Series Spotlights an Innovative Animation Pioneer

“Writing With Lighting: D.W. Griffith, Mary Ellen Bute, Busby Berkeley,” a program in the “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film” series that the UCLA Film and Television Archive is presenting Sunday, offers viewers a rare look at the work of one of the first American abstract animators and one of the first women to enter a field dominated by male artists. Bute’s name may not be widely known today, but during the mid-1930s, her experimental short films screened at the prestigious Radio City Music Hall.

Born in Texas in 1904, Bute received a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She initially intended to paint in the manner of Rosa Bonheur, but later recalled that in Philadelphia, “I was deeply impressed by the wonderful Picassos, the African art, the Paul Klees, the Braques, the Kandinskys. Kandinsky used abstract, nonobjective canvas the way you experience a musical composition. Well, I thought it was terrific but these things should be unwound in [a] time continuity. It was a dance. That became my objective.”

Her desire to blend music, abstract imagery and movement led her to New York, where she studied with electronics wizard Leon Theremin; Thomas Wilfred, who developed a color organ; and musician-mathematician Joseph Schillinger. She collaborated with experimental filmmaker Melville Webber and Ted Nemeth, a cameraman with experience in advertising, documentaries and special effects. Bute married Nemeth in 1940.

The early films from the late ‘30s and early ‘40s in “Writing With Lighting” feature a variety of techniques, including 3-D miniatures, cels, cutouts and drawings on film. Bute’s abstract and semiabstract images reflect the influence of the nonobjective animator Oskar Fischinger (who fled Germany for Hollywood in 1935). Her work would influence a later generation of Los Angeles-based experimental filmmakers, notably computer animation pioneer John Whitney Sr.

In “Synchromy No. 4: Escape,” set to the Toccata section of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” Bute juxtaposes moving grids with a series of patterns built out of golden triangles. The patterns suggest structures, tunnels and even organic shapes as they form and re-form in time to the music. In “Parabola,” she uses wire sculptures and three-dimensional models to examine the relationship between the curve and the cone from which is it generated.

Bute made “Escape” and “Parabola” in 1937, the year Walt Disney completed “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and a loony waterfowl who would become Daffy Duck “woo-hoo’ed” his way through Tex Avery’s “Porky’s Duck Hunt” at Warner Bros. Bute doesn’t present a story or provoke laughs in her shorts; she offers a vision of animation completely unlike the Hollywood cartoons that define the medium for most Americans.

In addition to three other Bute shorts”Writing With Lighting” includes two Busby Berkeley musical numbers: “Don’t Say Goodnight” from “Wonder Bar” (1934) and “By a Waterfall” from “Footlight Parade” (1933).

Berkeley’s work epitomizes Hollywood movie-making at its most lavish; Bute’s offers a minimalist alternative to mainstream films. But there are some surprising parallels between Bute’s visuals and the geometric patterns formed by lines of dancers in Berkeley’s production numbers. Bute continued to make animated and live-action films until her death in 1983.

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“Writing With Lighting” screens Sunday at 2 p.m. at the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall at UCLA. Admission: $7, general; $5, students, seniors. Information: (310) 206-8013 or www.cinema.ucla.edu.