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Mary Ellen Bute: Pioneer Animator captures the personal and professional life of Mary Ellen Bute (1906—1983) one of the first American filmmakers to create abstract animated films in 1934, also one of the first Americans to use the electronic image of the oscilloscope in films starting in 1952, and the first filmmaker to interpret James Joyce’s literature for the screen, Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a live-action film for which she won a Cannes Film Festival Prize in 1965.
Bute had an eye for talent and selected many creative people who would go on to be famous. She hired Norman McLaren to hand paint on film for the animation of her Spook Sport, 1939, before he left to head the animation department of the Canadian Film Board. She cast the now famous character actor Christopher Walken at age fourteen as the star of her short live-action film, The Boy Who Saw Through, 1958. Also, Bute enlisted Elliot Kaplan to compose the film score of her Finnegans Wake before he moved on to compose music for TV’s Fantasy Island and Ironside.
This biography drawn from interviews with Bute’s family, friends, and colleagues, presents the personal and professional life of the filmmaker and her behind-the-scenes process of making animated and live action films.
Kit Smyth Basquin holds a BA from Goucher College in history, an MA in art history from Indiana University, and a PhD in interdisciplinary studies from Union Institute and University, Cincinnati.
Dr. Basquin worked thirteen-and-a-half years as an administrator in the Drawings and Prints Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to that she was a curator of education and independent curator at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee. Dr. Basquin is a free-lance writer and a choral singer in New York.
Review of Mary Ellen Bute: Pioneer Animator by Kit Smyth Basquin in Film Quarterly spring 2021
Tom Klein, film critic and professor at Loyola Marymount within the School of Film and Television, wrote: “In writing this biography, Smyth Basquin has made a facet of film history glimmer in a new light. Bute led a fascinating life, and her films, until recently, had been widely overlooked. Kit Smyth Basquin not only has been thorough with her research but also has donated her collected materials to the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The book is an essential addition to the field of animation studies, vastly increasing the available information about Bute. It serves as both an acknowledgment of her contributions to cinema and a testament to the rewards of finding one’s own way amid hardships.”
Publications
Click the button below to learn more about Dr. Basquin on the Association of Print Scholars website.
Narrative Magazine, January 2017 – Gaza City
Art in Print, Mary 2017 – “Collecting Self”
New York Magazine, May 2017 – Response letter to art critic Jerry Saltz
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