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Maya Deren
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Maya Deren was born Eleonora Derenkowsky in Kiev in 1917. Her father was a psychiatrist. In 1922 the family emigrated to America and settled in Syracuse, New York. Maya was educated at the League of Nations School in Switzerland, at Syracuse and New York universities, and at Smith College, where she earned a Master of Arts degree in literature in 1938. While still a student at Syracuse, she devoted her energies to the underground socialist movement. As her fascination for photography and film grew, her talent for organization and persuasion was re-channeled.
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Maya Deren was a director whose work was critical to the start of the American avant-garde film movement. Deren's education was in journalism and literature. After realizing an interest in modern dance, Deren began working for the choreographer Katherine Dunham. While in Los Angeles for a performance by Dunham's dancers, she met the Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid. The two were subsequently married and in 1943 co-directed Meshes of the Afternoon, which became one of the most significant early experimental films produced in America. A year later, Deren directed her own film, At Land, which similarly explored dreamlike psychological states.
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Born in Kiev in 1917, Maya Deren emigrated to the United States with her parents a few years later, grew up mainly in Syracuse, New York, and attended Syracuse University. A social activist from her teens, she became interested first in dance and subsequently in filmmaking. Throughout the 1950s, until her premature death in 1961 at the age of 44, Maya Deren was a leading exponent of experimental cinema and considered one of its most influential artists. She first traveled to Haiti to film dances in 1947, and returned in following years for lengthy stays. The work in Haiti led to the classic ethnographic study, Divine Horsemen, written with the encouragement of Joseph Campbell, as well as audio recordings and a documentary film which was later edited by Teiji and Cherel Ito. A two-hour documentary on Maya Deren and her work was produced for BBC television in 1987.
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"In the Mirror of Maya Deren" presents generous excerpts from Deren's films, mercifully in their original silent versions and not with the new scores added years later by her third husband, composer Teijo Ito. As a filmmaker, Deren broke new ground and taboos with her stunning imagery. "At Land" (1944) brings three women into a contact of an obviously Sapphic nature, while "Ritual in Transfigured Time" (1946) dared to erase color lines by having Trinidad-born Rita Christiani in a starring role where race is not an issue. Deren's fascination with capturing the grace and poetry of modern dance on film provided her audiences with "A Study in Choreography for Camera" (1945) with Talley Beatty as the lithe focus of the lens, "Meditation on Violence" (1946) with Chao-Li Chi mixing martial arts into balletic movements, and "The Very Eye of Night" (1955), with choreography by the legendary Antony Tudor and performances by his Metropolitan Opera Ballet School.
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Maya Deren is considered a pioneer in the exploration of film language and expanded the medium into an art form. Duchanp's, "Nude descending a Staircase" can only imply movement. As a time-based medium, film uses movement through space and distortions of time as a part of its symbol making properties. Maya Deren did not consider herself a Surrealist, she felt her art form was more controlled than allowed by the movement's original objectives. Though her images are embedded in film language they still pursue a study of the unconscious which has Surrealism at its roots. However, instead of involving the irrational unconscious of Freud, she preferred Carl Jung's examinations of subconscious archetypal symbolism and Joseph Campbell's studies of primordial myth-making.
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Maya Deren's life has been turned into a legend since her early death in 1961. An ambitious four-volume ‘docu-biography' (after a decade of Deren's neglect) begun in the mid- 1970's by Catrina Neiman, Millicent Hodson, Francine Bailey and VéVe Clark, receiving the cryptic title: The Legend of Maya Deren. Anthology Film Archives and their now defunct periodical Film Culture backed the project. Up until today only two volumes have been released and the others still await publication funds.
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Maya Deren