In 1986, the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor independent filmmakers. Discusses film as an independent art form and asserts that it should not be seen as merely a way to illustrate a . The hectic distortions and special effects that Hammid created give the movie its mind-bending intensity, whereas Derens presence gives it its allure and its personality. Between 1952 and 1955, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The Very Eye of Night. She supported herself from 1937 to 1939 by freelance writing for radio shows and foreign-language newspapers. Shed started using Benzedrine to fuel her long days and nights of activity while travelling with Dunham, and kept with it afterward. . Reprinted in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, edited by Bruce R. McPherson, 19-33. 48 Copy quote. (Deren and Hammid divorced in 1947. Free shipping for many products! She has often been credited as one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century and her influence is seen in film today. 1984 note that while still in her teens, Elenora was a leader in the Trotskyist Young Peoples Socialist League, where she met and married YPSL activist and union organizer Gregory Bardacke. In February 1946 she booked the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village for a major public exhibition, titled Three Abandoned Films, in which she showed Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944) and A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945). Then there is Derens paradigm-shifting anthropological research on Voudoun in Haiti, which, while influenced by founders of the field such as Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, modeled an outsider ethnographic approach rejecting the dogmas of the previous generation. Although she had established a name for herself . Source for information on Deren, Maya (1908-1961 . (For the purposes of the movies credits, Deren took the name Maya, and kept it, onscreen and off.) The lightning bolt in this primordial soup of Derens avant-garde celebrity came on February 18, 1946. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian. New York: Maple-Vail, 1984. Certain symbols reoccur on the screen, including a cloaked, mirror-faced figure, and a key, which becomes twinned with a knife. The scene, featuring about thirty people and centered on Christianis efforts to connect with the other guests, is filmed in slow motion; the framings emphasize the layering in depth of the revellers comings and goings, and Deren evokes their cold-hearted conviviality with keenly discerning and precisely imaginative direction. A new era of strength competitions is testing the limits of the human body. Cinema As An Art Form. For instance, extended narrations and detailed descriptions of crucial scenes in Derens life, such as the Hollywood party where she and Hammid met and the Morton Street party at which he decided to leave her, have the feel of literary compositionspersuasive and moving onesbut I found myself wondering which details were Durants inventions and which were nuggets emerging in correspondence, notebooks, interviews, or elsewhere. It was there that Deren met Alexandr Hackenschmied (later Hammid), a celebrated Czech-born photographer and cameraman who would become her second husband in 1942. She finished school at New York University with a bachelor's degree in literature[9] in June 1936, returning to Syracuse in the fall. It is the first example of a narrative work in avant-garde American film; critics have seen autobiographical elements in the film, as well as thoughts about women and the individual. Maya Deren >Maya Deren (1917-1961) wore many hats in her brief lifetime: avant-garde >filmmaker, documentarian, author, and Voudoun priestess, to name a few. Durant quotes from Nins diary regarding the force exerted by Deren among the Village culturati: We are subject to her will, her strong personality, yet at the same time we do not trust or love her wholly. In 1941 and 1942, Deren travelled with Dunham and her dance troupe throughout the United States. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. These signs initially pointed in different directions, but eventually a cluster of forms developed, which were to become the cinema as we know it today. filmography bibliography articles in Senses web resources Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema Maya Deren is recognizable as the woman with the enigmatic expression at If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutions website, please contact your librarian or administrator. Russian-born American filmmaker, poet, photographer, choreographer, and critic Maya Deren (April 29, 1917-October 13, 1961) endures as one of humanity's most significant experimental filmmakers and champions of independent cinema. This Kino blu ray Maya Deren Collection will be one of the premier releases of 2020. According to the earliest program note, she describes Meshes of the Afternoon as follows: This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. Deren was only five years-old when, together with her parents, she arrived in the USA in 1922, having fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. In order to support independent film artists, she established the Creative Film Foundation (CFF), which inspired Amos Vogels Cinema 16 as well as the British feminist film collective Circles, among others. April 29]1917 in Kyiv, now Ukraine, into a Jewish family,[6] to psychologist Solomon Derenkowsky and Gitel-Malka (Marie} Fiedler,[1] who supposedly named her after Italian actress Eleonora Duse. In revolutionary moments, time seems to accelerate, and changes usually marked out in decades take place in a matter of months. Clark, VV A., Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, eds. Both P. Adams Sitney's "Meshes" and Lucy Fischer's "The Eye for Magic" seek to compare and contrast Maya Deren to the European cinema of Bunuel and Dali; and Melies, respectively. He was an acclaimed cameraman and still photographer; he and Deren quickly fell in love and married. And, in any case, Durant adds, she didnt have the money to finish it. [17] The other article intended for Mademoiselle magazine was not published,[18] but three signed enlargements of photographs intended for this article, all depicting Deren's friend New York ceramist Carol Janeway, are preserved in the MoMA[19] and the Philadelphia Museum of Art,[20][21] all prints were from Janeway's estate. Her mere presence beamed onto the screen her vast inner worlds of emotion and intellect. These signs initially pointed in different directions, but eventually a cluster of forms developed, which were to . $18.00. Durant suggests that she left the film unfinished on ethical grounds, regarding the uses and abuses of the visual representation of a religion and a culture that was neither hers nor that of most of her likely viewers. An outspoken anti-realist, Deren affirmed that if cinema "was to take place beside the others as a full-fledged art form, it must cease merely to record realities that owe nothing of their actual existence to the film instrument.". The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Work. The figure belongs to dancer and choreographer Talley Beatty, whose last movement is a leap across the screen back to the natural world. They married in 1935, he graduated in 1936, and they moved to Greenwich Village, where he became a labor organizer and she, in the midst of her last year of college at N.Y.U., became a Socialist activist. Deren and Beatty met through Katherine Dunham, while Deren was her assistant and Beatty was a dancer in her company. [15], After graduation from Smith, Deren returned to New York's Greenwich Village, where she joined the European migr art scene. As the editors describe in their interview with the Camera Obscura collective in 1977, they set out to document Derens life; and despite the first volume clocking in at over 1200 pages, The Legend remains an incomplete project, stopping at 1947, fourteen years before her death. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. A biographical sketch built from nine brief meditations on aspects of Derens history, filmography, and reception. She had severe health issues (in 1954, she had major surgery for an abdominal hemorrhage and peritonitis) and serious money trouble; she refused to take a regular job. Hurd, Mary G. Women Directors and Their Films. Interestingly, the idea of horizontality and verticality is also studied by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist famous for his distinction between the signified and the signifier, who developed a model which specifies the distinction between the syntagmatic (horizontal) and the . Her relationship with Bateson ended in disasterhe snuck off to Germany without telling her.) Her imagination was fertile, but her wide-ranging life was a veritable engine of stories that seemed ready-made to be put on film, with a first-person imaginative inventiveness of a sort that would hardly be found in Hollywood. Sitney, P. Adams, ed, The Film Culture Reader, Prager Publishers Inc., New York, 1970 Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. [10], In 1928, Deren's parents became naturalized citizens of the United States. Gene Kelley consulted Deren about her work in ' choreocinema ', or dance films which include A Study in Choreography for Camera with Talley Beatty in 1945 and Ritual in Transfigured Time with Rita Christiani, Anais Nin and Frank Westbrook and her 'tour de force' ethnographic footage shot in Haiti during the 1950's.. By 1938 Deren left New York to work with the legendary choreographer and ethnographer, Kathryn Dunham, managing her troupe, as detailed in Clark, et al. View the institutional accounts that are providing access. This combination of dance and film has often been referred to as "choreocinema", a term first coined by American dance critic John Martin. Derens accomplishments in the realm of experimental cinema were knit into the wider phenomenon of the Second World War as a peculiarly powerful real-time engine for artistic transformation in the U.S., from Abstract Expressionism conquering art galleries to bebop surging in jazz clubs. 125 ratings9 reviews. " The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde." Biography 29 (1): 140 -58. Deren talks about the freedoms of independent cinema: Artistic freedom means that the amateur filmmaker is never forced to sacrifice visual drama and beauty to a stream of wordsto the relentless activity and explanations of a plotnor is the amateur production expected to return profit on a huge investment by holding the attention of a massive and motley audience for 90 minutesInstead of trying to invent a plot that moves, use the movement of wind, or water, children, people, elevators, balls, etc. She became fixated on Katherine Dunham, a Black dancer (working on Broadway and in Hollywood), the founder of a dance company, and an academically trained anthropologist. In the late nineteen-thirties, he worked on a pair of crucial anti-Nazi documentaries, and left the country soon before the Nazi invasion, making his way to Los Angeles, where he was promised work. Essential Deren. [42] The footage was incorporated into a posthumous documentary film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, edited and produced in 1977 (with funding from Deren's friend James Merrill) by her ex-husband, Teiji It (19351982), and his wife Cherel Winett It (19471999). Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and Latina/o Americans in Film and Television. Despite, or thanks to, her youth, she nearly single-handedly put experimental cinema on the American cultural map, and also became its iconic visual presence. Nichols, Bill, ed., Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001: "Introduction" by Bill Nichols, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film" by Maya Deren and "Aesthetic Agencies in Flux" by Mark Franko. It seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film", full of dramatic angles and innovative editing. She seems to be invisible to the people as she crawls across the table, uninhibited; her body continues seamlessly again onto a new frame, crawling through foliage; following the flowing pattern of water on rocks; following a man across a farm, to a sick man in bed, through a series of doors, and finally popping up outside on a cliff. One action can be performed across different physical spaces, as in A Study in Choreography For Camera (1945), and in this way sews together layers of reality, thereby suggesting continuity between different levels of consciousness. In New York, she took frequent vitamin injections, which likely included amphetamines, from the infamous Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson (who also treated John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and many other household names before losing his license in the seventies). The most conspicuous, and perhaps the most significant, adaptation of Derens far-rangingly associative yet meticulously composed fantasies may well be in the movies of David Lynch. (Between trips, she made another short dance film, Meditation on Violence.). In this essay, she related how in the 17th century, a division occurred between science, magic, religion, and philosophy, a division she saw . She shrinks in the wide frame as she walks farther away from the camera, up and down sand dunes, then frantically collecting rocks back on the shore. [22], Deren defined cinema as an art, provided an intellectual context for film viewing, and filled a theoretical gap for the kinds of independent films that film societies were featuring. In the December 1946 issue of Esquire magazine, a caption for her photograph teased that she "experiments with motion pictures of the subconscious, but here is finite evidence that the lady herself is infinitely photogenic. She became the name of avant-garde cinema by becoming its face: a still of her, at a window in Meshes, is, to this day, the prime iconic image of American experimental filmmaking, the single-frame synecdoche for the entire category. Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic. This camera was used to make her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), made in collaboration with Hammid in their Los Angeles home on a budget of $250. Durants book itself, twenty years in the making, bears the illumination of fanatical research and passionate empathy forpractically an inhabiting ofDerens inner world. She then created a scholarship for experimental filmmakers, the Creative Film Foundation.[25]. In 1945, Deren filmed another silent short, Ritual in Transfigured Time, the last of her films, as Durant notes, in which she appears. as a poem might celebrate these. "[40] Afterwards, Deren wrote several articles on religious possession in dancing before her first trip to Haiti. She went on three additional trips through 1954 to document and record the rituals of Haitian Vodou.