Maya Deren (b. 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. Melbourne where she teaches in the Cinema Studies Department. She has often been credited as one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century and her influence is seen in film today. [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. 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. Meshes of the Avant-Garde Maya Deren was a director and actress, best known for her work as an experimental filmmaker. 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 Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Her father shortened the family name to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York. 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 . Vol. Edited by Bill Nichols. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Maya Deren, original name Eleanora Derenkowsky, (born April 29, 1917, Kiev, Ukrainedied Oct. 13, 1961, New York, N.Y., U.S.), influential director and performer who is often called the "mother" of American avant-garde filmmaking. Derens last decade was a depressing decrescendo. Clark, VV A., Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, eds. In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. Deren was born May 12[O.S. 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. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian. Post author: Post published: June 9, 2022 Post category: how to change dimension style in sketchup layout Post comments: coef %in% resultsnamesdds is not true coef %in% resultsnamesdds is not true She felt that she was physically irresistible. It seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. She became the name of avant-garde cinema by becoming its face: a still of her, at a window in Meshes, is, to this day, the prime iconic image of American experimental filmmaking, the single-frame synecdoche for the entire category. | Scanners | Roger Ebert", "Divine Horsemen - The Voodoo Gods Of Haiti", Martina Kudlek (director of "In the Mirror of Maya Deren") by Robert Gardner BOMB 81/Fall 2002, Article on Maya Deren: seven films that guarantee her legend, Maya Deren biography from Jewish Women's Archive, Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maya_Deren&oldid=1141681134, American people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent, White Russian emigrants to the United States, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox person with multiple spouses, Articles containing Ukrainian-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Toronto Film Society workshop; unreleased, unfinished, Original footage shot by Deren (19471954); reconstruction by, Recorded by Maya Deren; design [cover]: Teiji It; liner notes: Cherel Ito, Deren appears as a character in the long narrative poem, In 1987, Jo Ann Kaplan directed a biographical documentary about Deren, titled, In 2002, Martina Kudlacek directed a feature-length documentary about Deren, titled, Grand Prix Internationale for Amateur Film, Her most widely read essay on film theory is probably, This page was last edited on 26 February 2023, at 07:20. 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. Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44, from a brain hemorrhage brought on by extreme malnutrition. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Part 2 of the biography follows her transition from Eleanora to Maya, and the creation of her first four films. this page. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2002. 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. 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. "[30] Maya Deren washes up on the shore of the beach, and climbs up a piece of driftwood that leads to a room lit by chandeliers, and one long table filled with men and women smoking. Hurd, Mary G. Women Directors and Their Films. 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, film enthusiasts, and scholars. 4 At other times, she selected other titles for the screenings as a way of marketing the films and guiding their reception In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. 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 1939, while employed as an elder writers secretary, Deren eventfully pursued an obsession. She certainly didnt invent experimental cinema, nor introduce it in the U.S., but, with this short silent film, Deren became the genres Orson Welles, realizing her own original ideas by a fruitful collaboration with an experienced cinematographer (as Welles did with Gregg Toland) and putting those ideas over by way of onscreen star power. Meanwhile, she turned to her mother to pay her utility bill, and she literally asked friends for food. 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. Shibboleth / Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutions website and Oxford Academic. Along with her furious repudiation of Hollywood formulas, celebrity worship, and commercialism, Deren also rejected the prevailing notions of documentary filmmaking. Deren was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema, highlighting personal, experimental, underground film. In her Glossary of Creole Words, Deren includes 'Voudoun' while the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary[49] draws attention to the similar French word, Vaudoux. Meshes of the Afternoon is a 1943 American short experimental film directed by and starring wife-and-husband team Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied.The film's narrative is circular and repeats several motifs, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper-like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off . [14] Her master's thesis was titled The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry (1939). Instead of an impresario, she became an embittered rival to her successors. 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 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. In Haiti she was a Russian. [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). $18.00. She finished school at New York University with a bachelor's degree in literature[9] in June 1936, returning to Syracuse in the fall. 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. Owing to legal issues after its producers death, the film didnt show in New York until 1959, at which time it made hardly a ripple. The main roles were played by Deren and the dancers Rita Christiani and Frank Westbrook.[34]. The evening sold out in a matter of minutes, leaving hundreds on the street milling about in frustration, Durant writes. Certain symbols reoccur on the screen, including a cloaked, mirror-faced figure, and a key, which becomes twinned with a knife. 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. She was openly critical of other avant-garde filmmakers, even while remaining collegial, and encouraging, in practice; in the mid-fifties, she established an organization, the Creative Film Foundation, to channel small amounts of grant money to experimental filmmakers. Expand or collapse the "in this article" section, Anthropological and Ethnographic Research, Expand or collapse the "related articles" section, Expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section, Cinema and Media Industries, Creative Labor in, Film Theory and Criticism, Science Fiction. The Legend of Maya Deren, Vol. She was also a prolific writer and dedicated activist for film art. 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. Free shipping for many products! 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). [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. [4] She became known for her European-style handmade clothes, wild curly hair and fierce convictions. (While filming on the beach at Amagansett, Deren chanced to meet Anas Nin, and they quickly became friends.). In At Land, Deren more conspicuously acts, with a newly athletic, choreographic element. The choreography is perfectly synched as he seamlessly appears in an outdoor courtyard and then returns to an open, natural space. But the downtown ground had been prepared by Deren. Then, just as quickly, she fell out of that world, never to return in her too-brief lifetime. Argues for a serious engagement with Deren, rather than more mythmaking. Uniting such diverse interests was Derens commitment to transforming culture, which she ultimately saw as the responsibility of the artist to her society. Camera Obscura Collective. 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. 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 . 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 . Living on the margins of Hollywood, they went to movies, thought about movies, met filmmakers, and got inspired. Original Title: . A new era of strength competitions is testing the limits of the human body. New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2004. 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. View the institutional accounts that are providing access. (Soon after he and Deren met, he changed his name to Alexander Hammid.) 2023 Cond Nast. Between 1952 and 1955, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The Very Eye of Night. The figure belongs to dancer and choreographer Talley Beatty, whose last movement is a leap across the screen back to the natural world. This kind of Freudian interpretation, which she disagreed with, led Deren to add sound, composed by Teiji It, to the film. Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky in 1917 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Emily E Laird. The first craving aroused by her silent films is to hear the literal sound of her voice. 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. 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. Indeed, she continues to inspire a wide range of artists, from filmmakers to visual artists and musicians. See below. A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions. Photographed by Hella Heyman. Geller 2011 and Clark, et al. [9] The film is famous for how it resonated with Deren's own life and anxieties. Dunham's fieldwork influenced Deren's studies of Haitian culture and Vodou mythology. Maya is the name of the mother of the historical Buddha as well as the dharmic concept of the illusory nature of reality. They speak about the difficult project of demythologizing Derens persona while also preserving her legend. As her work has evolved, the times have caught up. Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. Introduction. Her three trips to Haiti occupied much of her timenineteen monthsthrough 1950. New York: Women Make Movies, 1987. I liked her bohemianismshe had no hours. Abstract. Sitney, P. Adams, ed, The Film Culture Reader, Prager Publishers Inc., New York, 1970 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. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. "Cinema As an Art Form," in Introduction to the Art of the . Turim, M. "The Ethics of Form: Structure and Gender in Maya Deren's Challenge to the Cinema." Nichols 77-102. I think sex was her great ace. Source for information on Deren, Maya (1908-1961 . Abstract. 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. All rights reserved. Although her film work certainly has had a huge effect on everything from music videos to feature-length cinema, and spanning genres from the dance film to ethnographic documentary, Derens reach extended far beyond her films alone. And, in any case, Durant adds, she didnt have the money to finish it. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. 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. 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. Geller, Theresa L. The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde. In this essay, she related how in the 17th century, a division occurred between science, magic, religion, and philosophy, a division she saw . 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. 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). They lived together in Laurel Canyon, where he helped her with her still photography which focused on local fruit pickers in Los Angeles. Perhaps the only book-length study of Deren's films and theories in relation to each other. Selfies; Instagram; Facebook; Twitter; Pinterest; Flickr; About Us. [4] In September, she divorced Hammid and left for a nine-month stay in Haiti. 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 . [41] Deren filmed, recorded and photographed many hours of Vodou ritual, but she also participated in the ceremonies. [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. "Maya Deren's four 16 mm. Reprinted in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, edited by Bruce R. McPherson, 19-33. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. Despite, or thanks to, her youth, she nearly single-handedly put experimental cinema on the American cultural map, and also became its iconic visual presence. (For the purposes of the movies credits, Deren took the name Maya, and kept it, onscreen and off.) This well-reviewed documentary film contains several interviews with central figures in Derens life such as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Alexander Hammid, and others. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. . Deren was an avant-garde version of Lana Turner (a young non-actress who was discovered at the counter of a soda fountain), but Deren was ready not to be discovered but to discover herself, by way of a movie that she would make. 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. Photographs courtesy Saint Lucy Books / Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center / Boston University. Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. 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. A few decades later, Maya Deren would take a very different approach. 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. New York: Maple-Vail, 1988. DVD. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Deren attacked Hollywood for its artistic, political and economic monopoly over American cinema. In 1943, Deren purchased a used 16mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. The Guggenheim Fellowship grant in 1947 enabled Deren to finance her travel and complete her film Meditation on Violence. The lightning bolt in this primordial soup of Derens avant-garde celebrity came on February 18, 1946. 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. 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. (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.). Edited by Phillip DiMare, 623626. Meshes, Trances, and Meditations. Monthly Film Bulletin 55.653 (June 1988): 183185. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. Early Life Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky on April 29, 1917. "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. 1 Part 2 consists of hundreds of documents, interviews, oral histories, letters, and autobiographical memoirs.[9]. It is said that she was named after 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. Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. Maya. Maya Deren, who died at the age of 44 in 1961, was a visionary whose works are still way ahead of their time.