Though her name may not ring a bell with most cineastes, Mary Ellen Bute’s contemporaries and collaborators recall the New York-based filmmaker vividly.
“Mary Ellen made quite a pilgrimage through the New York avant garde,” recalled film historian and distributor Cecile Starr.
Through a joint effort between the Yale Film Study Center and the National Film Preservation Fund—the three-day event sheds light on one of the lesser-known chapters in the city’s long history of independent filmmaking.
According to Ann Horton-Line, the manager of Yale’s Film Study Center, Bute and her husband Ted Nemeth tackled the Sisyphean task of acquiring funding for independent film projects while raising their two sons via Nemeth’s earnings from toiling in commercials, military training films and educational short subjects.
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