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." including "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film," included in facsimile in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. 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. 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. The Chinese filmmaker Lou Yes daring drama, from 2000, eludes censorship by means of intricate storytelling. A biography filled with primary documents from Derens life, including letters, photographs, and interviews with key figures in her life, such as her mother, first husband, friends, employers, and family. 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] She became known for her European-style handmade clothes, wild curly hair and fierce convictions. 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). "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. Along with her furious repudiation of Hollywood formulas, celebrity worship, and commercialism, Deren also rejected the prevailing notions of documentary filmmaking. View the institutional accounts that are providing access. ISBN 0 520 22732 8. In this essay, she related how in the 17th century, a division occurred between science, magic, religion, and philosophy, a division she saw . 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 was only five years-old when, together with her parents, she arrived in the USA in 1922, having fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine. 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. Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter. . 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). ), 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 She had been interested in that country, and its religious rituals, since her time alongside Dunham; from late 1946 to mid-1947, her intellectual and personal relationship with the anthropologist and filmmaker Gregory Bateson sparked her quasi-ethnographic ambitions to make a film there. She would do almost anything for attention, Dunham said. Meditation on Violence (1948, 13 minutes) Directed by Maya Deren. 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. In 1946, Maya Deren, theorist, poet, and avant-garde filmmaker, wrote a treatise entitled An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film. If you see Sign in through society site in the sign in pane within a journal: If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society. 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. A densely packed short bio of Deren, covering her films, writings, and art activism. [36] Footnotes. Maya Deren. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. Maya Deren. Theres a special, melancholy tinge to the fate of those who were themselves at the forefront of the very revolutions that left them behind. What made Deren a legend had to do with her powerful persona and leadership in the arts community, gathering around her a cadre of creative people, noted by OPray 1988. as a poem might celebrate these. Derens relentless quest for what was extraordinary about her inner life came at the expense of what was already extraordinary in her outer one. Nichols (2001), page 18. As Hurd 2007, Geller 2011, and Kudlcek 2004 point out, the commitment to an artists community and the structures to support them impelled Deren to develop structures such as the Creative Film Foundation to support artists generally. 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]. Derens last decade was a depressing decrescendo. Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. Screenwriter. VHS. Her parents were Jewish, prosperous, and educated. Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev - October 13, 1961, . 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. 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. 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. written by experimental filmmaker (of the 1940s and 1950s), Maya Deren, because I have seen her famous film, Meshes of the Afternoon in Film 101B; in this . In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. It is the first example of a narrative work in avant-garde American film; critics have seen autobiographical elements in the film, as well as thoughts about women and the individual. Maya 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. (Vogel was also one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, which was launched in 1963.). marcosdada. The evening sold out in a matter of minutes, leaving hundreds on the street milling about in frustration, Durant writes. Vol. Focuses not simply on the facts of Derens life but tries to capture her persona on film through its experimental montage of 16mm film, sound clips, and archival material. 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. By achieving worldwide recognition for films that she made on her own, with family and friends, on trivial budgets, she spurred generations of experimental filmmakers to follow in her footsteps; their films then found a home in institutions that shed helped bring to life. Her condition may have also been weakened by her long-term dependence on amphetamines and sleeping pills prescribed by Max Jacobson, a doctor and member of the arts scene, notorious for his liberal prescription of drugs,[9] who later became famous as one of President John F. Kennedy's physicians. Original Title: . Maya. She set herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry's standards and practices. I think sex was her great ace. 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. Melbourne where she teaches in the Cinema Studies Department. The first of these trajectories is Deren's interest in socialism during her youth and university years".[31]. Discusses film as an independent art form and asserts that it should not be seen as merely a way to illustrate a . [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 most film historians agree, it carved a path for the American avant-garde and gave rise to underground cinema, shepherding European modernism into the film experiments of such filmmakers as Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, David Lynch, and Cindy Sherman. She was always dressed up, talking, speaking many languages and being a Russian."[35]. 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. Her three trips to Haiti occupied much of her timenineteen monthsthrough 1950. [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. 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. 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. Deren was quickly introduced to high artistic circles through her work as a portrait photographer for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. 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. It seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. Kino has a reputation for releasing quality products that respectfully focus on the history and art of cinema. Maya Deren 1917 - 1961. In 1939, while employed as an elder writers secretary, Deren eventfully pursued an obsession. In Haiti she was a Russian. Deren, whose coterie had expanded to include many in the downtown artistic beau monde, became a major socialite in bohemian circles, turning the couples apartment into a center of parties and gatherings, and her connections proved galvanic. He was an acclaimed cameraman and still photographer; he and Deren quickly fell in love and married. [14] In 1944, Deren filmed The Witch's Cradle in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery with Duchamp featured in the film. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2002. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film", full of dramatic angles and innovative editing. 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. Bill Nichols, 267-322. 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." The most important part of your equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your . 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. She died in 1961, in poverty and obscurity. Instead of an impresario, she became an embittered rival to her successors. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian. The actor, a fixture of New Yorks experimental-theatre scene, did not become his characters; he stood, somehow, next to them, amused and delighted. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Camera Obscura Collective. 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. Led by filmmaker Frank Stauffacher, Art in Cinema's programs pioneered the promotion of avant-garde cinema in America. I liked her bohemianismshe had no hours. New York: Maple-Vail, 1988. Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions. A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. "[40] Afterwards, Deren wrote several articles on religious possession in dancing before her first trip to Haiti. However, it is the life and art community established by Deren in New York City that garners most attention. [41] Deren filmed, recorded and photographed many hours of Vodou ritual, but she also participated in the ceremonies. Save Save Cinema as an Art Form For Later. Shibboleth / Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutions website and Oxford Academic. [4] After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City. Free shipping for many products! [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. [16] In his review for renowned experimental filmmaker David Lynch's Inland Empire, writer Jim Emerson compares the work to Meshes of the Afternoon, apparently a favorite of Lynch's.[50]. Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. And, in any case, Durant adds, she didnt have the money to finish it. We recognize her talent. Deren, as Durant notes, was already deeply devoted to the art of dance, even though she had no training, and she more or less imposed herself on Dunham as a secretary and assistant. Rare Occasion, Auras, 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 books one crucial lack is notes: footnotes or endnotes. 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. Her expression seems confused when she sees two women playing chess in the sand. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience. 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. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. Perhaps the only book-length study of Deren's films and theories in relation to each other. With no extant theatre for the kinds of movies she was making, she held private screenings at home and, eventually, a midtown art gallery. The couple left California for Greenwich Village, renting a fifth-floor walkup apartment at 61 Morton Street (where Deren lived for the rest of her life). 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 . [6] Her mother moved to Paris, France, to be with her daughter while she attended the League of Nations International School of Geneva in Switzerland from 1930 to 1933. The link was not copied. [33] It is worth noting that Beatty collaborated heavily with Deren in the creation of this film, hence why he is credited alongside Deren in the film's credit sequence. Three years later, mother and child returned to Syracuse; Deren enrolledat sixteenat Syracuse University, where she and another student, Gregory Bardacke, a Communist and a football player, fell in love. A few decades later, Maya Deren would take a very different approach. A biographical sketch built from nine brief meditations on aspects of Derens history, filmography, and reception. 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. 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. 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, inside as well as outside her subconscious, although it has a similar amorphous quality compared to her other films. The camera initially does not show her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman. Early Life Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky on April 29, 1917. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Please subscribe or login. . By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. 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. Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. 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. [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. 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. This combination of dance and film has often been referred to as "choreocinema", a term first coined by American dance critic John Martin. Screen Dance adapts this idea to the strategic collaboration of many art forms that can . 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 sophisticated literature and art magazine named View. Edited with a preface by Bruce McPherson. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and came from a well-regarded Jewish family . New York: Maple-Vail, 1984. Ad Choices. Uniting such diverse interests was Derens commitment to transforming culture, which she ultimately saw as the responsibility of the artist to her society. Indeed, the wealth of this material has produced one of the most complete biographies of an artist: The Legend of Maya Deren. " Cinema as an Art Form." New Directions 9. Avant-Garde: The Case of Maya Deren", "Go Inland, young woman! In 1943, Deren purchased a used 16mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. [16] At the end of touring a new musical Cabin in the Sky, the Dunham dance company stopped in Los Angeles for several months to work in Hollywood. Rather, its Derens miraculous transformation from a private do-it-yourself artist to a public figure, and then a historic onefrom an outsider, working at home, to the spokesperson and the heroine not only of her own cinematic venture but of the entire form of cinema in which she worked, for which she advocated, and that she established as a prime art form of her time. Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film contains all of Deren's essays on her own films as well as . 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. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account. Maya is the name of the mother of the historical Buddha as well as the dharmic concept of the illusory nature of reality. She left Bardacke (they soon divorced), entered Smith College for a masters in English, and then returned to New York. Yet, unlike Welles, who made his movie fame when he was hired by a studio that then released his film, and when critics recognized his originality, Deren created Meshes in the absence of institutional, organizational, or even intellectual frameworkswhich she took upon herself to construct, too. 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. [9] In 1940, Deren moved to Los Angeles to focus on her poetry and freelance photography. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2011. She made a film with Marcel Duchamp (which she never finished), and, in the summer of 1944, she made another film of phantasmagorical imagination, At Land. Where Meshes ends with Deren as a bloody corpse, At Land begins with her body washing up on a beachalive, as it turns out. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. [13] She attended the New School for Social Research. 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. When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [4] In September, she divorced Hammid and left for a nine-month stay in Haiti. 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. 1917d. 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. 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]. (Regarding Derens academic literary studies, Durant writes that her research on the Symbolist and Imagist poets gave her foundational language on which she would rely, at least intuitively, when she approached filmmaking in the early 1940s.) She rejected Hollywood in toto, and allowed the dime-store macabre of B movies to infiltrate her sensibility. 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. cinema as an art, form maya deren. Biography 29.1 (2006): 140. The Very Eye of the Night (1959, 15 minutes) Directed by Maya Deren.