Her expression seems confused when she sees two women playing chess in the sand. This is thought to be inspired by her father who was a student of psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev who explored trance and hypnosis as neurological states. Between 1942 and 1947 she made five short black-and-white films (one . Edited with a preface by Bruce McPherson. View the institutional accounts that are providing access. She went after anybody including someone who belonged to someone else. The Chinese filmmaker Lou Yes daring drama, from 2000, eludes censorship by means of intricate storytelling. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. Its the tale of an artist who, in the mid-nineteen-forties, in the span of four years, by the age of thirty, remade her artistic worlddrastically and definitively. 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. [27], 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. Her three trips to Haiti occupied much of her timenineteen monthsthrough 1950. April 29]1917[1][2] October 13, 1961) was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important promoter of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Work. She became friends with a young filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, whose films she didnt like but whose creative spirit she admired. cinema as an art, form maya deren. In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. . Click the account icon in the top right to: Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. (For the purposes of the movies credits, Deren took the name Maya, and kept it, onscreen and off.) Deren was transformed by this relationship and embraced her new life by changing her name, in 1943, to Maya. With inheritance from her father, she bought a 16mm Bolex camera and made her first film with Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon, detailed by Kudlcek 2004. Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter. Maya Deren. Regarded as one of the founders of the postwar American independent cinema, the legendary Maya Deren was a poet, photographer, ethnographer, filmmaker and impresario. Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways: Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. In 1943, Maya Deren made one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema, Meshes of the Afternoon, in collaboration with cinematographer Alexander Hammid. . Deren filmed 18,000 feet of Vodou rituals and people she met in Haiti on her Bolex camera. He was an acclaimed cameraman and still photographer; he and Deren quickly fell in love and married. 1 Part 2 consists of hundreds of documents, interviews, oral histories, letters, and autobiographical memoirs.[9]. She went on to make several films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, her camerawoman. 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. Cecile Starr article on role of late Maya Deren in creating Amer avant-garde film, on occasion of Museum of Modern Art presentation, May 4-11, of 30-yr History of American Avant-Garde Cinema . Abstract. Deren was born May 12[O.S. It took another batch of independent filmmakersthe young French critics who then became the filmmakers of the French New Waveto export Hollywood successfully from Paris to Greenwich Village (and another Voice critic, Andrew Sarris, to broker the import). Above all, she both championed and embodied the idea that movies were art and, indeed, the art of the time. She made several other films before her untimely death at age forty-four. Deren and Beatty met through Katherine Dunham, while Deren was her assistant and Beatty was a dancer in her company. The choreography is perfectly synched as he seamlessly appears in an outdoor courtyard and then returns to an open, natural space. Turim, M. "The Ethics of Form: Structure and Gender in Maya Deren's Challenge to the Cinema." Nichols 77-102. In At Land, Deren more conspicuously acts, with a newly athletic, choreographic element. Awarded the Cannes Festivals 16mm Grand Prix Internationale in 1947, the first ever given to an American or a woman, Meshes impacted film history in ways still felt to this day. 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. [23], 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 additionally on Vodou. Meanwhile, she turned to her mother to pay her utility bill, and she literally asked friends for food. Derens last decade was a depressing decrescendo. Nichols (2001), page 18. The Legend of Maya Deren. She supported herself from 1937 to 1939 by freelance writing for radio shows and foreign-language newspapers. Scott MacDonald's "Art in Cinema" presents complete programs presented by . However, it is the life and art community established by Deren in New York City that garners most attention. In the first scene of her film-dance Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945/6), Maya Deren appears, leaning against a doorframe. This kind of Freudian interpretation, which she disagreed with, led Deren to add sound, composed by Teiji It, to the film. Shed started using Benzedrine to fuel her long days and nights of activity while travelling with Dunham, and kept with it afterward. Cinema As An Art Form. [4] She became known for her European-style handmade clothes, wild curly hair and fierce convictions. Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: ; May 12[O.S. 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. Although she had established a name for herself from a young age as a leader in the Young Peoples Socialist League, as well as having published as a journalist and a poet, and earning a masters degree from Smith College, Deren is best known for her first short film: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). . Deren's initial concept began on the terms of a subjective camera, one that would show the point of view of herself without the aid of mirrors and would move as her eyes through spaces. In the Mirror of Maya Deren, 2001. 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.. Durant offers fictionalized sequences, the biographical equivalent of renactments in documentaries, but doesnt identify them as such, and leaves the sourcing of events and descriptions unclear. It seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. Derens relentless quest for what was extraordinary about her inner life came at the expense of what was already extraordinary in her outer one. She was always dressed up, talking, speaking many languages and being a Russian."[35]. [7][8], In 1922, the family fled the Ukrainian SSR because of antisemitic pogroms perpetrated by the White Volunteer Army and moved to Syracuse, New York. New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2004. All rights reserved. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2002. Along with her furious repudiation of Hollywood formulas, celebrity worship, and commercialism, Deren also rejected the prevailing notions of documentary filmmaking. An LP of some of Deren's wire recordings was published by the newly formed Elektra Records in 1953 entitled Voices of Haiti. Interview with the editors of The Legend (VV Clark, Millicent Hodson, Catrina Neiman, and Francine Bailey) that addresses their research methods and process of working together on the biography. This well-reviewed documentary film contains several interviews with central figures in Derens life such as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Alexander Hammid, and others. Invocation: Maya Deren. Throughout the 1940s, Deren worked in independent, experimental cinema, lecturing extensively and developing a network of nontheatrical exhibit spaces across the country. She was also a prolific writer and dedicated activist for film art. The film begins with Deren bearing a skein of yarn and, with forced gaiety, recruiting Christiani for its winding (as Nin looms in the background). Between 1952 and 1955, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The Very Eye of Night. [9] He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse. Maya Deren. A new biography of the iconic independent filmmaker depicts a cultural force of nature who all too quickly lost her way. Deren, who conceived Meshes of the Afternoon (Hammid, who did the camera work, credited her as the films artistic creator), is its main actor. A biographical sketch built from nine brief meditations on aspects of Derens history, filmography, and reception. 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]. A few decades later, Maya Deren would take a very different approach. From 1946 until 1954, the San Francisco-based film society Art in Cinema presented programs of independent film to audiences at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the University of California, Berkeley. Rare Occasion, Auras, Film. In 1946, Maya Deren, theorist, poet, and avant-garde filmmaker, wrote a treatise entitled An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film. In 1943, she moved to a bungalow on Kings Road in Hollywood[4] and adopted the name Maya, a pet name her husband Hammid coined. 1984. We recognize her talent. Maya Deren. Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions. WRITINGS ON FILM BY Maya Deren Edited with a preface by Bruce R. McPherson DOCUMENTEXT 'kingston, New York Essential Deren : Film Poetics 8 movement of wind, or water, children, people . Later that year, she sought to distribute her films, contacting museums and universities, writing a sales brochure called "Cinema as an Independent Art Form," and taking out a print ad in a . Berkeley: University of . Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev - October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowsky, was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s. She and her husband became active in various socialist causes in New York City; during this time they separated and eventually divorced three years later. Details her formative years consisting of her childhood and education as well as her early publications, poems, and journalism. Reprinted in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, edited by Bruce R. McPherson, 19-33. 331pp. "The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.". Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases.