Mary Ellen Bute
The second installment of the Early Monthly Segments film series features the only live action feature film by the legendary pioneer of American abstract filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute. In Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Bute transforms Joyce’s language into cinema in a truly oneiric film style. Surreal and dense with allusion the work echoes the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure, while remaining true to its wit and uncanny beauty. With Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut. – Notes adapted from Greylodge.org
Programme:
Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
16mm, 1965,92 mins, b&w
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute, Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth, Music by Elliot Kaplan
Print courtesy the archives of York University’s Sound and Moving Image Library
Screened with: Gloria!, Hollis Frampton, 16mm, 1979, 9 minutes
@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday April 21, 2009 | 7:30pm screening
Gloria!