April 29]1917 in Kyiv, now Ukraine, into a Jewish family,[6] to psychologist Solomon Derenkowsky and Gitel-Malka (Marie} Fiedler,[1] who supposedly named her after Italian actress Eleonora Duse. this page. 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). Melbourne where she teaches in the Cinema Studies Department. The camera initially does not show her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman. April 29] 1917 - October 13, 1961) was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important promoter of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. She went after anybody including someone who belonged to someone else. [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. 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 . After the October Revolution, her father was conscripted into battle with Bolshevik forces, and Eleanora and her mother endured illness and poverty at home. Like the brightest stars of classic Hollywood, Deren was both too much and too little an actress to ever be anything onscreen but herself. Discusses film as an independent art form and asserts that it should not be seen as merely a way to illustrate a . 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. 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. Hurd, Mary G. Women Directors and Their Films. She went on three additional trips through 1954 to document and record the rituals of Haitian Vodou. This Kino blu ray Maya Deren Collection will be one of the premier releases of 2020. 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. 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. (For the purposes of the movies credits, Deren took the name Maya, and kept it, onscreen and off.) [27], By her fourth film, Deren discussed in An Anagram that she felt special attention should be given to unique possibilities of time and that the form should be ritualistic as a whole. Above all, she both championed and embodied the idea that movies were art and, indeed, the art of the time. The main roles were played by Deren and the dancers Rita Christiani and Frank Westbrook.[34]. 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. Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: ; May 12[O.S. 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. Meshes of the Avant-Garde Maya Deren was a director and actress, best known for her work as an experimental filmmaker. In Haiti she was a Russian. 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. Geller 2011 and Clark, et al. 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. 1984 documents the early life of Deren, who was born Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev, Ukraine. (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. In the first scene of her film-dance Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945/6), Maya Deren appears, leaning against a doorframe. "[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. . In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. Following her studies in journalism and political science at Syracuse University and NYU in 1936, she went on to pursue a masters degree in English literature from Smith College. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Deren attacked Hollywood for its artistic, political and economic monopoly over American cinema. 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. Despite her feminist subtext, she was mostly unrecognized by feminist writers at the time, even influential writers Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey ignored Deren at the time,[28] though Mulvey later would give Deren this recognition, since their works were often in conversation with each other.[29]. Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic. 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. The concept of working in a multidisciplinary form across media and processes has become more prevalent in modern day culture. However, it is the life and art community established by Deren in New York City that garners most attention. 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. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. [23], Her entrepreneurial spirit became evident as she began to screen and distribute her films in the United States, Canada, and Cuba, lecturing and writing on avant-garde film theory, and additionally on Vodou. 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 . Documentary film narrated by actress Helen Mirren. Along with her furious repudiation of Hollywood formulas, celebrity worship, and commercialism, Deren also rejected the prevailing notions of documentary filmmaking. 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 . Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and Latina/o Americans in Film and Television. 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." The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren (1917-1961). "[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. The Very Eye of the Night (1959, 15 minutes) Directed by Maya Deren. She made several other films before her untimely death at age forty-four. including "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film," included in facsimile in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutions website, please contact your librarian or administrator. Another fervent advocate and practical-minded activist for experimental cinema, the critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, came to the fore of Village life, including at the Village Voice; she judged his work harshly, but they nonetheless collaborated in the promotion of experimental films. Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer.BiographyEarly lifeDeren was born in Kiev, Ukraine to Solomon Derenkowsky and Marie Fiedler. New York: Women Make Movies, 1987. 1917d. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Shed started using Benzedrine to fuel her long days and nights of activity while travelling with Dunham, and kept with it afterward. June 16, 2022; Posted by usa volleyball national qualifiers 2022; 16 . Kaplan, Jo Ann, dir. [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. (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. Free shipping for many products! NOTIC) MATERIAL Wry Be CoDR ESSENTIAL COLLECTED. 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. Interestingly, the idea of horizontality and verticality is also studied by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist famous for his distinction between the signified and the signifier, who developed a model which specifies the distinction between the syntagmatic (horizontal) and the . 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. 1 Part 2 consists of hundreds of documents, interviews, oral histories, letters, and autobiographical memoirs.[9]. 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. [14] Her master's thesis was titled The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry (1939). Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. She became friends with a young filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, whose films she didnt like but whose creative spirit she admired. films have already won considerable acclaim. She has often been credited as one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century and her influence is seen in film today. 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. Perhaps the only book-length study of Deren's films and theories in relation to each other. New York: Maple-Vail, 1988. They lived together in Laurel Canyon, where he helped her with her still photography which focused on local fruit pickers in Los Angeles. The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. 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. She wrote a book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, about her travels, but she never completed her film. Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer. In 1941 and 1942, Deren travelled with Dunham and her dance troupe throughout the United States. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian. Winner: 2005 Book of the Year Bronze Award for Performing Arts. Berkeley: University of . 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. Screen Dance adapts this idea to the strategic collaboration of many art forms that can . In 1943, Maya Deren made one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema, Meshes of the Afternoon, in collaboration with cinematographer Alexander Hammid. 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. She was always dressed up, talking, speaking many languages and being a Russian."[35]. Paradoxically, the most exciting and absorbing drama that emerges from Durants book isnt, as one might expect from the life story of a crucially significant filmmaker, the behind-the-scenes efforts that went into the making of Derens movies. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account. 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. 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. Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946, 15 minutes, Silent) Directed by Maya Deren. She received a master's degree in English literature at Smith College. But Derens prime achievement reaches even beyond her artistry, her personality, the filmmakers she inspired, and the institutions she fostered. Taking on more of an environmental psychologist's perspective, Deren "externalizes the hidden dynamic of the external worldas if I had moved from a concern with the life of the fish, to a concern with the sea which accounts for the character of the fish and its life. [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. "[32], Running at just under 3 minutes long, A Study in Choreography for Camera is a fragment but also a carefully constructed exploration of a man who dances in a forest, and then seems to teleport to the inside of a house because of how continuous his movements are from one place to the next. 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. . By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Deren came to Los Angeles with Dunham, where she met and married filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who introduced her to visual media by taking her to foreign films and by teaching her still photography and filmmaking. This exhibition looks at Deren's legacy through her own work and that of a . 125 ratings9 reviews. 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. Maya. " Cinema as an Art Form." New Directions 9. Geller, Theresa L. The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde. DVD. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Footnotes. 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. In the first moments of the film, the woman (Deren) enters a . She then created a scholarship for experimental filmmakers, the Creative Film Foundation.[25]. Interview with the editors of The Legend (VV Clark, Millicent Hodson, Catrina Neiman, and Francine Bailey) that addresses their research methods and process of working together on the biography. Photographs courtesy Saint Lucy Books / Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center / Boston University. 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. I could move directly from my imagination into film, she wroteand so she did, with hardly a trace of her lived experience. Deren is also the author of An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. Deren was convinced that mass-market films did not fully utilize all the resources of the camera; "she felt that cinema as an art form had scarcely been touched". ), Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. In 1943, she moved to a bungalow on Kings Road in Hollywood[4] and adopted the name Maya, a pet name her husband Hammid coined. 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]. Deren has generated a great deal of biographical research due in part to the wealth of material available, particularly the holdings at Boston University donated by Derens mother, noted in Clark, et al. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2011. Her >influence, especially in independent film, has not only endured but also >increased in the decades following her death. 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.". VHS. Deren and Beatty met through Katherine Dunham, while Deren was her assistant and Beatty was a dancer in her company. "Maya Deren's four 16 mm. Convinced that there was poetry in the camera, she defied all commercial production conventions and started to make films with only ordinary amateur equipment. Filled with primary documents, incorporating interviews with Alexander Hammid and her large circle of friends and colleagues in the art world, as well as reprints of Maya Derens photography, poetry, essay, and film notes. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Clark, et al. In 1944 Maya made a film at the Peggy Guggenheim Art of this Century Gallery . 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. A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions. View your signed in personal account and access account management features. Abstract. Introduces brief reviews of Derens films that follow in the June and July 1988 issues of Monthly Film Bulletin. By 1938 Deren left New York to work with the legendary choreographer and ethnographer, Kathryn Dunham, managing her troupe, as detailed in Clark, et al. Living on the margins of Hollywood, they went to movies, thought about movies, met filmmakers, and got inspired. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Her efforts to promote an independent cinema have inspired filmmakers for over fifty years. Indeed, she continues to inspire a wide range of artists, from filmmakers to visual artists and musicians. The evening sold out in a matter of minutes, leaving hundreds on the street milling about in frustration, Durant writes. Durants book itself, twenty years in the making, bears the illumination of fanatical research and passionate empathy forpractically an inhabiting ofDerens inner world. Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film contains all of Deren's essays on her own films as well as . Paperback, sewn, 264 pages, 5.5 x 8.5", 2005, -929701-65-8. 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." She died in 1961, in poverty and obscurity. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji It in 1952. So far, so goodthe very essence of movies is to be the art for artists who dont have an art. In 1946, Maya Deren, theorist, poet, and avant-garde filmmaker, wrote a treatise entitled An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film. A few decades later, Maya Deren would take a very different approach. 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. Because of her sometimes-difficult nature, Durant writes, Derens social life and her artistic activities, which were so closely connected, narrowed. A lot of sources give other dates of birth: April 29, 1917. She finished school at New York University with a bachelor's degree in literature[9] in June 1936, returning to Syracuse in the fall. Publisher: University of California Press. In the Mirror of Maya Deren **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Martina Kudlacek. I liked her bohemianismshe had no hours. In 1986, the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor independent filmmakers. (This article was completed with the assistance of Laura Stamm.). [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). Nichols, Bill, ed., Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001: "Introduction" by Bill Nichols, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film" by Maya Deren and "Aesthetic Agencies in Flux" by Mark Franko. A woman, played by Maya Deren, walks to her friend's house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and has a dream. . 1984 note that while still in her teens, Elenora was a leader in the Trotskyist Young Peoples Socialist League, where she met and married YPSL activist and union organizer Gregory Bardacke. 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. Deren was a muse and inspiration to such up-and-coming avant-garde filmmakers as Curtis Harrington, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger, who emulated her independent, entrepreneurial spirit. [27] She also regularly explored themes of gender identity, incorporating elements of introspection and mythology. 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. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film", full of dramatic angles and innovative editing. Maya Deren and the American Avante Garde. 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). Maya Deren (b. 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 Throughout the 1940s, Deren worked in independent, experimental cinema, lecturing extensively and developing a network of nontheatrical exhibit spaces across the country. She seems to be invisible to the people as she crawls across the table, uninhibited; her body continues seamlessly again onto a new frame, crawling through foliage; following the flowing pattern of water on rocks; following a man across a farm, to a sick man in bed, through a series of doors, and finally popping up outside on a cliff.

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