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Maya Deren by Wendy Haslem Wendy Haslem is an Associate at the University of Melbourne where she teaches in the Cinema Studies Department. Her research covers studio and independent film production in America during the 1940s. |
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| Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema
When she was born in Kiev in 1917 her mother named her Eleanora after the Italian actress Eleanora Duse. Deren's mother Marie confessed that she crossed her legs and refused to give birth whilst her husband Solomon continued to refer to their baby as 'him'. Marie recollects, “As soon as Dr Deren left, I started to deliver the baby”. (1) In 1922 the Derenkowsky family fled the threat of anti-semitism in the Ukraine, arriving in New York where they contracted and Anglicized their name to Deren. The family was discontent and frequently separated. As an adolescent Maya was sent to Geneva to attend The League of Nations International School whilst Marie Deren studied languages in Paris and Solomon Deren practiced psychology in New York. As a young woman Eleanora Deren studied journalism and political science and became active in student politics at Syracuse University. Deren transferred to New York University where she was awarded her undergraduate degree in 1936. At Smith College she completed a Masters Degree in English Literature and symbolist poetry in 1939. After college Deren began working as an assistant to the famous dancer and choreographer, Katherine Dunham. Deren found inspiration and nomadic adventure with the innovative Katherine Dunham Dance Company, touring and performing across the US. It was in Los Angeles in 1941 that Deren met Alexander Hammid, a Czechoslovakian filmmaker working in Hollywood. In collaboration with Hammid, Deren produced her first and most remarkable experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).
Meshes of the Afternoon was produced in an environment of wartime volatility and this is reflected symbolically throughout its mise-en-scène. The title card suggesting that the film was 'made in Hollywood' is ironic, Deren sets her film within an LA setting, but it is the nightmare element of the dream factory that interests her most. The film establishes an atmosphere saturated in paranoia and distrust with lovers turning into killers and with the presence of a mysterious but fascinating hooded figure. As European émigrés, Deren and Hammid invest their film with an acute sense of restlessness and alienation. Meshes of the Afternoon reflects this uncanny estrangement in the doubling, tripling and quadrupling of its central character (played by Deren) and in its cyclic narrative, a structure that seems condemned to repetition. The hooded figure with the reflective face adds yet another dimension, reflecting back the identity of those who look into her eyes. Thomas Schatz points to Meshes as the best known experimental film of the decade. He categorizes it as the first example of “the poetic psychodrama”, films bearing the impression of art cinema which were seen as “scandalous and radically artistic.” (2) He writes that the poetic psychodrama “emphasized a dreamlike quality, tackled questions of sexual identity, featured taboo or shocking images, and used editing to liberate spatio-temporal logic from the conventions of Hollywood realism.” (3) Meshes of the Afternoon is shot as a silent film, there is no dialogue, communication between characters or diegetic sound. A record player plays silently. Whilst the disc revolves and the needle is engaged in the groove, there is no indication of the sound that it makes. Teiji Ito's soundtrack makes Meshes appear like a music video before its time, the drumbeat is synchronized to movement and to the cut. When Deren takes one of her many short journeys along the path or up stairs, the sound of her steps is overlaid by Ito's drumbeat metonymically standing in for and amplifying her movement. Inspired by Eisenstein's notion of rhythmic montage, the editing and movement are accentuated by the rhythm of the soundtrack.
Rhythm also impacts significantly on spectatorship. The rhythm of the sound, movement and editing conspire to produce the effect of a trance film. Meshes of the Afternoon's dream-like mise-en-scène, illogical narrative trajectory, fluid movement and ambient soundtrack invite a type of contemplative, perhaps even transcendental, involvement for the spectator. Whilst Meshes engages the viewer, it also presents vision in crisis. The film is constructed from a myriad of eyeline matches and mismatches. The use of extreme angles to imply one character looking down on the dreamer, a type of spider's point of view, foreshadows the dreamer's death. Seen in reverse it could translate as the dreamer's 'out of body' experience. Occasionally Deren's point of view proves to be ineffectual, the reverse shot from the sleeping Deren is impossible. The fourth replica of Deren's character wears bulbous goggles that can do nothing to enhance her vision.
P. Adams Sitney refutes the notion that Deren was the director of Meshes of the Afternoon. He argues that Hammid “photographed the whole film. Maya Deren simply pushed the button on the camera for the two scenes in which he appeared.” (5) Stan Brakhage also classifies Meshes as Hammid's film. Deren's biographers perceive the film as a collaboration, noting that Hammid provided the mechanical expertise to realize images born from Deren's imagination. (6) What is undeniable is that Meshes establishes key themes and cinematic innovations that Deren continued to explore throughout her career as an experimental filmmaker.
With A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945) Deren's 16mm Bolex becomes a performer equal in significance to the star of this film, Talley Beattey. In the opening sequence Deren's camera rotates more than 360 degrees, scanning past the figure in movement. In this film Deren articulates the potential for transcendence through dance and ritual. The movement of the dancer does not always motivate the camera, so Deren's visual expression remains free floating. The spaces linked in this film range from the interior of a museum to the forest and courtyard. Deren writes, “The movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was. With a turn of the foot, he makes neighbors of distant places.” As Beattey spins, he appears to develop more than one face, forming an illusion of a totem pole. Ritual In Transfigured Time (1946) silently follows Rita Christiani's perspective as she enters an apartment to find Maya Deren immersed in the ritual of unwinding wool from a loom. Deren includes another expression of the external invading the internal with a strange wind that surrounds and entrances her as she becomes transported by the ritual. Ritual in Transfigured Time links the looming ritual with the ritual of the social greeting. Christiani enters a party, meets and greets, moving throughout the crowd like a dancer. Her movements become increasingly expressive and fluid, the ritual becomes a performance. Key themes in this film are the dread of rejection and the contrasting freedom of expression in the abandonment to the ritual. In Meditation on Violence (1948) Deren's camera is motivated by the movement of the performer, Chao Li Chi. This film is marked by a lack of dynamism and mobility that we have come to expect from Deren's camera. It also obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. The shadows on the white wall behind Chi amplify the movement of the Wu Tang ritual. In Meditation on Violence Deren experiments with film time, reversing the film part way through producing a loop. Exhibited forwards and then backwards, the difference in the Wu Tang movements is almost imperceptible.
Deren is often referred to as the archetypal example of independence, a filmmaker who managed to avoid the institutional regulation of American cinema. Deren screened her films on her living room walls to interested audiences, occasionally exhibiting to critics like Manny Farber and James Agee. Her aim was to inspire a new generation of avant-garde filmmakers. Nichols writes, As an independent distributor Deren exhibited and presented lectures on her films across the United States, Cuba and Canada. In 1946 she booked the Village's Provincetown Playhouse for a public exhibition. Deren titled the exhibition: 'Three Abandoned Films – a showing of Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land & A Study in Choreography for the Camera'. Deren took the word 'abandoned' to refer to Guillaume Apollinaire's observation that a work of art is never completed, just abandoned. Whilst the title was ironic, the exhibition was successful. Deren's independent exhibitions inspired Amos Vogel's formation of Cinema 16, a film society that promoted and exhibited experimental films in New York. Nichols argues that, “Deren acted the role of cinematic Prometheus, stealing the fire of the Hollywood gods for those whom the gods refused to recognize.” (8) In the late 1950s Deren formed the Creative Film Foundation to reward the achievements of independent filmmakers. Her work led to the establishment of the first filmmaker's Co-op in New York City. Evasive and unclassifiable, Deren actively rejected categorization as a surrealist and refused the definition of her films as formalist or structuralist. Her affiliation with surrealism is undeniable. In 1943 Deren collaborated with Marcel Duchamp to produce a film called Witch's Cradle, a choreographed set of movements between the figure (played by Duchamp) and the camera. The film was intended to be an exploration of the magical qualities of objects in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery, a space where Duchamp also exhibited. Witch's Cradle remains unfinished, the film recalling Duchamp's difficulty with completion. Duchamp's Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) collected dust in his studio for seven years until it was shattered in transit. Duchamp celebrated the accident as the final element allowing the art to be considered complete. It is in Deren's writing that her status as an innovator in film production and film theory is accentuated. In 1946 Deren wrote “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film” where she explained her approach to filmmaking. Her argument emphasizes filmmaking as a matrix where elements exist outside of the constraints of hierarchy, order or value. It is a utopian approach, comparable to the logic developed by the Russian Formalists, which stresses the influence of individual elements within the anagram. Deren also wrote “Cinematography: the creative use of reality” and an unpublished article entitled “Psychology of Fashion”. In 1953 Deren presented a paper entitled “Poetry and the Film” at a Cinema 16 Symposium. In this paper she argued that film works on two axes: the horizontal, including narrative, character and action, and the vertical, characterized by the more ephemeral elements of mood, tone and rhythm.
In 1985 Deren's third husband Teiji Ito and his new wife Cherel assembled and edited the Haitian footage that had remained incomplete since Deren's death. The footage was spliced together to form an anthropological structure and a voice-over narration was added to clarify the details of the ceremonies. Upon its release, critics expressed reservations that the film was at odds with Deren's style and contrasted with her original conception of the film. Maya Deren was a key figure in the development of the 'New American Cinema'. Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon in his experimentation with narration. Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance. Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters and in the incorporation of the “psychogenic fugue”, the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual. Speculation surrounding Maya Deren is most rampant concerning the details of her death. Deren died in 1961, aged 44. The legend begins with Stan Brakhage who, in his book Film at Wit's End, speculates that Deren's death was punishment for her intimate involvement in the Haitian Voudoun ritual. In Martina Kudlacek's recent video In The Mirror of Maya Deren, this notion is coldly dispelled with the dreadful assertion that Deren died of a cerebral hemorrhage due to a combination of malnutrition and a predilection for amphetamines and sleeping pills.
Ito thought that this was the perfect resting place for a woman energized in life by ritual, dance, voodoo, music, poetry, writing and of course, experimental film. As a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema, Deren's legacy is both abstract and tangible. Her innovations in filmmaking continue to fascinate aspiring experimental filmmakers. Her pioneering, uncompromising spirit enabled her to elude the institutional limitations that controlled filmmaking in 1940s American culture. Deren's enduring quest to secure financial support for experimental filmmakers during her lifetime was finally answered with the establishment of a grant bearing her name. In 1986 the American Film Institute recognized Deren's significant contribution to experimental filmmaking by creating the Maya Deren Award to act as an incentive and reward for the work of contemporary independent film and video makers.
Maya Deren © Wendy Haslem, November 2002 Endnotes:
Filmography Witch's Cradle (1943)Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: Marcel Duchamp, B&W (incomplete) Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Dir: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Screenplay: Maya Deren. Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Music: Teiji Ito. B&W. At Land (1944) Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: John Cage, Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. B&W. A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945) Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: Talley Beatty. 3 mins, silent, B&W. Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: Rita Christiani, Maya Deren. 14 mins, B&W, silent Meditation on Violence (1948) Dir: Maya Deren. Cast: Chao Li Chi. Music: Teiji Ito. The Very Eye of Night (1958) Dir: Maya Deren. Assistant director: Harrison Starr III. Screenplay: Maya Deren. Music: Teiji Ito. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985) Original footage shot by Deren (1947-1954). Reconstruction by Teiji & Cherel Ito. Films about Deren: Invocation: Maya Deren (1987) Dir: Jo Ann Kaplan In The Mirror of Maya Deren (2001) Dir: Martina Kudlacek 
Select Bibliography Stan
Brakhage, Film At Wit's End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers,
Mc Pherson & Co.: New York, 1989
Articles in Senses of Cinema Maya Deren, Dance, and Gestural Encounters in Ritual in Transfigured Timeby Erin Brannigan In the Mirror of Maya Deren by Rebecca Bachman
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