CINEMA FOR ALL

Maya Deren

Director
Maya Deren

Part of A History of Transgression: Keynotes in Experimental Cinema

Certificate 15

Born Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev, Ukraine in 1917, Maya Deren moved to New York with
her family in 1922, where she later became one of the most influential figures of American
avant-garde filmmaking. She studied journalism and political science and also received a
Masters degree in English literature. Deren was initially interested in poetry and dance,
becoming secretary to the choreographer Katherine Dunham at the beginning of the 1940s.
Dance would become an extremely important element in her film work and she concentrated
heavily on the symbolic importance of movement and gesture, as well as the technical ability
of film to create a choreography of time and space. Deren made a total of six films Meshes
of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual
in Transfigured Time (1946), Meditation on Violence (1948) and The Very Eye of Night (1958).
To this filmography can be added two projects that remained incomplete at the time of her
death in 1961 The Witchs Cradle, featuring the iconic avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp,
and Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, a documentary on voodoo ritual for which
Deren received a Guggenheim grant and which also gave rise to a book of the same name.
Maya Deren was a fervent self-publicist, distributing her own films and publicising them
through regular talks and lectures. She was openly critical of Hollywood cinema, once stating
I make my films for what Hollywood spends on lipstick. This antagonism towards the
commercialisation of film (which had previously been expressed by the earlier generation
of avant-garde filmmakers of the 1910s and 20s) became a crucial element in the emergence
of a wave of underground filmmaking, frequently referred to as New American Cinema.
Her theoretical works on cinema have also had a significant impact on the development of
avant-garde film discourse. In essays such as An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film
Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality and Poetry and the Film, Deren develops
a theory of film based on its unique temporal and spatial properties and its relationship to
reality. As with many experimental filmmakers, her theory and practice are inseperable, both
illustrating the gradual development of visual ideas. Her committment to the promotion of
film as an art form, its complex language capable of creatively interpreting reality, has been
a source of inspiration for generations of filmmakers working outside the mainstream. This
programme looks at a selection of Derens early films, in which her committment to film form
is most vigorously expressed.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, 18m)
Derens first film, Meshes of the Afternoon was the result of a collaboration with her second
husband Alexander Hammid, an established cameraman, editor and director. The film was shot
over two and a half weeks in their own home and using basic 16mm equipment. Hammids
technical experience was combined with Derens interest in the dream and psychological
exploration. Repeated actions, recurring motifs, violent imagery and an intriguingly complex
narrative structure take the viewer on a terrifying journey into the unconscious, where the real
and the imagined can no longer be separated.
The film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event
continues overleaf

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which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the sub-conscious of an individual will
develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience ... This film
rests heavily upon the symbolic value of objects and situations. The very first sequence of the film concerns the incident, but
the girl falls asleep and the dream consists of the manipulation of the elements of the incident. Everything which happens in
the dream has its basis in suggestion in the first sequence the knife, the key, the repetition of stairs, the figure disappearing
around the curve of the road. Part of the achievement of this film consists in the manner in which cinematic techniques are
employed to give a malevolent vitality to inanimate objects. (Maya Deren)
At Land (1944, 15m)
At Land, made a year later in 1944, draws heavily on Meshes of the Afternoon, developing Derens interest in personal
identity and subjective expression. This film, in which Deren again plays the lead role, progresses through a series of
dream-like spaces, symbolic imagery and encounters with multiple selves.
The universe was once conceived almost as a vast preserve, landscaped for heroes, plotted to provide them with appropriate
adventures. The rules were known and respected, the adversaries honorable, the oracles as articulate and as precise as
the directives of a six-lane parkway. Errors of weakness or vanity led, with measured momentum, to the tragedy which
resolved everything. Today the rules are ambiguous, the adversary is concealed in aliases, the oracles broadcast in a babble of
contradictions. (Maya Deren)
Experimental film historian P. Adams Sitney has described At Land as the earliest of the pure American trance films.
This category of avant-garde film was a key tendency of the 1940s and 50s defined by the protagonist who passes
invisibly among people; the dramatic landscapes; the climactic confrontation with ones self and ones past.
A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945, 4m)
The emphasis on the continuous development of movement and gesture through disparate spaces found in Meshes of the
Afternoon and At Land becomes the central subject of A Study in Choreography for Camera. Here, the autobiographical
element of the previous two films is replaced by a more concentrated focus on dance, combining the single movements
of the dancer, Talley Beatty with the corresponding pans of the camera. Deren subtitled it Pas de Deux, highlighting
the fusion of the two arts.
The camera can create dance, movement and action which transcend geography and take place anywhere and everywhere; it
can also be the meditating mind turns inwards upon the idea of movement, and this idea, being an abstraction, takes place
nowhere or, as it were, in the very center of space. (Maya Deren)
The accompanying film, Out-takes from A Study in Choregraphy for Camera only began to be distributed after Derens
death. The 15 minutes of footage from which the original 3-minute film was made allow the spectator a closer
understanding of the editing process, by which Deren achieves an impressive exercise in compression.
Dr Kim Knowles, University of Edinburgh

Sources
- Maya Deren. Notes, Essays, Letters, Film Culture, 39, 1965.
- Bill Nichols (ed.), Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
- P. Adams Sitney. Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde 1943-1978, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press,
1979.

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BOX OFFICE 0141 332 8128

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