





Duration: 90 min



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



There are currently no copies of this film availabe on VHS or DVD.



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.



