Deren, Maya. 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 . 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. this page. Certain symbols reoccur on the screen, including a cloaked, mirror-faced figure, and a key, which becomes twinned with a knife. [4] After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. In 1944, back in New York City, her social circle included Marcel Duchamp, Andr Breton, John Cage, and Anas Nin. [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). An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. In 1941 and 1942, Deren travelled with Dunham and her dance troupe throughout the United States. Avant-Garde: The Case of Maya Deren", "Go Inland, young woman! ISBN 0 520 22732 8. They speak about the difficult project of demythologizing Derens persona while also preserving her legend. (Vogel was also one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, which was launched in 1963.). Introduction. The sequence of walking up to the gate on the partially shaded road restarts numerous times, resisting conventional narrative expectations, and ends in various situations inside the house. Screenwriter. Suzhou River, Reviewed: Gangland Romance as Political Critique. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. "If cinema is 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. Deren was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema, highlighting personal, experimental, underground film. "[32], 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. Sitney, P. Adams, ed, The Film Culture Reader, Prager Publishers Inc., New York, 1970 Referred to as poetic psychodrama, the film was ahead of its time with its focus on depicting fragments of the unconscious mind, externalising disjointed mental processes, dreams, and potential drama through poetic cinematic re-enactments brought to life Her films are not only poetic but instructive, offering insight into the human body and pysche and demonstrating the potential of film to explore these subjects. Thats the story told in Maya Deren: Choreographed for Camera, Mark Alice Durants new biography of the filmmaker (published by Saint Lucy Books), and its thrilling and terrifying. Abstract. Born Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev, Russia, on April 29, 1908 (some sources cite 1917); died of cerebral hemorrhage in St. By the time Deren had put those journeys to rest and returned to Morton Street as her steady base of action, the scene of avant-garde, independent, nonnarrative filmmaking that she advocated had quickly caught on, in Greenwich Village and beyondbut in ways that she disliked. Acknowledges the filmmakers she influenced, such as Derek Jarman and Barbara Hammer, and musicians who have recently rescored her films, from Portuguese rock group Mo Morta and British rock group Subterraneans to Japanese-born No Wave music maverick, Ikue Mori. 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 would do almost anything for attention, Dunham said. Ritual in Transfigured Time began in August and was completed in 1946. [4] Of two still photography magazine assignments of 1943 to depict artists active in New York City, including Ossip Zadkine, her photographs appeared in the Vogue magazine article. 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. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. The movie also has elements of erotic fantasy, as when she strolls with a man who turns out to be four different ones (including Hammid and the composer John Cage), she follows Hammid into a cabin and instead finds yet another man there in a bed, andback on the beachshe stumbles upon two women playing chess and joyfully caresses one players head. [46], Anthropologists Melville Herkovitz and Harold Courlander acknowledged the importance of Divine Horsemen, and in contemporary studies it is often cited as an authoritative voice, where Deren's methodology has been especially praised because "Vodou has resisted all orthodoxies, never mistaking surface representations for inner realities."[47]. Screen Dance adapts this idea to the strategic collaboration of many art forms that can . This exhibition looks at Deren's legacy through her own work and that of a . 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. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump-cutting, superimposition, slow-motion, and other camera techniques to her advantage, Deren abandoned established notions of physical space and time, in carefully planned films with specific conceptual aims.[4][5]. In 1946, Maya Deren, theorist, poet, and avant-garde filmmaker, wrote a treatise entitled An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film. The first of these trajectories is Deren's interest in socialism during her youth and university years".[31]. In early 1943, Derens father died and left her a small sum of money, with which she bought a movie camera, a 16-mm. New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2004. During that time she also worked as an editorial assistant to famous American writers Eda Lou Walton, Max Eastman, and then William Seabrook. As a woman in her mid-twenties, Deren was an artist without portfolio, endowed with a poets imaginative flamboyance and a photographers sense of visual composition, to which she added an activists revolutionary fervor, aptitude for advocacy, and organizational practicality. Rare Occasion, Auras, Film. 1 Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (Yonkers: Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946), 10; in VV A. Clark, Millicent Hodson and Catrina Neiman, eds., The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works (New York: Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture, 1988), Volume I, Part 1: Chambers (1941-47), $70. 'An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film.' In Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. When her films began to appear in the 1940s, it was still incredibly rare for . 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. 1, Part 2: Chambers (19421947). Maya Deren (b. With no extant theatre for the kinds of movies she was making, she held private screenings at home and, eventually, a midtown art gallery. [41] Deren filmed, recorded and photographed many hours of Vodou ritual, but she also participated in the ceremonies. "Maya Deren's four 16 mm. In college it always seemed like the guys who were poets got more girls than the prose writers. 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. Maya Deren (b. Deren came to Los Angeles with Dunham, where she met and married filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who introduced her to visual media by taking her to foreign films and by teaching her still photography and filmmaking. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. Her first piece explores a woman's subjectivity and her relation to the external world. She documented her knowledge and experience of Vodou 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. This kind of Freudian interpretation, which she disagreed with, led Deren to add sound, composed by Teiji It, to the film. Camera Obscura Collective. 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. Her parents immigrated to Syracuse, New York, when Maya was very young; she was a naturalized US citizen before she reached her teens. However, Ritual contains a nearly four-minute sequence of ingeniously conceived and thrillingly crafted stylization, which I consider the most fascinating scene that she ever filmedand its one in which she doesnt appear. Ellen Careys kaleidoscopic self-portraits put her out of synch with many of her peers. 1917-d. 1961) completed only six films and two monographs in her lifetime, yet she made a huge impact on the history of cinema and the avant-garde specifically. Save Save Cinema as an Art Form For Later. She fulfilled the destiny detailed by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his 1835 story Wakefield: By stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. A woman, even more so. "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti", McPherson & Company. Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: ; May 12 [O.S. Deren Maya - An Anagram of Ideas on Art Form and Film. Between 1952 and 1955, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The Very Eye of Night. She was exactly the kind of personality and performer, of limited technique but hypnotically photogenic, for whom the cinema was made. 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. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. A new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front dilutes the power of Erich Maria Remarques antiwar novel. When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. 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. In her book of the same name[48] Deren uses the spelling Voudoun, explaining: "Voudoun terminology, titles and ceremonies still make use of the original African words and in this book they have been spelled out according to usual English phonetics and so as to render, as closely as possible, the Haitian pronunciation. Any hours were all right, just like mine.. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. The careers of the American independent filmmakers who rode that new wavewhether the ones who made it to Hollywood, such as Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, or the ones who didnt, such as Juleen Compton and Peter Emanuel Goldmanwould be unthinkable without hers. Clark, VV A., Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, eds. While working as Dunham's assistant, Deren was given access to Dunham's archive which included 16mm documents on the dances in Trinidad and Haiti. Shibboleth / Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutions website and Oxford Academic. [27] She also regularly explored themes of gender identity, incorporating elements of introspection and mythology. Most of the songs, sayings and even some of the religious terms, however, are in Creole, which is primarily French in derivation (although it also contains African, Spanish and Indian words). In 1945, Deren filmed another silent short, Ritual in Transfigured Time, the last of her films, as Durant notes, in which she appears. She had rented the Provincetown Playhouse, a West Village theatre, for a screening of her films on that evening, and, as Durant details, she promoted the hell out of it. Original Title: . C. Nekola, "On Not Being Maya Deren" Wide Angle, 18, October, 1996. [30] Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop. Discusses film as an independent art form and asserts that it should not be seen as merely a way to illustrate a . They have the ability to manifest our dream lives onscreen. Argues for a serious engagement with Deren, rather than more mythmaking. Indeed, she continues to inspire a wide range of artists, from filmmakers to visual artists and musicians. She supported herself from 1937 to 1939 by freelance writing for radio shows and foreign-language newspapers. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), her collaboration with Alexander Hammid, has been one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema history. Regarded as one of the founders of the postwar American independent cinema, the legendary Maya Deren was a poet, photographer, ethnographer, filmmaker and impresario. (She instructed them, When you hail each other, hail with your palm up.) As Durant observes, In Derens edit, shots and gestures are rhythmically repeated, elevating casual movements into the realm of the choreographic., The sudden success that Deren seemingly willed into being also brought on a classic case of be careful what you wish for. Six weeks after her Provincetown Playhouse triumph, she was awarded a Guggenheim grant, with which she financed a trip to Haiti. 49 Followers. Meanwhile, she turned to her mother to pay her utility bill, and she literally asked friends for food. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer. Improve your films not by adding more equipment and personnel but by using what you have to its fullest capacity. [15], After graduation from Smith, Deren returned to New York's Greenwich Village, where she joined the European migr art scene. Led by filmmaker Frank Stauffacher, Art in Cinema's programs pioneered the promotion of avant-garde cinema in America. ), Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, (includes the complete text of Maya Deren's 'An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film'), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 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.". In the first moments of the film, the woman (Deren) enters a . In the spring of 1945 she made A Study in Choreography for Camera, which Deren said was "an effort to isolate and celebrate the principle of the power of movement. 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. View your signed in personal account and access account management features. The edit is 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. A list of these articles are found in: Sullivan, 1997, pp.199-218. A still from Ritual in Transfigured Time, with Rita Christiani, Anas Nin, and Deren in the foreground. Her influence can also be seen in films by Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Su Friedrich. Maya Deren, Bruce McPherson (Editor) 4.42. Until now, Maya Deren's essays on the art and craft of filmmaking have not been available in a comprehensive volume equally handy for students . The link was not copied. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Indeed, the wealth of this material has produced one of the most complete biographies of an artist: The Legend of Maya Deren. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and came from a well-regarded Jewish family . Introduces brief reviews of Derens films that follow in the June and July 1988 issues of Monthly Film Bulletin. According to 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.". In Meshes, a woman falls asleep at home and imagines an episode involving multiples of herself, a recurring slippage of her house key out of her mouth, a flower that she finds in the street, a knife that she finds on the table, a black-shrouded figure with a mirror for a face, and Hammid himself, who comes home, sees one of the Derens in bed, and approaches her with a tentative eroticism. [14] In 1944, Deren filmed The Witch's Cradle in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery with Duchamp featured in the film. Winner: 2005 Book of the Year Bronze Award for Performing Arts. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji It in 1952. Her writings on the philosophy of art and technology foreshadowed some of the most highly regarded work in the field today, especially with regard to theorizing the historical and technological shifts in the experience of time. As her work has evolved, the times have caught up. [13] She attended the New School for Social Research.