Synchromy No. 4: Escape
United States
1937
4 Min
Color
None
Synopsis
To the toccata portion of Bach’s “Toccata and fugue in D minor,” we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music’s rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises. —IMDb
Director
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
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
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