an extensive collection of Bute papers; another collection is at Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles. Several of her films are at the Yale Film Study Center, George Eastman House, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Anthology Film Archives, and a number of other institutions and archives; an entire 16mm collection is with Cecile Starr; and a travelling film show of all of her abstract short 16mm films has been presented since 2006 in the US, Australia and Europe by Center for Visual Music in association with Cecile Starr and The Women’s Independent Film Exchange. —wikipedia

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Ted Nemeth

Ted Nemeth (1911-1986) was an early animation pioneer and cinematographer, who served in the latter capacity on Jim Henson’s short film Time Piece. As Frank Oz recalled in a 2001 FilmForce interview, “Jim would scrape enough money up through commercials and we would go out shooting on weekends with Ted Nemeth, who had an old 35mm rackover camera.”

Early in his career, Nemeth had been working on commercial advertising and documentary projects when, in 1933, he served as camerman on Rhythm in Light, an experimental short by Mary-Ellen Bute, who he would soon wed. The couple, sometimes in collaboration with Norman McLaren (future auteur with The National Film Board of Canada), produced a number of experimental avant-garde animated shorts, between the 1930s and the 1950s. He later provided cinematography for Bute’s 1966 film version of Finnegan’s Wake, which she wrote and directed. Nemeth had a particular keen eye for color, reflected in the tones which adorn Time Piece, but even… read more