"THE NEW WORLD NEEDS THE POEMS OF REALITIES
AND SCIENCE AND THE DEMOCRATIC AVERAGE AND BASIC
EQUALITY... IN THE CENTRE OF ALL, AND OBJECT OF
ALL, STANDS THE HUMAN BEING, TOWARD WHOSE HEROIC
AND SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION POEMS AND EVERYTHING DI-
RECTLY OR INDIRECTLY TEND, OLD WORLD OR NEW."

WALT WHITMAN

Mary Ellen Bute
Producer - Director

Expanding CINEMA*

381 Park Avenue South #920, New York, N.Y. 10016 • 212 / 686-8627 • 677-6200 Ext. 710

Advisory Committee
for the filming of
Passages From James Joyce's
FINNEGANS WAKE

The James Joyce Society
Padraic Colum, President
Frances Steloff, Treasurer

OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING

A 16mm color, sound film. Running time about 60 minutes.
Sponsored by The American Film Institute, and Rockefeller
Foundation. Seeking additional funding.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PRODUCTION

Walt Whitman is depicted experiencing his odyssey while writing about it to an 'insisting friend' who lives abroad and has become interested in _Leaves of Grass_ and in America --the New World.

The film dramatically portrays Whitman as a young man who has attained the full realization of the power of his poetic and social "visions" of man as a creature of magnificent beauty, worth and potential.

Intermixed with the dramatic portrayal of Whitman is footage of the present, demonstrating the remarkable foresight and prophetic qualities of his writing.

For example, the initial footage combines Whitman, NASA film excerpts, and a voiceover reading Whitman's lines quoted by the late Chet Huntley in his televised reportage of the Apollo 8 Mission.

Whitman's enormous impact as a "new" American artistic force is defined dramatically by portrayal of the impact of his work and personality upon Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The use of original documents and still photographs vividly evoke these crucial years in Whitman's and America's development. In addition, the frequent use of live actors and location shooting further dramatize the period.

The film, produced and directed in color by Mary Ellen Bute, runs approximately 60 minutes. Locations include Long Island and New England.

* A company doing research, experimental and creative work in motion pictures.

The film is suitable for wide and extended showing. Distribution is specifically projected for Public and Cable Television, Colleges and High Schools. Foreign distribution is also anticipated, especially in Europe where Whitman's popularity is broadly based.

**WHITMAN'S CONCEPT TIMELY AND POWERFUL** A few random instances of his expanding influence:

"Today, when young people are attuned to the search for individuality and transcendence, they cherish Whitman as a preceptor of selfhood and as a grass-root mystic who speaks to them in a meaningful way."

(Professor Harold Aspiz, California State University)

"Whitman placed ambitiousness in the canon of artistic virtues, enrolled his own art in the American expansionism and has bewitched subsequent generations with an ideal of all-inclusiveness, with an intriguing image of 'vast oceanic tides' of feeling and notation that make the poet nothing less than 'the age transfigured'."

(John Updike)

"Whitman had the vision of the whole, the historic 'scheme'. .. This poet of the 'modern' (in personal sensation) and of the 'future' (as a new sympathy between different races and peoples) actually helped to supply, through all his writings, the rationale for the massive power that emerged."

(Alfred Kazin)

The late Chet Huntley, of Huntley-Brinkley, quoted Whitman to usher in the age of moon travel in his reportage of Apollo 8.

i.e.:-
Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any
path to follow?

Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy ! O fruit of all !)
them to fulfil O soul.

And I said to my spirit, "When we become the enfolders of

those orbs, and the pleasures and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?"
And my spirit said, "No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond."

(Walt Whitman)

**ENTHUSIASTIC RESPONSE:** "I saw a recent workprint of the film and was quite moved by Ms. Bute's ability to animate the world of Whitman and Emerson and bring it to a contemporary rel-
evancy. Whitman's and Emerson's words are used almost exclusively and the cumulative impact of these words as spoken by the actors is most powerful. Although Whitman is a well-known American writer, my feeling is that Mary Ellen Bute has done for him what she did for Joyce in her "Finnegans Wake". What the film does, I believe, is give a wonderful feeling of hope to the viewer, hope for the future.

"I only wish to provide my personal recommendation of Mary Ellen Bute as a remarkable, indefatigable artist, and I am sure that anyone involved in this project would be proud of its certain accomplishment."

Howard Klein
Director Arts
The Rockefeller Foundation

**PLUS** growing excitement over the talent of John Getz who enacts Walt Whitman.

**PLUS** Educators say: "Whitman speaks to young people today in a meaningful way."

**PLUS** "Whitman, A Builder Of The American Vision" is a dynamic force in the "new patriotism". (New York Times tear sheet Enclosed.)

**HERALD** wide-spread interest in this film.

EDUCATORS

The Editors of the WALT WHITMAN REVIEW (a quarterly sub-
scribed to by 970 Institutional Libraries in the United States, and
has a long list of subscribers in Canada, Australia, South America
and Europe) are highly supportive of our film, OUT OF THE CRADLE
ENDLESSLY ROCKING, and plan a Center Spread announcing it when it
goes into Distribution. Copies of the film will be available on 16mm
prints, Video Cassettes and Discs.

The handsome publications of _Great American Writers_ by New York University Press has been heavily subsidized --all except Walt Whitman, who is over subscribed! Also, the New York Public Library lists 165 titles of books available on Whitman. "There is no end to the interest in Whitman", says Charles E. Feinberg Head of Whitman Studies at the Library of Congress.

Mr. Feinberg, who is also a 'Renowned Collector of Whitman
Manuscripts, books, letters, and other memorabilia' is very pleased
about our film and has supplied beautiful facsimiles of Whitman ma-
terial needed for photography.

In "<u>American Characteristics and Other Essays</u>" Thornton Wilder says: "Americans were filled with a sense of newness, of vastness, and of challenge. As Walt Whitman put it:

'It almost seems as if a poetry with cosmic and dynamic
features of magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the
human soul, were never possible before.'

"And for this big feeling within them they needed to employ
a grand style, a swelling rhetoric unabashed. Boldest of all was Walt
Whitman, who saw the necessity of desophisticating himself in order to
achieve it.

"It is not necessary to remind you that Walt Whitman addressed himself to everyone who could read or be read to.

"The effect is of a ceiling being removed from above our
heads."

CURRENT STATUS

Working with a professional cast and crew, Mary Ellen Bute and her staff have completed the Major Photography for OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING, a film based on Walt Whitman.

The color workprint and voice tracks are synchronized for interlocked screening. These costs were defrayed by grants from The American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Producers.

The production needs editing; opticals and special effects.

Insert photography of documents and pictures.

Art work and photography of titles and credits.

Pre-mix recording sessions to correct voice, and voice levels.

Sound effects and music.

Sound Mix --voice, music and effects.

Negative matching and conforming.

Color, sound composite Answer Print, complete with opticals.

A color reversal inter-negative (16mm liquid gate CRI)

The estimated cost of these iteme needed to finish the film is
about $54,000. A detailed Budget is available.

Concord, Mass'tts, 21 July, 1855

Dear Sir, I am not blind to the worth of the
wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass." I find it the
most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that
America has yet contributed. I am very happy in
reading it, as great power makes us happy.

***

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I
have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said
incomparably well, as they must be. I find the
courage of treatment which so delights us, and
which large perception only can inspire.

***

R. W. EMERSON

WALT WHITMAN

( Copy for the convenience of private reading only )

FESTIVAL OF AMERICAN ARTS & HUMANITIES

PRESS COMMENTS

I have seen this enchanting rhapsody three times now . . . The playing is admirable, cheerful or confident or ironic, sharpened by farce or touched by melancholy: Martin J. Kelly as Finnegan . . . and a team of dancers and singers and jokers who, most aptly jolly at the wake, the "Funerall" round the hero's temporary coffin, bring the cadences of Dublin into the London cinema.—Dilys Powell SUNDAY TIMES

... Music, acting and camerawork are cut together with a brilliance that achieves more of Joyce's textual style than all Joseph Strick's 'Ulysses' did with far more labour. What Joyce would have called "a fadeograph of a yestern scene" shows the cinema for once doing literature justice—Alexander Walker EVENING STANDARD

With the dialogue both spoken and printed as sub-titles it is remarkable how clear it becomes and the film is an imaginatively conceived adaptation.—FILM REVIEW

'Finnegans Wake' is a striking cinematic accomplishment.—NEW YORK TIMES

Watching 'Finnegans Wake', is like having a book in some foreign tongue translated before one's eyes.

Mary Ellen Bute, who produced and directed the film, has created a remarkable work. Some of the imagery, both verbal and visual has a strange and mesmerising beauty—in particular the bridal sequences and the scenes showing Dublin and its river in the early morning.

JEWISH CHRONICLE

MARY ELLEN BUTE has won prizes for her abstracts and short films at the Venice and Brussels Film Festivals. Before going into creative films, she studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Sorbonne, and then did stage and television work at Yale, New York and Columbia Universities. After Yale, she made a world tour with one of her productions. She is married to the cinematographer and producer Ted Nemeth, who worked with her on "Finnegans Wake." The film presented challenges which might well have daunted another producer. A critic wrote: "... And who, from that lengthy unfolding of metaphors, sensed images, newly imagined words and musico-literary puns, could get a grip on 'Finnegans Wake'? How could this mass of impressions, half subconscious, come into just realisation in a medium which traditionally deals with visual objects in a realistic way? Mary Ellen Bute has done this..."

USIS, American Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London.W.1. GRO 9000, Ext 683