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. 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. [4] Deren served as National Secretary in the National Student office of the Young People's Socialist League and was a member of the Social Problems Club at Syracuse University through which she met Gregory Bardacke, whom she married at the age of eighteen in June 1935. She finished school at New York University with a bachelor's degree in literature[9] in June 1936, returning to Syracuse in the fall. In February 1946 she booked the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village for a major public exhibition, titled Three Abandoned Films, in which she showed Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944) and A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945). [3] She combined her expertise in dance and choreography, ethnography, the African spirit religion of Haitian Vodou, symbolist poetry and gestalt psychology (student of Kurt Koffka) in a series of perceptual, black-and-white short films. Select search scope, currently: catalog all catalog, articles, website, & more in one search; catalog books, media & more in the Stanford Libraries' collections; articles+ journal articles & other e-resources Durants book itself, twenty years in the making, bears the illumination of fanatical research and passionate empathy forpractically an inhabiting ofDerens inner world. These signs initially pointed in different directions, but eventually a cluster of forms developed, which were to become the cinema as we know it today. With no extant theatre for the kinds of movies she was making, she held private screenings at home and, eventually, a midtown art gallery. I could move directly from my imagination into film, she wroteand so she did, with hardly a trace of her lived experience. As her work has evolved, the times have caught up. She set herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry's standards and practices. They married in 1935, he graduated in 1936, and they moved to Greenwich Village, where he became a labor organizer and she, in the midst of her last year of college at N.Y.U., became a Socialist activist. . The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren (1917-1961). How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. Along with her furious repudiation of Hollywood formulas, celebrity worship, and commercialism, Deren also rejected the prevailing notions of documentary filmmaking. Maureen Turin's essay, "The ethics of form: structure and gender in Maya Deren's challenge to cinema", marks a welcome turn in the book to film analysis. In April, 1945, she made another film, A Study in Choreography for Camera, featuring the dancer Talley Beatty, also a Dunham alumnus, and it attracted attention in the world of dance. Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: |links=no; - October 13, 1961) was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important promoter of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. The hectic distortions and special effects that Hammid created give the movie its mind-bending intensity, whereas Derens presence gives it its allure and its personality. [27], A Study in Choreography for Camera was one of the first experimental dance films to be featured in the New York Times as well as Dance Magazine. 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. Dunham's fieldwork influenced Deren's studies of Haitian culture and Vodou mythology. In 1939, while employed as an elder writers secretary, Deren eventfully pursued an obsession. 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. [26], In her work, she often focused on the unconscious experience, such as in Meshes of the Afternoon. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and came from a well-regarded Jewish family . In her Glossary of Creole Words, Deren includes 'Voudoun' while the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary[49] draws attention to the similar French word, Vaudoux. The sin. films have already won considerable acclaim. "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 only five years-old when, together with her parents, she arrived in the USA in 1922, having fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine. 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.[3]. New York: Women Make Movies, 1987. Derens films were, for weeks, the talk of the Village, even those who were turned away had an opinion about what was seen that night., Among the audience at the Provincetown Playhouse was a twenty-four-year-old Austrian Jewish immigrant named Amos Vogel, who said that the event made him recognize a new kind of talent in filmmaking, an individual expressing a very deep inner need. The following year, Vogel and his wife, Marcia, founded a film society called Cinema 16, which launched its screenings at the same theatre and, in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, was New Yorks prime venue for non-Hollywood, independent, experimental, and international movies. [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). 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. 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. All rights reserved. There is no concrete information about the conception of Meshes of the Afternoon beyond that Deren offered the poetic ideas and Hammid was able to turn them into visuals. Mind, Fiction, Matter. ), 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 After the October Revolution, her father was conscripted into battle with Bolshevik forces, and Eleanora and her mother endured illness and poverty at home. Throughout the 1940s, Deren worked in independent, experimental cinema, lecturing extensively and developing a network of nontheatrical exhibit spaces across the country. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2002. As the editors describe in their interview with the Camera Obscura collective in 1977, they set out to document Derens life; and despite the first volume clocking in at over 1200 pages, The Legend remains an incomplete project, stopping at 1947, fourteen years before her death. DVD. Her mere presence beamed onto the screen her vast inner worlds of emotion and intellect. A list of these articles are found in: Sullivan, 1997, pp.199-218. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 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. The intent of such depersonalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension and frees him from the specializations and confines of personality. A new biography of the iconic independent filmmaker depicts a cultural force of nature who all too quickly lost her way. View your signed in personal account and access account management features. She died in 1961, in poverty and obscurity. 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. In At Land, Deren more conspicuously acts, with a newly athletic, choreographic element. 1988. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. [5] Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. Her performance is full of overtones of other performers: her puckish sidelong glances evoke Katharine Hepburn; and, when she over-earnestly and campily strains in her physical tasks, she brings to mind Bette Davis. The evening sold out in a matter of minutes, leaving hundreds on the street milling about in frustration, Durant writes. Deren was not quite a dancer, untrained as an actor, but endowed with charisma and temperament, craving not so much to be seen as to be recognized, turning her tumultuous private social life into a kind of performance. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. She edited a brochure with blurbs from notables (including Nin) and a short essay of her own, papered the Village with handmade fliers, and extended personal invitations to major critics. Deren and Beatty met through Katherine Dunham, while Deren was her assistant and Beatty was a dancer in her company. Suzhou River, Reviewed: Gangland Romance as Political Critique. In fact, we do not have a record of Deren having any professional career in dancing but it is known that she for a long time worked as the personal assistant of Kathryn Dunham - writer and dance director. Then there is Derens paradigm-shifting anthropological research on Voudoun in Haiti, which, while influenced by founders of the field such as Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, modeled an outsider ethnographic approach rejecting the dogmas of the previous generation. Russian-born American filmmaker, poet, photographer, choreographer, and critic Maya Deren (April 29, 1917-October 13, 1961) endures as one of humanity's most significant experimental filmmakers and champions of independent cinema. [9] He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse. A woman, played by Maya Deren, walks to her friend's house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and has a dream. The acceptance of integration has become widespread and as a result a more informed and evolved society has elapsed. . [14] Her master's thesis was titled The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry (1939). Her last completed film, The Very Eye of Night, which transformed live-action footage of the choreographer Antony Tudors student dancers into animation, was shot in 1952 and finished only in 1956. Uniting such diverse interests was Derens commitment to transforming culture, which she ultimately saw as the responsibility of the artist to her society. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. [4] After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City. The scene, featuring about thirty people and centered on Christianis efforts to connect with the other guests, is filmed in slow motion; the framings emphasize the layering in depth of the revellers comings and goings, and Deren evokes their cold-hearted conviviality with keenly discerning and precisely imaginative direction. A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer. 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. Ukrainian-born filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961) established the avant-garde film movement in the United States in the 1940s. (Durant reports that, in their travels together in the Jim Crow South, the blue-eyed Derenwho had a mighty mass of curly red hairwas taken for Black or of mixed race.). Kingston: Documentext. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian. In the 1940s and 1950s, Deren (b. Ukraine, 1917-1961) was a pioneer of experimental cinema as an art form, independent and distinct from Hollywood production values or the dramatic narrative, closer to the modernist and avant-garde art practices of her generation. Bill Nichols, 267-322. Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946, 15 minutes, Silent) Directed by Maya Deren. Her father shortened the family name to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York. [9] In 1940, Deren moved to Los Angeles to focus on her poetry and freelance photography. Maya Deren, Cinema as an Art Form, 1946 . 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.". 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." Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1946, 1917 , "Maya Deren | biography - American director and actress", "Maya Deren: seven films that guarantee her legend", "Cinematic "Pas de Deux": The Dialogue between Maya Deren's Experimental Filmmaking and Talley Beatty's Black Ballet Dancer in "A Study in Choreography for Camera" (1945)", "The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: "Meshes of the Afternoon" and ITS Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde", "Ritual in Transfigured Time: Narcisa Hirsch, Sufi Poetry, Ecstatic Dances, and the Female Gaze", "Performance and Persona in the U.S. In 1930, Marie, who was unhappy in the provincial city, took her daughter to Geneva, where the precocious girl was acclaimed as a poet by her classmates and also became an enthusiastic photographer. A still from Ritual in Transfigured Time, with Rita Christiani, Anas Nin, and Deren in the foreground. In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. Reprinted in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, edited by Bruce R. McPherson, 19-33. In 1945, Deren filmed another silent short, Ritual in Transfigured Time, the last of her films, as Durant notes, in which she appears. VHS. The most conspicuous, and perhaps the most significant, adaptation of Derens far-rangingly associative yet meticulously composed fantasies may well be in the movies of David Lynch. Enter your library card number to sign in. This camera was used to make her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), made in collaboration with Hammid in their Los Angeles home on a budget of $250. In New York, she took frequent vitamin injections, which likely included amphetamines, from the infamous Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson (who also treated John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and many other household names before losing his license in the seventies). The family snuck out of the country in the early nineteen-twenties and made their way to Syracuse, New York, changing their last name to Deren. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account. The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. Maya Deren (b. In the first moments of the film, the woman (Deren) enters a . Early Life Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky on April 29, 1917. 48 Copy quote. But Derens prime achievement reaches even beyond her artistry, her personality, the filmmakers she inspired, and the institutions she fostered. For instance, extended narrations and detailed descriptions of crucial scenes in Derens life, such as the Hollywood party where she and Hammid met and the Morton Street party at which he decided to leave her, have the feel of literary compositionspersuasive and moving onesbut I found myself wondering which details were Durants inventions and which were nuggets emerging in correspondence, notebooks, interviews, or elsewhere. The Guggenheim Fellowship grant in 1947 enabled Deren to finance her travel and complete her film Meditation on Violence. Introduces brief reviews of Derens films that follow in the June and July 1988 issues of Monthly Film Bulletin. Her influence can also be seen in films by Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Su Friedrich. Works about Deren and her works have been produced in various media: Deren's films have also been shown with newly written alternative soundtracks: Deren was also an important film theorist. 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 . Footnotes. Where the Creole word retains its French meaning, it has been written out so as to indicate both the original French word and the distinctive Creole pronunciation." Avant-Garde: The Case of Maya Deren", "Go Inland, young woman! Greasing the bodies of adulterers. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: ; May 12 [O.S. See below. 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. 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.. Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44, from a brain hemorrhage brought on by extreme malnutrition. Kino has a reputation for releasing quality products that respectfully focus on the history and art of cinema. cinema as an art, form maya deren | Posted on May 31, 2022 | resultat rugby auvergne 1re srie sams secrtaire mdicale Strangers and vague acquaintances stopped her in the street asking how they might see her films, Durant writes. Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: ; May 12[O.S. When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. She felt that she was physically irresistible. However, it is the life and art community established by Deren in New York City that garners most attention. Exposure to these documents led her to write her 1942 essay titled, "Delicious Possession in Dancing. She focuses on key scenes in At land, Meshes of the afternoon and Ritual in transfigured time (USA 1946), analysing Deren's use of socio-ritual and musical structures, the "transformation of . Deren screened her films on her living room walls to interested audiences, occasionally exhibiting to critics like Manny Farber and James Agee. A source of inspiration for ritual dance was Katherine Dunham who wrote her master's thesis on Haitian dances in 1939, which Deren edited. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a memorable, experimental, surreal short film directed and written by Maya Deren. Durant suggests that she left the film unfinished on ethical grounds, regarding the uses and abuses of the visual representation of a religion and a culture that was neither hers nor that of most of her likely viewers. 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. Durant quotes from Nins diary regarding the force exerted by Deren among the Village culturati: We are subject to her will, her strong personality, yet at the same time we do not trust or love her wholly. It seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. 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The high-art audience that she galvanized for her filmsthe audience that then filled the seats at Cinema 16 and devoured Mekass column in the Voicewould soon be ready to see the high art of movies in places where Deren didnt, in Hollywood films. Deren filmed At Land in Port Jefferson and Amagansett, New York in the summer of 1944. She left Bardacke (they soon divorced), entered Smith College for a masters in English, and then returned to New York. Deren pulls herself up on a hefty bit of driftwood and, peering over its edge, finds herself in a banquet room, at the long table of a dinner party, where she crawls on the tablecloth between the cheerful and unfazed guests. New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2004. She wrote a book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, about her travels, but she never completed her film. Regarded as one of the founders of the postwar American independent cinema, the legendary Maya Deren was a poet, photographer, ethnographer, filmmaker and impresario. My writing consists of critical and personal articles about film, artistic communication, and the societal impacts of cinema, as well as its impact on society. From about 1910, however, signs emerged that cinema was on the road to acquiring some sort of legitimacy. Camera Obscura Collective. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Paperback, sewn, 264 pages, 5.5 x 8.5", 2005, -929701-65-8. marcosdada. 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]. 49 Followers. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Photographed by Hella Heyman. Geller 2011 and Clark, et al. By twenty, she had completed her undergraduate degree and was divorced, struggling to support herself as a poet and journalist. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. As for the specific influence of Derens artistry, it radiated outward in many directions and inspired a wide range of avant-garde filmmakers, such as Shirley Clarke (who began her career with highly aestheticized dance films), Yvonne Rainer (who filmed personal psychodramas), Mekas (who built his first feature around disjointed, B-movie-like fantasies), and Barbara Hammer (who derived from Derens work a radical feminist cinema). Meanwhile, she turned to her mother to pay her utility bill, and she literally asked friends for food. The books one crucial lack is notes: footnotes or endnotes. Like the brightest stars of classic Hollywood, Deren was both too much and too little an actress to ever be anything onscreen but herself. A few decades later, Maya Deren would take a very different approach. In early 1943, Derens father died and left her a small sum of money, with which she bought a movie camera, a 16-mm. She received a master's degree in English literature at Smith College. When Maya Deren decided to make an ethnographic film in Haiti, she was criticized for abandoning avant-garde film where she had made her name, but she was ready to expand to a new level as an artist. The function of film, Deren believed, was to create . Above all, she both championed and embodied the idea that movies were art and, indeed, the art of the time. A new era of strength competitions is testing the limits of the human body. [4] In September, she divorced Hammid and left for a nine-month stay in Haiti. Deren was quickly introduced to high artistic circles through her work as a portrait photographer for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. Bill Nichols (ed. In the Mirror of Maya Deren, 2001. Then Hammid comes home again to discover the gruesome aftermath of violence. 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. Invocation: Maya Deren. "[30] 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. Improve your films not by adding more equipment and personnel but by using what you have to its fullest capacity.