Mary Ellen Bute Passages from Finnegans Wake (1965 67)

Passages from James Joyce s Finnegans Wake Directed by Mary Ellen Bute Screenplay by Mary Manning Cinematography by Ted Nemeth Music by Elliot Kaplan Cast (in alphabetical order) Ray Flanagan. .. Young Shem Peter Haskell. .. Shem Page Johnson. .. Shaun Martin J. Kelley. .. Finnegan Jane Reilly. .. Anna Livia A halfforgotten, halflegendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly postNew Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.