Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Anitra's Dance (M. E. Bute) is five minutes of film in which appears no person, no utilitarian thing. It is an attempt to provoke emotion by the dramatic movements of abstract objects, accompanied by the music of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite. In time to the music, a galaxy of rings swim into view, a pyramid intrudes, something resembling a piano keyboard rolls over & over, 50 balls pass deliberately across the screen. This unhuman cinema is, according to its author, the first entirely abstract film ever made and shown...
Author and producer is Mary Ellen Bute, daughter of a Texas landowner and second cousin of Woodrow Wilson's Colonel Edward Mandell House. After three years' work and 18 unproduced animated cartoons of abstract dramas, she hired a cameraman and made Anitra's Dance in three months for $3,000 in her Manhattan apartment. To get her abstract effects, she used sheets of crumpled Cellophane, an egg-cutter, prisms, toy pyramids, ping pong balls, velvet, sparklers, bracelets and, chiefly, camera angles. Although the pyramids are intended to suggest the fact that Anitra danced in the Egyptian desert...
...This is just a kinetic visual art with time continuity. It takes advantage of the possibilities in the cinema of an abstract art that develops in time before the eyes as sound develops before the ears-rhythm, the development of themes in counterpoint, a variety of intensities and volumes...
...qualities of the latter all the more apparent. Dainty modern Nymphenburg porcelains made from the eighteenth century molds by Franz Bustelli are placed near the delicate bronze antelope by the contemporary sculptress, Renee Sintenis and show her to be part of an old German tradition of technical excellence. Violently abstract paintings and prints along with sharply realistic ones suggest something of the chaos of postwar Germany...
Very different in character are the works of Kandinsky and Klee. The former seeks a refuge from modern life through a play of abstract form and colour. Squares, triangles and circles carefully arranged make balanced colour compositions that gladden the eye but never attack the intellect or the emotions. Klee's refuge is in dreams. Like the surrealists, he portrays vague images conjured up from the subconscious and paints them with a tongue-in-the-cheek seriousness that has been completely misunderstood by his lugubrious colleagues in Paris. Nolde, like the sculptor Lehmbruck, is German in his intensity and paints...