America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

All

6 / 23

Previous Next

Working outside of Hollywood’s commercial system of movie production and distribution, many filmmakers developed new approaches to their medium from the 1930s to the 1950s. Some focused on formal concerns traditionally associated with painting. In the 1930s Mary Ellen Bute, for example, took inspiration from the abstract compositions of European modernists such as Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. In Synchromy No. 4: Escape, one of her “visual symphonies” set to classical music, an animated orange triangle struggles to escape a patterned prison. Abstract avant-garde filmmaking carried into the 1950s through the work of artists like Robert Breer and Len Lye, who captured the dynamism of gestural abstraction—a prominent feature of American painting at the time.

For a number of mid-century American filmmakers, cinema became a medium for psychological, philosophical, and even ritual experiment. Maya Deren—a leading auteur visionary who wrote, produced, financed, distributed, publicized, and even acted in her Surrealist-influenced films—deconstructed conventional cinema’s presentation of linear plots and genre, producing poetic investigations of cinematic time and metaphor. Helen Levitt’s film In the Street, like her photography, seemingly takes a more documentary approach to everyday life in what was then known as Spanish Harlem—but it is not simple reportage. Declaring her broad, metaphorical view at the beginning of the film, she proclaims that everyday street life is a “theater and a battleground . . . where every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer.” Raphael Montañez Ortiz used footage from a classic Hollywood Western and from a World War II news reel, “re-editing” them by chopping them up with a tomahawk, tossing the pieces in a “medicine bag,” dumping them out, and splicing them together in random order. These chance operations served, for the artist, to symbolically alter American history, and to “redeem the indigenous wound” caused by the violent displacement and vilification of Native Americans.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

Back

2 / 4

Previous Next

Trained as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1920s, Mary Ellen Bute identified with the dominant concerns of the modernist avant-garde of that time: an eagerness to move toward abstraction, a desire to capture the frenetic pace of modern life, and an urge to represent movement and duration on canvas. Bute initially sought to express motion and the structures of musical composition in painted abstractions of color and light, but she soon grew disillusioned with painting and turned to film. As she explained: “I felt an overwhelming urge to translate my reactions and ideas into a visual form that would have the ordered sequence of music…Painting was not flexible enough and too confined within its frame.”

It was for her “visual symphonies” that Bute ultimately gained both critical and popular acclaim. This work, her first color film, features animated shapes enacting a simple plot against the musical background of J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The “hero” of the story is an orange triangle that attempts to escape through a series of scrims—a swirling blue-green plane, black grids that spin and oscillate, and willowy lines that trap the triangle against the blue background. In the final frames, the protagonist escapes the patterned prison and floats balletically into a blue-and-black mist. Bute’s formally rigorous yet high-spirited films were exhibited at Radio City Music Hall during the 1930s, making them some of the most widely seen avant-garde films in the United States at the time.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 82. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 648 works

America Is Hard to See

Free Radicals

6

MARY ELLEN BUTE (1906-1983), SYNCHROMY NO. 4: ESCAPE, 1937-1938

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Free Radicals

6

MARY ELLEN BUTE (1906-1983), SYNCHROMY NO. 4: ESCAPE, 1937-1938

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection