U B U W E B - Film & Video: Maya Deren

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Maya Deren (1917-1961)

Out-Takes From a Study in Choreography for Camera 1945
Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: Talley Beatty. 3 mins, silent, B&W.

Maya Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is an acknowledged classic of the avant-garde dance/trance film. More than 20 years after Maya Deren died in 1961, Anthology Film Archives in New York began to distribute the 15 minutes of outtakes that survive of the four-minute film, in order to demonstrate not only "how she did it" but to provide an object lesson in economy of editing. ~ David Lewis, All Movie Guide

At Land 1944
Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: John Cage, Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. B&W

Deren's second experimental film, At Land (1944), reinforces her interest in the juxtaposition of anachronistic spaces and introduces a critique of social rituals. This film begins by reversing the natural rhythm with images of waves breaking and descending back into the sea. Starring again, Deren is seen climbing up a dead tree trunk on the beach, magically emerging onto a table where a formal dinner party is in progress. This 'civilized' world ignores Deren as she crawls along their dinner table. By depicting herself as invisible to the diners, Deren highlights the myopia of the guests. The dinner sequence in At Land ends with an enchanted chess game. A pawn falls from the table and descends back into the dead wood on the beach, it falls over rocks, into the water and is washed away over the waterfalls. Chasing the pawn, Deren is restored to her original landscape. - Wendy Haslem
(http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/deren.html)

Meditation on Violence 1948
Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: Chao Li Chi. Music: Teiji Ito.

In Meditation on Violence (1948) Deren's camera is motivated by the movement of the performer, Chao Li Chi. This film is marked by a lack of dynamism and mobility that we have come to expect from Deren's camera. It also obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. The shadows on the white wall behind Chi amplify the movement of the Wu Tang ritual. In Meditation on Violence Deren experiments with film time, reversing the film part way through producing a loop. Exhibited forwards and then backwards, the difference in the Wu Tang movements is almost imperceptible.

Ritual in Transfigured Time 1946
Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: Rita Christiani, Maya Deren. 14 mins, B&W, silent

Ritual In Transfigured Time (1946) silently follows Rita Christiani's perspective as she enters an apartment to find Maya Deren immersed in the ritual of unwinding wool from a loom. Deren includes another expression of the external invading the internal with a strange wind that surrounds and entrances her as she becomes transported by the ritual. Ritual in Transfigured Time links the looming ritual with the ritual of the social greeting. Christiani enters a party, meets and greets, moving throughout the crowd like a dancer. Her movements become increasingly expressive and fluid, the ritual becomes a performance. Key themes in this film are the dread of rejection and the contrasting freedom of expression in the abandonment to the ritual.

Meshes of the Afternoon 1943
Dir: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Screenplay: Maya Deren. Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Music: Teiji Ito. B&W.

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the "trance film," in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted "to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately."

Made by Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent avant-garde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and other major experimental filmmakers. Beautifully shot by Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cameraman in Europe (where he used the surname Hackenschmied) before he moved to New York, the film makes new and startling use of such standard cinematic devices as montage editing and matte shots. Through her extensive writings, lectures, and films, Deren became the preeminent voice of avant-garde cinema in the 1940s and the early 1950s. (MoMA.org)

The Very Eye of Night (excerpt) 1958
Dir: Maya Deren. Assistant director: Harrison Starr III. Screenplay: Maya Deren. Music: Teiji Ito.

The Very Eye of Night (1958) was a collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School. The film was beset by problems in its production and carried with it a heavy weight of expectation. A shimmering constellation of stars established the background for negative images of figures resembling Greek Gods superimposed on and magically transported along the milky way. Deren called it her 'ballet of night', an ethereal dance within a nocturnal space that focused on the spectacle rather than the narrative. Ito collaborated on the soundtrack using tone blocks and bells, recalling the trance rhythm of Meshes of the Afternoon. Prioritizing enchantment over interpretation, The Very Eye of Night proved to be Deren's most controversial and misunderstood film.

Witch's Cradle 1943
Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: Marcel Duchamp, B&W (incomplete)

Witch's Cradle, a choreographed set of movements between the figure (played by Duchamp) and the camera. The film was intended to be an exploration of the magical qualities of objects in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery, a space where Duchamp also exhibited. Witch's Cradle remains unfinished, the film recalling Duchamp's difficulty with completion. Duchamp's Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) collected dust in his studio for seven years until it was shattered in transit. Duchamp celebrated the accident as the final element allowing the art to be considered complete.

Divine Horsemen 1985
Original footage shot by Deren (1947-1951). Reconstruction by Teiji & Cherel Ito.

Maya Deren takes us on a journey into the fascinating world of the Voudoun religion, whose devotees commune with the cosmic powers through invocation, offerings, song and dance. The Voudoun pantheon of deities, or loa, is witnessed as being living gods and goddesses, actually taking possession of their devotees. The soundtrack conveys the incantatory power of the ritual drumming and singing.

"Maya Deren first went to Haiti as an artist . . . but the manifestations of rapture that seized her, and transported her beyond the bounds of any art she had ever known."

Notes: Wendy Haslem, "Maya Deren" (Senses of Cinema, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/deren.html)

Wendy Haslem is an Associate at the University of Melbourne where she teaches in the Cinema Studies Department. Her research covers studio and independent film production in America during the 1940s.

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