Tarantella is a five-minute color, avant-garde animated short film created by Mary Ellen Bute, a pioneer of visual music and electronic art in experimental cinema.
Contents With piano accompaniment by Edwin Gerschefski, "Tarantella" features rich reds and blues that Bute uses to signify a lighter mood, while her syncopated spirals, shards, lines and squiggles dance exuberantly to Gerschefski's modern beat. Bute produced more than a dozen short films between the 1930s and the 1950s and once described herself as a "designer of kinetic abstractions" who sought to "bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding with the … rhythmic cadences of music." Bute's work influenced many other filmmakers working with abstract animation during the 1930s and 1940s, and with experimental electronic imagery in the 1950s.
National Film Registry In 2010, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
References
External links Tarantella essay by Lauren Rabinovitz at National Film Registry