I think most people are familiar with Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (in no small part perhaps to its seeming influence on later directors including David Lynch). But so much of her work still remains relatively obscure - or at least it did till the advent of youtube. What would we do without it?Introduction taken from a MOMA exhibition upon Deren a few years ago:
Maya Deren (American, 1917–1961) was a visionary of American experimental film in the 1940s and 1950s. A precocious student, she studied poetry and literature at New York University and Smith College, where she became interested in the arts. While working for modern-dance choreographer Katherine Dunham, Deren met her future husband, filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who introduced her to European avant-garde film. In 1943, the couple collaborated on the short film Meshes of the Afternoon, which has since become one of the most widely influential films of the American experimental-film movement.
Deren, who received the first Guggenheim Foundation grant for “creative work in the field of motion pictures” and formed the Creative Film Foundation to broaden support for experimental film, continued making and self-distributing her own films and lecturing and writing about avant-garde cinema theory until her untimely death at the age of forty-four. Her pioneering formal innovations—performing in front of the camera, using semiautobiographical content, and meshing literary, psychological, and ethnographic disciplines with rigorous technique—inspired future generations of experimental filmmakers.
Pictures and Audio Interviews.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a short experimental film directed by wife and husband team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film's narrative is circular, and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper--like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality.
Ritual in Transfigured Time may be the piece in which Maya Deren puts all her interests and achievements: a surrealistic narrative and dance choreographies. It is beautiful and powerful, but may have too many elements to be coherent and to possess her earlier works' strength.
The Very Eye Of Night (1958)
Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.
Meditation on Violence (1948) A young Oriental man with a headscarf and bare torso shadowboxes indoors in front of a series of unadorned walls, light, dark, both shades. He is then shown exercising outside with a sword in an area surrounded by a low stone wall and overlooking a river, before there is a return to the first sequence.
Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop.
At Land (1946) "In her classic text, Cinematography: the Creative Use of Reality, Deren says, "In my At Land, it has been the technique by which the dynamic of the Odyssey is reversed and the protagonist, instead of undertaking the long voyage of search for adventure, finds instead that the universe itself has usurped the dynamic action which was once the prerogative of human will, and confronts her with a volatile and relentless metamorphosis in which her personal identity is the sole constancy."
Cinematically, the unmatched shots also create a sense of disorientation in time and space. The viewer is forced to form their own 'story' or 'meaning' according to her or his own ingenium. The use of surreal structure for Deren was not so much an artistic preference as a belief that cinema needs to find its own instrument as an art form, to relinquish its reliance on, "narrative disciplines it has borrowed from literature," and its, "timid imitation of the causal logic of narrative plots.
Cinematically, the unmatched shots also create a sense of disorientation in time and space. The viewer is forced to form their own 'story' or 'meaning' according to her or his own ingenium. The use of surreal structure for Deren was not so much an artistic preference as a belief that cinema needs to find its own instrument as an art form, to relinquish its reliance on, "narrative disciplines it has borrowed from literature," and its, "timid imitation of the causal logic of narrative plots.
