Follow. Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky in 1917 in Kyiv, Ukraine. 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. In college it always seemed like the guys who were poets got more girls than the prose writers. cinema as an art, form maya derenpartition star wars marche impriale trompette. A biographical sketch built from nine brief meditations on aspects of Derens history, filmography, and reception. filmography bibliography articles in Senses web resources Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema Maya Deren is recognizable as the woman with the enigmatic expression at "Cinema as an Art Form." New Directions, No. And, in any case, Durant adds, she didnt have the money to finish it. The first craving aroused by her silent films is to hear the literal sound of her voice. Please subscribe or login. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Deren is also the author of An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. The main roles were played by Deren and the dancers Rita Christiani and Frank Westbrook.[34]. The film's protagonist, played by dancer Rita Christiani, enters the frame and with her arm raised moves towards the room occupied by 'Maya' as if compelled to do so. A lot of sources give other dates of birth: April 29, 1917. $18.00. She then created a scholarship for experimental filmmakers, the Creative Film Foundation.[25]. This exhibition looks at Deren's legacy through her own work and that of a . 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. Living on the margins of Hollywood, they went to movies, thought about movies, met filmmakers, and got inspired. 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). This combination of dance and film has often been referred to as "choreocinema", a term first coined by American dance critic John Martin. Maya Deren and David Lynch are brilliant directors not merely because of their vivid images or ability to tell a story without precisely telling a story. including "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film," included in facsimile in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. One action can be performed across different physical spaces, as in A Study in Choreography For Camera (1945), and in this way sews together layers of reality, thereby suggesting continuity between different levels of consciousness. Then, just as quickly, she fell out of that world, never to return in her too-brief lifetime. Vol. Indeed, the wealth of this material has produced one of the most complete biographies of an artist: The Legend of Maya Deren. 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. Along with her furious repudiation of Hollywood formulas, celebrity worship, and commercialism, Deren also rejected the prevailing notions of documentary filmmaking. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. Though she repudiated any connection of her work to Surrealism, Meshes is at least a work of unrealismof fantasy that explicitly links its action to dreams and imagination. [9] He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse. The first of these trajectories is Deren's interest in socialism during her youth and university years".[31]. Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and Latina/o Americans in Film and Television. Her expression seems confused when she sees two women playing chess in the sand. 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. Maya Deren. Berkeley: University of . Meshes, Trances, and Meditations. Monthly Film Bulletin 55.653 (June 1988): 183185. Maya Deren and the American Avante Garde. 1984 documents the early life of Deren, who was born Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev, Ukraine. 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. The sin. The choreography is perfectly synched as he seamlessly appears in an outdoor courtyard and then returns to an open, natural space. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account. In 1945, Deren filmed another silent short, Ritual in Transfigured Time, the last of her films, as Durant notes, in which she appears. [9] 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. 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. However, it is the life and art community established by Deren in New York City that garners most attention. [15], After graduation from Smith, Deren returned to New York's Greenwich Village, where she joined the European migr art scene. Hurd, Mary G. Women Directors and Their Films. Deren and her partner, the composer Teiji Ito, who became her third husband in 1960, were threatened with eviction and faced real hunger. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. By twenty, she had completed her undergraduate degree and was divorced, struggling to support herself as a poet and journalist. 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. It covers aspects of her personal life, her most famous films, and important references to her founding of the Creative Film Foundation and related involvement with Amos Vogels Cinema 16. Her dispute by mail with her landlord was epic and obsessive. In the Mirror of Maya Deren, 2001. 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]. [38][39] She had studied ethnographic footage by Gregory Bateson in Bali in 1947, and was interested in including it in her next film. It seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. She went on three additional trips through 1954 to document and record the rituals of Haitian Vodou. Mind, Fiction, Matter. 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. Click the account icon in the top right to: Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. She worked at it. 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. The concept of working in a multidisciplinary form across media and processes has become more prevalent in modern day culture. A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions. Avant-Garde: The Case of Maya Deren", "Go Inland, young woman! 4 At other times, she selected other titles for the screenings as a way of marketing the films and guiding their reception Convinced that there was poetry in the camera, she defied all commercial production conventions and started to make films with only ordinary amateur equipment. [43][44][45] 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. [11], Deren began college at Syracuse University, where she studied journalism[12] and political science, and also became a highly active socialist leader during the Trotskyist movement. We recognize her talent. In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. She felt that she was physically irresistible. Maya Deren, Cinema as an Art Form, 1946 . Deren, Maya. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Maya Deren 1917 - 1961. Discusses film as an independent art form and asserts that it should not be seen as merely a way to illustrate a . [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. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. (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. Enter your library card number to sign in. Bill Nichols (ed. She crosses the threshold, takes up a chair, and begins to unwind a skein of wool. (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. Another interpretation is that each film is an example of a "personal film". I could move directly from my imagination into film, she wroteand so she did, with hardly a trace of her lived experience. "[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. Original Title: . Actor. (Vogel was also one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, which was launched in 1963.). In 1986, the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor independent filmmakers. films have already won considerable acclaim. She set herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry's standards and practices. 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. In revolutionary moments, time seems to accelerate, and changes usually marked out in decades take place in a matter of months. 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. In the Mirror of Maya Deren **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Martina Kudlacek. You do not currently have access to this chapter. In this essay, she related how in the 17th century, a division occurred between science, magic, religion, and philosophy, a division she saw . In Greek myth, Maia is the mother of Hermes and a goddess of mountains and fields. Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in. An LP of some of Deren's wire recordings was published by the newly formed Elektra Records in 1953 entitled Voices of Haiti. 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. She was also a prolific writer and dedicated activist for film art. Melbourne where she teaches in the Cinema Studies Department. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Deren filmed 18,000 feet of Vodou rituals and people she met in Haiti on her Bolex camera. 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. In 1944 Maya made a film at the Peggy Guggenheim Art of this Century Gallery . As with her other films on self-representation, Deren navigates conflicting tendencies of the self and the "other", through doubling, multiplication and merging of the woman in the film. Her imagination was fertile, but her wide-ranging life was a veritable engine of stories that seemed ready-made to be put on film, with a first-person imaginative inventiveness of a sort that would hardly be found in Hollywood. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. Geller, Theresa L. The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde. The Very Eye of the Night (1959, 15 minutes) Directed by Maya Deren. 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. Led by filmmaker Frank Stauffacher, Art in Cinema's programs pioneered the promotion of avant-garde cinema in America. Both P. Adams Sitney's "Meshes" and Lucy Fischer's "The Eye for Magic" seek to compare and contrast Maya Deren to the European cinema of Bunuel and Dali; and Melies, respectively. If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutions website, please contact your librarian or administrator. DVD. 35 Copy quote. Cinema As An Art Form. 'An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film.' In Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. 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 . Instead of an impresario, she became an embittered rival to her successors. Maya Deren, Bruce McPherson (Editor) 4.42. "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti", McPherson & Company. 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. Ellen Careys kaleidoscopic self-portraits put her out of synch with many of her peers. cinema as an art, form maya deren. She made several other films before her untimely death at age forty-four. I liked her curiosity, her vivaciousness. Abstract. The lightning bolt in this primordial soup of Derens avant-garde celebrity came on February 18, 1946. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and came from a well-regarded Jewish family . (For the purposes of the movies credits, Deren took the name Maya, and kept it, onscreen and off.) In order to support independent film artists, she established the Creative Film Foundation (CFF), which inspired Amos Vogels Cinema 16 as well as the British feminist film collective Circles, among others. ), Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. She supported herself from 1937 to 1939 by freelance writing for radio shows and foreign-language newspapers. [24], 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. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer. She would work like a bee to get noticed, shaking around, carrying on. Deren, who conceived Meshes of the Afternoon (Hammid, who did the camera work, credited her as the films artistic creator), is its main actor. In the first moments of the film, the woman (Deren) enters a . (Her father, Solomon, was a doctor; her mother, Marie, had studied piano and economics.) Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic. . 331pp. From about 1910, however, signs emerged that cinema was on the road to acquiring some sort of legitimacy. Geller, Theresa L. Maya Deren. In Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia. 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). [9] In 1940, Deren moved to Los Angeles to focus on her poetry and freelance photography. as a poem might celebrate these. Because of her sometimes-difficult nature, Durant writes, Derens social life and her artistic activities, which were so closely connected, narrowed. 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. " The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde." Biography 29 (1): 140 -58. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) ranks among the most widely viewed of all avant-garde films. And use your freedom to experiment with visual ideas; your mistakes will not get you fired.[37]. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2011. [36] Deren died on October 13, 1961, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Deren was born May 12[O.S. Documentary, she complained, lacked art and imagination; she envisioned nonfiction filmmaking, of the sort that she was undertaking in Haiti, to be as creative as the fantasies that she filmed at home. Dunham's fieldwork influenced Deren's studies of Haitian culture and Vodou mythology. [13] She attended the New School for Social Research. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian. 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. In 1941, Deren wrote to Katherine Dunhaman African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist of Caribbean culture and dancesuggesting a children's book on dance; she later became Dunham's assistant and publicist. 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. Deren is often referred to as the archetypal example of independence, a filmmaker who managed to avoid the institutional regulation of American cinema. Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: ; May 12[O.S. The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. She was exactly the kind of personality and performer, of limited technique but hypnotically photogenic, for whom the cinema was made. [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). 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 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 . 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. ), 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 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. Screen Dance adapts this idea to the strategic collaboration of many art forms that can . This well-reviewed documentary film contains several interviews with central figures in Derens life such as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Alexander Hammid, and others. Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. Kino has a reputation for releasing quality products that respectfully focus on the history and art of cinema. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. We spent a great deal of time talking about her. In a frenzy of creation and organization, Deren seemingly ordered the world around her, at least for a crucial moment, to fit into a pattern of her own design. Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: ; May 12 [O.S. She went after anybody including someone who belonged to someone else. The link was not copied. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Her >influence, especially in independent film, has not only endured but also >increased in the decades following her death. 1, Part 2: Chambers (19421947). Excerpts from an Interview with The Legend of Maya Deren Project: The Camera Obscura Collective. Camera Obscura 12 (1979): 177191. Nichols (2001), page 18. 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. [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. Scott MacDonald's "Art in Cinema" presents complete programs presented by . 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. Maya Deren (b. They have the ability to manifest our dream lives onscreen. She became friends with a young filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, whose films she didnt like but whose creative spirit she admired. US$19.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) [Bolded page numbers refer to the original page numbers of the reproduced version of Deren's essay, "An anagram of ideas on art, form . Her influence can also be seen in films by Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Su Friedrich. Deren, Maya (1908-1961)Russian-born American experimental filmmaker often cited as the creator of the first film of the American avant-garde and the "choreo-cinema," a collaborative art between the dancer and the camera. 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. In Haiti she was a Russian. 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.