PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE'S FINNEGANS WAKE : A FILM BY EXPANDING CINEMA : DEDICATED TO FRANCES STELOFF [cover title] by Joyce, James; [Mary Ellen Bute (script treatment)] - 1965

New York: Expanding Cinema [script published by arrangement with Viking Press], 1965. First Separate Edition. Softcover. Fine. 11 x 8½-inch leaves in an 11½ x 9-inch folder. [4],58,[3] pp. Leaves in printed blue metal tab folder. Fine.

PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE'S FINNEGANS WAKE was the final film produced and directed by Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983), a pioneer in experimental film and animation. Bute spent much of her early career developing a style of "visual music" in film, synchronizing abstract images and music. PASSAGES, a film treatment of FINNEGANS WAKE using Joyce's original language, was largely a live-action piece but incorporated animation, double exposures, and various other unconventional visual methods. UbuWeb describes it thus: "A half-forgotten, half-legendary 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 post-New 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. With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut." The film was shown in limited capacities until its final release in 1967. Its screening of its first rush print, for which the present volume was produced, took place February 16, 1965, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before an audience of the James Joyce Society in celebration of Joyce's birthday. The James Joyce Society was inaugurated in 1947 at the Gotham Book Bart. Bute dedicates her film to Gotham's founder and owner, Frances Steloff.