(np) the ubu site has the James Joyce FW movie

[Michael Bailey]

Hi,

not real easy to get this to play, in my experience, but...

http://www.ubu.com/film/joyce_wake.html

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; but
a 16 mm print is available for museums, universities, and Joycean
institutions. Contact Mrs. Cecile Starr at (802) 863-6904; rental is
$180.

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.