Spook Sport

Spook Sport (1940)

*** (out of 4)

The story is quite simple as the setting is a graveyard at night where there are bats, bells, ghosts and spooks. This animated film from Mary Ellen Bute and Norman McLaren is quite simply very fascinating to say the least. During the opening credits we are given a title card that shows us various shapes and it tells us what characters those shapes are playing. From here the use of music shows off the various shapes and their haunting of this graveyard. There's no question that this animated film is very "artsy" and that it's not going to go over well with more mainstream folks but I personally thought it was very entertaining and it actually looked excellent. There were a lot of details in the animation and there's no doubt that visually it's quite impressive.

One of the principal reasons why the European (or for that matter, Japanese) traditions of cinema are extremely different from the US tradition is the painful streak of philistinism in the "anglo-saxon" character that draws back instantly from anything it regards as "arty". Although this is often as true of the British as it is of United Statesians, the British have on occasions been able to privilege their more civilised "European" side. In the US, the anti-art attitude has been a really very disabling element in its cinema at virtually all periods and has also led to a commercial side-lining of anything considered "arthouse" (frequently in practice anything in a foreign language), a piece of sharp practice that has obviously also benefited the US film-industry and allowed it to dominate the so-called "mainstream".

Even those major directors who had attempted to innovate (one thinks of Von Stroheim, of Welles, of Charles Laughton) have in the end been unable to make headway in the US cinema. There have of course been US film-makers willing to experiment and make films of a more innovatory character but the whole structure of the US cinema industry is hugely loaded against them. So when the world was exploding with artistic ideas in the twenties or thirties (naturalism, impressionism, expressionism, dada, surrealism, futurism, social realism), this impinged hardly at all on the "blocked" US industry. Ditto in the forties with neo-verismo, in the sixties with "new wave"......

So it is important to pay tribute to those few courageous souls who have attempted, in spite of all discouragement, to break the mould of the "realistic" action-based cinema ("realistic" of course in a purely formal sense) with no hope of ever becoming an important factor in US cinema as a whole (as naturalism and expressionism did in Germany, as naturalism, impressionism and surrealism did in France, as shimongeki did in Japan, as "verismo" did almost everywhere in the world except in the US, as "new wave" styles did in France, Eastern Europe, Japan and Iran). In the US such film-makers were doomed to stay put in a ghetto marked "EXPERIMENTAL".

Mary Ellen Bute is one of those few. Her speciality was the combination of music and image, how to portray graphically and cinematically what one sees when one listens to music. Essentially she was an "abstract" film-maker, but, again, whereas "abstract" film was widely influential in European film (Ruttmann used his abstract film techniques in advertising, abstraction is often an important element in impressionist film-making in France - in the films of Epstein, for instance - but is equally an element in Lotte Rieniger's superb animated film, Das Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed of 1926), it could have no such place in the sun in the US. So here we have a very charming little fantasy to the music of Saint-Saëns. It is nothing more than that but, equally, it is nothing less than that either. Chapeau bas, say I, to Mme Mary Ellen Bute and confusion to the philistines.

This is an artsy short from the collection "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941". It consists of lots of art and historical films which the average viewer probably will care less about if they see them.

Unlike most of their films, Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth are assisted by the young Norman McLaren--before McLaren gained some fame with his shorts he completed for the National Film Board of Canada. The film is set to the music of Saint-Saens and is supposedly about spooks coming out at night in a cemetery--though most of it consists of very vaguely animated objects. All in all, I didn't understand the film's appeal as unlike most art films from this collection, this one actually played at mainstream theaters (such as Radio City Music Hall).