Work description by Sandra Naumann

Mary Ellen Bute’s first film, Rhythm in Light, was the result of the trained painter’s many years of searching for a medium for the kinetic visual art form that she envisaged. To Anitra’s Dance from the Peer Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg, she arranged several hand-drawn pictures together with photographic images of moving three-dimensional objects such as crumpled cellophane, ping-pong balls, sparklers, egg slicers or bangles. Lighting and camera effects were used to manipulate these materials in such a way that they lost their concreteness and produced a complex, abstract interplay of light and shadow made up of geometric and amorphous forms. Bute organized and synchronized the images using Joseph Schillinger’s notation and composition methods.

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