Abstronic (1952)

A pioneer of visual music and electronic art Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s Set to classical music by the likes of Bach SaintSaëns and Shoshtakovich and replete with rapidly mutating geometries Butes filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically highspirited like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies In the late 1940s Lewis Jacobs observed that Butes films were composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in everchanging lights and shadows growing lines and forms deepening colors and tones the tumbling racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment Bute herself wrote that she sought to bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music