mary ellen bute

a pioneering independent American filmmaker

Mary Ellen Bute was a pioneering independent American filmmaker who, over the course of twenty-five years, produced a collection of innovative short and feature-length films, her most famous being an adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In addition to filmmaking, she was the founding member of the Women’s Independent Film Exchange.

Passages from Finnegans Wake (1966, 1h 37m)

A dead man lies in a coffin. Mourners drink and dance around him. Suddenly, the man sits up. The mourners push him back down. Thunder cracks. Buildings collapse. A bride runs through the city streets. Roses float on the water. These high-contrast black-and-white images, in evocative collage, make up the texture of Mary Ellen Bute’s 1966 film. It debuted at Cannes Film Festival and was named ‘Best Debut of the Year’ in 1965. The film is a very successful adaptation of a complicated novel; it is particularly good at transposing Joyce’s stream of consciousness into joyful animation and evoking Joyce’s state of semi-consciousness through Mary Ellen’s characteristic abstraction.