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Maya Deren
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Maya Deren

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Maya Deren (1917-1961) wore many hats in her brief lifetime: avant-garde filmmaker, documentarian, author, and Voudoun priestess, to name a few. Her influence, especially in independent film, has not only endured but also increased in the decades following her death. Deren was a seminal figure among independent filmmakers about whom legends sprung. Her reputation as a filmmaker rests on only seven short completed films in her lifetime and five unfinished films, though one was edited and released after her death. In the early 21st century Deren, who by then had been dead for more than 40 years, was still discussed as a fresh voice and a "past master who still matters," as the magazine "Utne Reader" declared her.

Early Years

Deren was born Eleanora Solomonovna Derenkovsky on April 29, 1917, in Kiev, Ukraine, less than two months after the Russian Revolution that forced the Tsar's abdication (but prior to the Bolshevik takeover). Her parents were members of Kiev's intelligentsia: her mother, Marie, had studied music and her father, Solomon, was a psychiatrist. The period between 1917 and 1922, Deren's early years, was a time of political and economic upheaval in Russia and Ukraine. The five-year span saw the Tsar's abdication; the two revolutions of 1917, the second of which brought the Bolsheviks to power; Russia's capitulation in the First World War; the civil war; and the formation of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Ukraine, which had been part of the tsarist empire, declared itself an independent nation on January 22, 1918, but in 1922 it became a constituent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Despite all of this, the Derenkovsky family led a relatively secure life.

All of that changed by 1922. The economy was in such a shambles that even Lenin had retreated from hardline communism toward a "New Economic Policy." A more important factor in the Derenkovskys' decision to emigrate was a recurrence of pogroms (organized massacres of Jews) in Ukraine. The family eventually settled in Syracuse, New York, where Solomon Derenkovsky's brother lived. After a period of adjustment Solomon Derenkovsky set up his psychiatric practice and the family name was shortened to Deren.

Young Eleanora Deren attended primary school in Syracuse until 1930 when she was sent to Switzerland to attend Ecole Internationale de Geneve, which was founded under the auspices of the League of Nations (the immediate predecessor of the United Nations). Deren remained in Switzerland for three years studying French, German, and Russian. When she returned to the United States in 1933 she enrolled at Syracuse University, where she studied journalism until 1935. At this time Deren joined the Young People's Socialist League, a Trotskyite organization. Among the political activists she became involved with was Gregory Bardacke, whom she married in 1935. Deren and Bardacke moved to New York City, and Deren transferred to New York University (NYU) from which she graduated in 1936. At NYU Deren first became interested in photography and film. Deren then went on to study literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; she was awarded an M.A. in 1939. By then Deren and Bardacke had divorced. Deren's initial career path was the publishing industry. She worked briefly as a writers' and publishers' factotum, all the while writing poetry herself.

Independent Filmmaker

Soon she met and began working as a secretary for Katherine Dunham, who was to have a profound influence on the directions Deren's career would take. Dunham was a choreographer and an anthropologist who had founded an African American dance company. It was while working for Dunham in Los Angeles in 1941, where Deren lived with her mother (Deren's parents ultimately divorced), that she met Alexander Hammid; ten years Deren's senior, he became another influence on her career. Hammid (original name Hackenschmied) was a Czechoslovakian refugee who came to the United States to work as a motion picture photographer for "The March of Time" newsreels. Deren and Hammid were married in 1942 and it was he who provided the stimulus for Deren's filmic imagination. During this time, possibly at Hammid's suggestion, Deren changed her first name to Maya, the Sanskrit word for illusion.

At the time of her marriage Deren was primarily a writer, with poetry, newspaper articles, short stories, and essays to her credit. One of her essays, written no doubt under the eye of Dunham, discussed religious possession in dancing - a theme that would later command her attention. In 1943 Solomon Deren died and left Deren a small inheritance with which she purchased a second-hand Bolex 16mm camera, which she and Hamid used to make the film Meshes in the Afternoon. While Meshes in the Afternoon is considered her first film by most film historians, filmmaker Stan Brakhage in his essay on Deren (published in Film at Wit's End ) discussed the idea that a study of the photography reveals it is primarily Hammid's film: "For all the unusual things that happen within the film, its whole style of photography betrays the slick, polished, penultimate craftsmanship of the old European sensibility for which Sasha [Hammid] was known." Nevertheless Brakhage does acknowledge "the real force of the film came from Maya herself."

Deren and Hammid moved to New York City where her electric personality really took off. Soon she was regularly screening Meshes in the Afternoon and lecturing the audience on independent filmmaking. This caused a natural friction with Hammid who felt he was being slighted. In 1943 Deren began another film, Witch's Cradle, but it remained unfinished. The most notable aspects of the film were that it was shot at an art gallery where a surrealist exhibition was taking place and that it included Marcel Duchamp. Deren followed up this attempt with the 15-minute film, At Land, which featured Deren herself on different landscapes: merticulously crawling on rocks, walking along what appears to be a cart path with a man who changes appearances. The film included brief appearances by poet and critic Parker Tyler, composer John Cage, and Hammid.

In 1945 Deren and Hammid decided to make a second film together in which Hammid would take the lead in directing and filming. The result was the 30-minute The Private Life of a Cat. Here again Stan Brakhage, who was a friend and something of a protégé of Deren, disputes the claim of film historians who say that Deren's imput was minimal. However The Private Life of a Cat did not boost Hammid's reputation the way Meshes had lifted Deren's. Also in 1945 Deren made A Study in Choreography for Camera, a 2 1/2-minute film that featured choreographer Talley Beatty who was also credited as co-director.

1946 was a busy year for Deren. She rented the Provincetown Playhouse n New York City and screened Meshes in the Afternoon, At Land, and A Study in Choreography for Camera. The program, which ran several evenings, was titled "Three Abandoned Films." She published An Anagram of Art, Form, and Film and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures." Deren was the first filmmaker to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. That year Deren also completed Ritual in Transfigured Time.

Voudoun Priestess

In 1947 she presented Meshes in the Afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Grand Prix International in the category of 16mm Film, Experimental Class. It was the first time the award went to a film produced in the United States and the first time a female director was honored. Deren and Hammid were divorced that year, and Deren began making trips to Haiti to observe and film Voudoun rituals and dance. The result was that over the next eight years her focus began to shift away from film and onto Voudoun culture. Deren's involvement with Voudoun became the source of most of the legends that surrounded her life.

In between trips to Haiti, Deren completed Meditation on Violence (1948). This was to be her only completed film for the next seven years as she spent a total of nearly two years in Haiti working on her Voudoun ritual project. In 1949 she began but left unfinished Medusa, and in 1951 she abandoned Ensemble for Somnambulists. By that time she had met and fallen in love with a young Japanese musician, Teiji Ito. Ito was 15 years old at the time of their meeting (Deren was 43), and Deren became both his mentor and lover; they lived together in New York and traveled to Haiti. In 1953 Deren published Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, a study of Haitian deities, rituals, and practices. The work had the assistance of anthropologist Gregory Bateson and was edited by Joseph Campbell. In the book Deren defined myth as "facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter." When the book was republished in 1970 Campbell wrote a second foreword (he had also written a foreword to the first edition) in which he summed up the work by saying: "It has always been my finding that the poet and the artist are better qualified both by temperament and by training to intuit and interpret the sense of the mythological figure than the university-trained empiricist. And rereading today, after twenty years, Maya Deren's celebration of the gods by whom her own life and personality were transformed, I am reconfirmed in that finding; reconfirmed, also, in my long-held belief that this little volume is the most illuminating introduction that has yet been rendered to the whole marvel of the Haitian mystères as 'facts of the mind.' "

By the time Deren had finished filming in Haiti she had shot more than 18,000 feet of film, but as Brakhage attests the amount of footage overwhelmed Deren and she could not complete the job of editing. Her own Voudoun practice continued, however, which may have been the reason for her inability to edit the footage. The deeper Deren became involved in the religion the harder it was for her to believe in the efficacy of the film document of the rituals. Deren's practice included regular dance rituals in her apartment as well as performing a Voudoun ritual at the marriage of dancer Geoffrey Holder, whereupon she went into a trance, witnessed by Brakhage, in which she displayed amazing physical strength and fits of violence. But Deren's Voudoun legend did not end there.

Final Film

Her final film, The Very Eye of Night, was completed in 1955, but because of financial problems it did not premiere until 1959. The film had its premiere in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with a soundtrack by Teiji Ito. The delay caused a rift between Deren and her backer, lyricist John Latouche, with the supposed result being that Deren put a Voudoun curse on Latouche, who died soon afterward.

In the late 1950s Deren established the Creative Film Foundation and in 1960 she married Teiji Ito. She had also begun the "Haiku Film Project," but it never went beyond the planning stage. In 1961 Deren and Ito traveled to New England to claim his inheritance following the death of his father. Ito's family sought to block the claim and Deren became apoplectic (showing signs of a stroke). The fit, whether Voudoun inspired or not, caused her to have a cerebral hemmorage, and she lapsed into a two-week coma from which she never awoke. Deren died on October 13, 1961, in New York City. The fact that it was Friday the 13th also contributed to her legend. Some believe she was the victim of a counter-curse placed on her by friends of Latouche. Another possible (and more rational) cause of her stroke was the so-called vitamin shots Deren had been receiving. These contained amphetamines.

After her death, the Haitian footage was offered to many filmmakers to edit, but all refused. In the 1980s Teiji Ito and his new wife Cherel completed the editing process and, with a soundtrack by Ito, the completed film became Divine Horsemen. In 1985 the American Film Institute established the Maya Deren Award for independent filmmaking.

Books

Brakhage, Stan, Film at Wit's End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers, McPherson & Company, 1989.

Deren, Maya, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, McPherson & Company, 1953, 1970.

Periodicals

Utne Reader, November-December 1991.

Online

"The Life of Maya Deren," Zeitgeist Films, http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/current/mayaderen/mayaderenbio.html (January 20, 2003).

"Maya Deren," Internet Movie Database, http://us.imdb.com/+Maya (January 27, 2003).

AMG AllMovie Guide:

Maya Deren

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Maya Deren did not launch the American film avant-garde, but more than any of her contemporaries, she galvanized, popularized, and feminized it. Famed for her 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon, one of the most widely viewed and analyzed of all experimental films, Deren was a tireless proponent of independent movie production and distribution, constantly writing, touring, and lecturing in support of her craft. She not only distributed her own films, but also financed her projects with the aid of fees and grants, in 1946 receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship -- the first awarded for creative filmmaking, and the first ever bequeathed to a woman. While her films lack an overtly feminist consciousness, Deren was arguably the first true woman auteur in American cinema, and her work challenged not only the medium's gender stratification but also its thematic principles, probing issues of sensuality and identity clearly distinct from the efforts of her male counterparts. And although many of Deren's films and writings drifted into obscurity following her 1961 death, her reputation has been greatly rehabilitated in later years, and her aesthetics and ethics alike remain a touchstone for independent filmmakers of all persuasions -- as the pioneering avant-garde director Stan Brakhage once said, "She is the mother of us all." Deren was born Elenora Derenkowsky in Kiev, Ukraine, on April 29, 1917. Her family fled to the U.S. in 1922 following a series of anti-Semitic pogroms, and settled in Syracuse, NY; her father, a psychiatrist, and her mother, an artist, were made naturalized American citizens in 1928, at that time adopting the abbreviated surname "Deren." While attending school in Switzerland, Deren developed an interest in writing poetry, and upon returning to New York she studied journalism and political science at Syracuse University, where she also became fascinated with filmmaking. After marrying student activist Gregory Bardacke, she relocated to New York City, continuing her education at New York University and serving as the National Secretary of the Young People's Socialist League; Deren also worked as a secretary and tour manager for the anthropologist and dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham, credited as one of the first performers to expose American audiences to traditional Caribbean music and dance. Dunham was no doubt a major influence on Deren, who would later explore and document Haitian dance and Voudoun (voodoo) rituals in her own work. After receiving her master's degree in English literature from Smith College in 1939, Deren divorced Bardacke. While in Los Angeles with a Dunham stage production, Deren met Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid; they later married, and she changed her given name from Elenora to Maya, from the Hindu goddess of sorcery. With Hammid's assistance, in 1943 she filmed Meshes of the Afternoon, shooting with a hand-wound Bolex camera and funding the project out of her own pocket, even appearing as its enigmatic protagonist(s). Although Deren would later criticize and renounce the surrealists, the resulting 16 mm, 14-minute effort plainly evokes the experimental approaches of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, and Luis Buñuel; an elliptical, poetic meditation on the self, hypnotically edited and relying on multiple exposure imagery to foster the illusion of myriad personas, Meshes of the Afternoon is a landmark of American cinema, a brilliant examination of form, content, and technique that conjures both film noir and gothic melodrama even as it challenges the very principles of standard narrative storytelling. Also in 1943, Deren began work on Witch's Cradle, a collaboration with Marcel Duchamp intended to articulate the magical properties of objects housed in Peggy Guggenheim's legendary Art of This Century gallery. Like many of Deren's projects, the film remained uncompleted. The following year, however, she did release her second short, At Land; again assuming the featured role -- this time portraying a woman who emerges from the sea to engage in a series of social conceits, including a dinner party and a chess match -- as in Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren explored themes of identity and context, relying on complex editing patterns to articulate questions of sameness and difference. For 1945's Ritual in Transfigured Time, a further examination of female psyche and sexuality, Deren cast the dancer Rita Christiani and the writer Anais Nin, employing similarly intricate edits and slow-motion effects to transform everyday movements into choreographed, dance-like actions -- more than one historian has called Deren the first dance filmmaker, and indeed, the intricate movements of the dancer's body and the medium's relations to space and time plainly embody the recurring concerns of her cinema. 1946 was in many respects the most pivotal year of Deren's career. After several years of distributing her films to colleges and universities on her own, she booked theProvincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village to mount her first major public exhibition -- titled "Three Abandoned Films," the retrospective featured Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and her latest effort, A Study for the Choreography of Camera. The screening was an unqualified success. Also in 1946, Deren published her book An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, and perhaps most notably won the first Guggenheim Fellowship for filmmaking. Her Guggenheim endowment funded not only her own non-profit filmmaking group, the Creative Film Foundation, but also a long-planned trip to Haiti to document her continuing fascination with Voudoun rites and dances. Between 1947 and 1954, Deren made three trips to Haiti, shooting over 20,000 feet of footage. The project yielded a book, 1953's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, but her plans to complete a film documentary remained unrealized during her lifetime -- not a trained anthropologist, her efforts to submit her footage for use in studying and documenting the Voudoun culture were dismissed by the anthropological community. During the intervening years, Deren did complete another short film, 1948's Meditations on Violence, perhaps the least-viewed and least-discussed of her finished works; from 1949 to 1951, she also began work on no fewer than three major projects -- provisionally entitled Medusa, Ensemble for Somnambulists, and Haiku -- none of which saw completion. As Deren's attempts to complete and distribute the Haitian footage faltered, her other work slowed and suffered, but she nevertheless solidified her standing as the American avant-garde's preeminent champion, appearing everywhere from Yale University to NBC's The Today Show to further her cause. In her lectures, Deren increasingly outlined and defined her views on film theory, and at the 1953 Cinema 16 symposium "Poetry and the Film" famously advocated her belief that the medium operates on a pair of axes: a horizontal, narrative axis encompassing character and action, and a vertical, poetic axis of mood, tone and rhythm. Between 1952 and 1955, she filmed The Very Eye of Night, a collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera's School of Ballet; released in 1959, it was her final completed film. Deren died suddenly on October 13, 1961, of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, most likely brought on by a longtime dependence on medically prescribed amphetamines and sleeping pills. (Many associates and acolytes speculated she was instead the victim of Voudoun rites.) In 1973, her third husband, Teiji Ito, teamed with his future wife, Cherel Winnett, to begin assembling Deren's Haitian footage into completed form; also titled Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, it was released in 1977. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi
Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Maya Deren

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Maya Deren
Birth name Eleanora Derenkowskaia
Born (1917-04-29)April 29, 1917
Kiev, Soviet Republic (present-day Ukraine)
Died October 13, 1961(1961-10-13) (aged 44)
New York, New York, United States
Spouse Gregory Bardacke (1935-1939)
Alexandr Hackenschmied (1942-1947)
Teiji Ito (1960-1961; her death)
Nationality American
Field Choreography, Film, Dancing, Ethnography, Ethnomusicology
Training New York University, New School of Social Research, Smith College
Works Films: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), A Study for Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945-1946), Meditation on Violence (1947), The Very Eye of Night (1959)
Books: Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953)
An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946)
Influenced by Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Katherine Dunham, Alexander Hammid, Gregory Bateson, Teiji Itō
Influenced Alexander Hammid, Barbara Hammer, Stan Brakhage, Jane Campion, Anaïs Nin, David Lynch
Awards Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Work in Motion Pictures, (1947)
Grand Prix Internationale for Amateur Film, Cannes Film Festival (1947)

Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia (Russian: Элеоно́ра Деренко́вская), was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. The function of film, Maya believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving.[1] She combined her interests in dance, voodoo and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness. Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon. She continued to make several more films on her own including At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.

Contents

Early life

Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine, to psychologist Solomon Derenkowsky and Marie Fiedler, who supposedly named her after Italian actress Eleonora Duse.

In 1922, the family fled the country because of anti-semitic pogroms and moved to Syracuse, New York. Her father shortened the family name to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York.[2] He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse.

In 1928, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her mother moved to Paris to be with her daughter while she attended the League of Nations School in Geneva, Switzerland from 1930 to 1933.

College

Deren began college at Syracuse University, where she became active in the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League (1907). Through the YPSL she met Gregory Bardacke, whom she married at the age of eighteen. After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City. She and her husband became active in various socialist causes in New York City. She graduated from New York University with a bachelor's degree in literature[2] and separated from Bardacke. The divorce was finalized in 1939. She attended the New School for Social Research and received a master’s degree in English literature at Smith College. Her master's thesis was titled "The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry" (1939).

Early career

After graduation from Smith, Deren returned to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she joined the European émigré art scene, and worked as an editorial assistant and free-lance photographer.[3] She became known for her European-style handmade clothes, wild, curly hair, and fierce convictions.[2] In 1941, Deren wrote and suggested a children's book on dance to African American dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham and later became her personal secretary. At the end of a tour, the Dunham dance company stopped in Los Angeles for several months to work in Hollywood. 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. Hackenschmied had fled from Czechoslovakia in 1938 after Hitler's advance. They lived together in Laurel Canyon where he helped her with her still photography. After living in New York, "California presented rich sights in the Forties – urban Hollywood in its archetypal, image-ridden 'glory,' and lovely desert countryside;" her photographs focused on local fruit pickers and the surrealism of Los Angeles.[3]

Cinema

Meshes of the Afternoon

When her father died of a heart attack in 1943, Deren purchased a used 16 mm Bolex camera with some of her inheritance money. This camera captured her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), in Los Angeles in collaboration with Hammid. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. It is the first narrative film in avant-garde American film, which critics have said took on an autobiographical tone - for women and the individual. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Itō in 1952. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film," following the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind bleeds in and out of reality. It follows a woman, played by Maya Deren, who walks to her friends house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and has a dream. The sequence of walking up to her friend's gate on the partially shaded road restarts numerous times, and ends in varying situations inside the house. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. Certain symbols recur on the screen, including a cloaked, mirror-faced figure, and a key, which becomes twinned with a knife. The loose repetition and rhythm cuts short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. The camera initially avoids her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman's face. Multiple selves appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting that the super-ego is at play, which is in line with the psychoanalytic Freudian staircase and flower motifs. Very aware of the "personal film," her first piece explores a woman's subjectivity and her relation to the external world. George Sadoul said Deren may have been "the most important figure in the post-war development of the personal, independent film in the U.S.A."[4] By starring herself, feminists see the flag that announces, "the personal is political." As with her other films on self-representation, Deren only partially navigates the tendencies of the self and other, and the differences and similarities, through doubling, multiplication and merging of the woman in the film. Following a dreamlike quest with allegorical complexity, Meshes of the Afternoon has an enigmatic structure and a loose affinity with both film noir and domestic melodrama.[2]

At Land

Deren filmed At Land in Port Jefferson and Amagansett, New York in the summer of 1944. Taking on more of an environmental psychologist's perspective, Deren "externalizes the hidden dynamic of the external world...as if I had moved from a concern with the life of the fish, to a concern with the sea which accounts for the character of the fish and its life."[4] Maya Deren washes up on the shore of the beach, and climbs up a piece of driftwood that leads to a room lit by chandeliers, and one long table filled with business men smoking in suits. She seems to be invisible to the men 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. 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. Her expression seems confused when she sees two women playing chess in the sand. She runs back through the entire sequence, and because of the jump-cuts, it seems as though she is a double or "doppelganger," where her earlier self sees her other self running through the scene. Some of her movements are controlled, suggesting a theatrical, dancer-like quality, while some have an almost animalistic sensibility as she crawls through the seemingly foreign environments. This is one of Deren's films in which the focus is on the character's exploration of her own subjectivity in her physical environment, insider as well as outside her subconscious, although it has a similar amorphous quality compared to her other films.

A Study in Choreography for the Camera

In the spring of 1945 she made A Study in Choreography for the Camera, which Deren said was "an effort to isolate and celebrate the principle of the power of movement."[4] The compositions and varying speeds of movement within the frame inform and interact with Deren's meticulous edits and varying film speeds and motions to create a dance that Deren said could only exist on film. Excited by the way the dynamic of movement is greater than anything else within the film, Maya established a completely new sense of the word "geography" as the movement of the dancer transcends and manipulates the ideas of both time and space.[4] Running at just under 3 minutes long, A Study in Choreography for Camera is a fragment but also a carefully constructed exploration of a man who dances in a forest, and then seems to teleport to the inside of a house because of how continuous his movements are from one place to the next. The choreography is perfectly synched as he seamlessly appears in an outdoor courtyard and then returns to an open, natural space. It shows a progression from nature to the confines of society, and back to nature. The figure belongs to dancer and choreographer Talley Beatty, whose last movement is a leap across the screen back to the natural world. The edit its broken, choppy, showing different angles and compositions, and even with parts in slow-motion, Deren is able to keep the quality of the leap smooth and seemingly uninterrupted.

Ritual in Transfigured Time

By her fourth film, Deren discussed in An Anagram that she felt special attention should be given to unique possibilities of time and that the form should be ritualistic as a whole. Ritual in Transfigured Time began in August and was completed in 1946. It explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual, looking at the details as well as the bigger ideas of the nature and process of change.

Meditation on Violence

Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. It was an attempt to "abstract the principle of ongoing metamorphosis," found in Ritual in Transfigured Time, though Deren felt it was not as successful in the clarity of that idea, brought down by its philosophical weight.[4] Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop.

Film career

Her entrepreneurial spirit became evident as she began to screen and distribute her films in the United States, Canada, and Cuba, lecturing and writing on avant-garde film theory, and Vodoun as well. In February 1946 she booked the Village's Provincetown Playhouse for a major public exhibition, titled Three Abandoned Films, in which she showed Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and A Study in Choreography for the Camera. The event was completely sold out, inspiring Amos Vogel's formation of Cinema 16, the most successful film society of the 1950s.

In 1946, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures," and won the Grand Prix Internationale for 16mm experimental film at the Cannes Film Festival for Meshes of the Afternoon. She then created a scholarship for experimental filmmakers called the Creative Film Foundation.[5]

In 1958, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The Very Eye of Night.

Deren was a muse and inspiration to such up-and-coming, avant-garde filmmakers as Curtis Harrington, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger, who emulated her independent, entrepreneurial spirit.

Personal life

In 1943, she moved to a bungalow on Kings Road in Hollywood[3] and adopted the name Maya. Maya is the name of the mother of the historical Buddha as well as the dharmic concept of the illusory nature of reality. In Greek myth, Maia is the mother of Hermes and a goddess of mountains and fields. Also in 1943, Deren began making a film with Marcel Duchamp, The Witches' Cradle, which was never completed.

In 1944, back in New York City, her social circle included Duchamp, André Breton, John Cage, and Anaïs Nin.

Many friends described her look as that of an exotic Russian Jew,[citation needed] contributing a part of her attractiveness to her bohemian, Greenwich Village lifestyle. 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."[6] Her third husband, Teiji Ito said "Maya was always a Russian. In Haiti she was a Russian. She was always dressed up, talking, speaking many languages and being a Russian."[6]

Criticism of Hollywood

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Deren attacked Hollywood for its artistic, political and economic monopoly over American cinema. She stated, “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick,” and observed that Hollywood “has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form.” She set herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry’s standards and practices.[7] 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 words...to the relentless activity and explanations of a plot...nor is the amateur production expected to return profit on a huge investment by holding the attention of a massive and motley audience for 90 minutes...Instead of trying to invent a plot that moves, use the movement of wind, or water, children, people, elevators, balls, etc. as a poem might celebrate these. And use your freedom to experiment with visual ideas; your mistakes will not get you fired.[8]

Haiti and Vodoun

When Maya Deren decided to make an ethnographic film in Haiti, she was criticized for abandoning avant-garde film where she had made her place, but she was ready to expand to a new level as an artist.[9] She had studied ethnographic footage by Gregory Bateson in Bali in 1947, and was interested in including it in her next film.[3] In September she divorced Hammid and left for a nine month stay in Haiti. The Guggenheim Fellowship grant in 1947 enabled Deren to finance her travel and complete her film Meditation on Violence. She went on three additional trips through 1954 to document and record the rituals of vodoun.

A source of inspiration for ritual dance was Katherine Dunham who wrote her master’s thesis on Haitian dances in 1939, which Deren edited. Afterwards Deren wrote several articles on religious possession in dancing before her first trip to Haiti.[10] Deren not only filmed, recorded and photographed many hours of vodoun ritual, but also participated in the ceremonies. She documented her knowledge and experience of Vodoun in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: Vanguard Press, 1953), edited by Joseph Campbell, which is considered a definitive source on the subject. She described her attraction to Vodoun possession ceremonies, transformation, dance, play, games and especially ritual came from her strong feeling on the need to decenter our thoughts of self, ego and personality.[2] In her book An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film she wrote:

"The ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of the dramatic action, but as a somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole. The intent of such depersonalization is not the deconstruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension and frees him from the specializations and confines of personality. He becomes part of a dynamic whole which, like all such creative relationships, in turn, endow its parts with a measure of its larger meaning."[1]

Deren filmed 18,000 feet of Vodoun rituals and people she met in Haiti. 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 Teiji Itō (1935-1982) and his wife Cherel Winett Itō (1947–1999).[11][12][13] All of the original wire recordings, photographs and notes are held in the Maya Deren Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. The film footage is housed at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

An LP of some of Deren's wire recordings was published by the newly-formed Elektra Records in 1953 entitled Voices of Haiti. The cover art for the album was by Teiji Ito.[14]

Death

Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44, from a brain hemorrhage brought on by extreme malnutrition. Her condition may have also been weakened by her long term dependence on amphetamines and sleeping pills prescribed by Dr. Max Jacobson, an arts scene doctor notorious for his liberal prescription of drugs.[2] Her father suffered from high blood pressure, which she may have had as well.

Her ashes were scattered in Japan at Mount Fuji.

Legacy

Deren was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema, highlighting personal, experimental, underground film. In 1986, the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor independent filmmakers.

The Legend of Maya Deren, Vol. 1 Part 2 consists of hundreds of documents, interviews, oral histories, letters, and autobiographical memoirs.[2]

Works about Deren and her works have been produced in various media:

  • In 1987, Jo Ann Kaplan directed a biographical documentary about Deren, titled Invocation: Maya Deren (65 min)
  • In 1994, the UK-based Horse and Bamboo Theatre created and toured Dance of White Darkness throughout Europe—the story of Deren's visits to Haiti.
  • In 2002, Martina Kudlacek directed a feature-length documentary about Deren, titled In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Im Spiegel der Maya Deren), which featured music by John Zorn.

Deren's films have also been shown with newly-written alternative soundtracks:

  • In 2004, the British rock group Subterraneans produced new soundtracks for six of Deren's short films as part of a commission from Queen's University Belfast's annual film festival. At Land won the festival prize for sound design.
  • In 2008, the Portuguese rock group Mão Morta produced new soundtracks for four of Deren's short films as part of a commission from Curtas Vila do Conde's annual film festival.

Filmography

Year Title Format Length Cast Notes
1943 The Witch's Cradle 16 mm 13 minutes Marcel Duchamp, Pajorita Matta B&W; unfinished[15]
1943 Meshes of the Afternoon 16 mm 14 minutes Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid Co-directed with Alexander Hammid; B&W; music by Teiji Itō added in 1959[15][16]
1944 At Land 16 mm 15 minutes John Cage, Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid B&W[15]
1945 A Study in Choreography for Camera 16 mm 3 minutes Talley Beatty B&W[15]
1946 Ritual in Transfigured Time 16 mm 14 minutes Rita Christiani, Maya Deren B&W; silent[15]
1947 The Private Life of a Cat 16 mm 29 minutes Collaboration with Alexander Hammid[16]
1948 Meditation on Violence 16 mm 13 minutes Chao-li Chi music by Teiji Itō[15]
1949 Medusa 16 mm 10 minutes Jean Erdman unfinished[16]
1951 Ensemble for Somnambulists 16 mm 7 minutes Toronto Film Society workshop; unreleased[16]
1958 The Very Eye of Night 16 mm 15 minutes In collaboration with Metropolitan Opera Ballet School;[16] assistant director: Harrison Starr III; music by Teiji Itō[15]
1959 Season of Strangers 16 mm 58 minutes Also known as Haiku Film Project; unfinished[16]
1985 Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti 16 mm John Genke (voice), Joan Pape (voice) Original footage shot by Deren (1947–1954); reconstruction by Teiji and Cherel Itō[15]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film by Maya Deren, The Alicat Bookshop Press, 1946.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde: Includes the complete text of An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film, edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001, pages 3-10, 268.
  3. ^ a b c d For the most authoritative source of biographical information on Maya Deren see: The Legend of Maya Deren, Volume 1, Part One; Part Two, by Catrina Neiman, VèVè Clark, Millicent Hudson, Francine Bailey, NY, 1976;1988.
  4. ^ a b c d e Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary. A Letter to James Card by Maya Deren. New York: Dutton, 1977.
  5. ^ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/158493/Maya-Deren
  6. ^ a b Performance and Persona in the U.S. Avant-Garde: The Case of Maya Deren. Maria Pramaggiore. Cinema Journal , Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter, 1997), pp. 17-40. University of Texas Press.
  7. ^ timeline at 2010 MoMA exhibit
  8. ^ Maya Deren, "Amateur Versus Professional", Film Culture 39 (1965): 45–46.
  9. ^ Maya Deren and the American Avantgarde edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, 2001. Maya Deren's Ethnographic Representation of Ritual and Magic in Haiti, Moira Sullivan, pages 207-229. According to Bill Nichols, "Taking up another neglected dimension of Maya Deren's work, Moira Sullivan's "Maya Deren's Ethnographic Representation of Ritual and Magic in Haiti" relies on primary source material in the Maya Deren Archive in Boston and Anthology Film Archives in New York." Maya Deren and the American Avantgarde edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, 2001, page 18
  10. ^ A list of these articles are found in : Sullivan, 1997, pp.199-218.
  11. ^ See Sullivan in Nichols, 2001, pages 207-229.
  12. ^ See also "Program notes" from screening at Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley
  13. ^ See also Paganopoulos, M. "The Archetype of Transformation in Maya Deren's Film Rituals" in Jung and Film II (eds)Hauke and Hockley, 2011, Routledge, pages 253-265.
  14. ^ EKLP 5 see Elektra Records discography for track listing.
  15. ^ a b c d e f g h "Great Directors: Maya Deren" by Wendy Haslem, Senses of Cinema, Issue 23, first published 12 December 2002. Accessed 19 June 2011
  16. ^ a b c d e f In the Mirror of Maya Deren, Zeitgeist Films. Accessed 19 June 2011

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Mentioned in

Invocation: Maya Deren (1987 Film)
Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946 Avant-garde / Experimental Film)
Medusa (1949 Avant-garde / Experimental Film)
Out-Takes From a Study in Choreography for Camera (1945 Avant-garde / Experimental Film)
A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945 Avant-garde / Experimental Film)
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