Maya Deren (; born Eleonora Solomonovna Derenkovskaya; ; – October 13, 1961) was a Russian-born American experimental filmmaker and important part of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.
The function of film, Deren believed, was to create an experience. in Kiev (present-day Ukraine)<!--See WP:KIEV--> into a Jewish family, to psychologist Solomon (Alexander) Derenkovsky and Gitel-Malka (Marie) Fiedler, Shortly before the Russian Revolution, her father studied at the Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute.
In 1922, the family fled the Ukrainian SSR because of antisemitic pogroms perpetrated by the White Volunteer Army and moved to Syracuse, New York. Her father shortened the family name from Derenkovskaya to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York. He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse. Deren's mother was a musician and dancer who had studied these arts in Kiev. Her mother moved to Paris, France to be nearer to her while she studied. Deren learned to speak French while she was abroad.
Deren enrolled at Syracuse University at 16, where she began studying journalism and political science.
In 1938, Deren attended the New School for Social Research, and received a master's degree in English literature at Smith College. Her Master's thesis was titled The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry (1939). This included works of Pound, Eliot, and the Imagists. By the age of 21, Deren had earned two degrees in literature. This most likely comes from her father identifying as agnostic. She was aware of issues happening around the world, so she looked to socialism as a cure. Socialism allowed her to merge her Jewish identity into a universalist worldview. She supported herself from 1937 to 1939 by freelance writing for radio shows and foreign-language newspapers. During that time she also worked as an editorial assistant to famous American writers Eda Lou Walton, Max Eastman, and then William Seabrook.
In 1940, Deren moved to Los Angeles to focus on her poetry and freelance photography. In 1941, Deren wrote to Katherine Dunham—an African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist of Caribbean culture and dance—suggesting a children's book on dance and applying for a managerial job for her and her dance troupe; she later became Dunham's assistant and publicist. Deren travelled with the troupe for a year, learning greater appreciation for dance, as well as interest and appreciation for Haitian culture. The other article intended for Mademoiselle magazine was not published, but three signed enlargements of photographs intended for this article, all depicting Deren's friend New York ceramist Carol Janeway, are preserved in the MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. All prints were from Janeway's estate.
Personal life
In 1943, she moved to a bungalow on Kings Road in Hollywood In 1944, Deren filmed The Witch's Cradle in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery with Duchamp featured in the film.
In the December 1946 issue of Esquire magazine, a caption for her photograph teased that she "experiments with motion pictures of the subconscious, but here is finite evidence that the lady herself is infinitely photogenic." Her third husband, Teiji Itō, said: "Maya was always a Russian. In Haiti she was a Russian. She was always dressed up, talking, speaking many languages and being a Russian." As Sarah Keller states, “Maya Deren lays claim to the honor of being one of the most important pioneers of the American film avant-garde with a scant seventy-five or so minutes of finished films to her credit.”
Deren 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. 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).
In 1946, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures", and in 1947, won the Grand Prix International for avant-garde film at the Cannes Film Festival for Meshes of the Afternoon. She then created a scholarship for experimental filmmakers, the Creative Film Foundation.
Between 1952 and 1955, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The Very Eye of Night.
Deren's background and interest in dance appears in her work, most notably in the short film A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945). This combination of dance and film has often been referred to as "choreocinema", a term first coined by American dance critic John Martin.
In her work, she often focused on the unconscious experience, such as in Meshes of the Afternoon. 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. She also regularly explored themes of gender identity, incorporating elements of introspection and mythology. 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, though Mulvey later would give Deren this recognition, since their works were often in conversation with each other.
Major films
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
thumb|Deren in [[Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)]]
In 1943, Deren purchased a used 16mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. 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. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. Critics have seen autobiographical elements in the film, as well as thoughts about woman as subject rather than as object. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed, long after its initial screenings, by Deren's third husband Teiji Itō in 1952. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film", full of dramatic angles and innovative editing. It investigates the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. A woman, played by Maya Deren, walks up to a house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and seems to have a dream. The sequence of walking up to the gate on the partially shaded road restarts numerous times, resisting conventional narrative expectations, and ends in various situations inside the house. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. Recurring symbols include a cloaked figure, mirrors, a key, and a knife.
The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. The camera initially does not show her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman, which creates a universalizing, totalizing effect- as it is easier to relate to an unknown, faceless woman. 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. This kind of Freudian interpretation, which she disagreed with, led Deren to add sound, composed by Teiji Itō, to the film.
Another interpretation is that each film is an example of a "personal film". Her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon, explores a woman's subjectivity and relation to the external world. Georges Sadoul said Deren may have been "the most important figure in the post-war development of the personal, independent film in the U.S.A." In featuring the filmmaker as the woman whose subjectivity in the domestic space is explored, the feminist dictum "the personal is political" is foregrounded. 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. 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.
Director's notes
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, as she envisioned them. 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. According to the earliest program note, she describes Meshes of the Afternoon as follows:
<blockquote>This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.</blockquote>
At Land (1944)
left|thumb|Deren in a still from the film At Land (1944)
Deren filmed At Land in Port Jefferson and Amagansett, New York in the summer of 1944. Taking on more of an environmental psychologist's perspective, Deren "externalizes the hidden dynamic of the external world...as 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."</blockquote>At just under three minutes long, A Study in Choreography for Camera is a fragment depicting 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. 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. The choreography is perfectly synched as he seamlessly appears in an outdoor courtyard and then returns to an open, natural space. It shows a progression from nature to the confines of society, and back to nature. The figure belongs to dancer and choreographer Talley Beatty, whose last movement is a leap across the screen back to the natural world. Deren and Beatty met through Katherine Dunham, while Deren was her assistant and Beatty was a dancer in her company. 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.
Meditation on Violence (1948)
Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. It was an attempt to "abstract the principle of ongoing metamorphosis", found in Ritual in Transfigured Time, though Deren felt it was not as successful in the clarity of that idea, brought down by its philosophical weight.
Deren talks about the freedoms of independent cinema:
Haiti and Vodou
When Maya Deren decided to make an ethnographic film in Haiti, she was criticized for abandoning avant-garde film where she had made her name, but she was ready to expand to a new level as an artist. She had studied ethnographic footage by Gregory Bateson in Bali in 1947, and was interested in including it in her next film. Afterwards, Deren wrote several articles on religious possession in dancing before her first trip to Haiti. Deren filmed, recorded and photographed many hours of Vodou ritual, but she also participated in the ceremonies. 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. She described her attraction to Vodou possession ceremonies, transformation, dance, play, games and especially ritual came from her strong feeling on the need to decenter our thoughts of self, ego and personality.
Deren filmed 18,000 feet of Vodou rituals and people she met in Haiti on her Bolex camera. 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 Itō (1935–1982), and his wife Cherel Winett Itō (1947–1999). 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. The film footage is housed at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.
An LP of some of Deren's wire recordings was published by the newly formed Elektra Records in 1953 entitled Voices of Haiti. The cover art for the album was by Teiji Itō.
Anthropologists Melville J. Herskovits and Harold Courlander acknowledged the importance of Divine Horsemen, and in contemporary studies it is often cited as an authoritative voice, where Deren's methodology has been especially praised because "Vodou has resisted all orthodoxies, never mistaking surface representations for inner realities."
In her book of the same name 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. Most of the songs, sayings and even some of the religious terms, however, are in Creole, which is primarily French in derivation (although it also contains African, Spanish and Indian words). 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." In her Glossary of Creole Words, Deren includes 'Voudoun' while the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary draws attention to the similar French word, Vaudoux.
Death
Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44 from a brain hemorrhage, which has been attributed to a combination of malnutrition and pharmaceutical drug use.
Deren was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema, highlighting personal, experimental, underground film. In 1986, the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor independent filmmakers.
The Legend of Maya Deren, Vol. 1 Part 2 consists of hundreds of documents, interviews, oral histories, letters, and autobiographical memoirs.
- Creative Work in Motion Pictures (1947)
Filmography
{| class="wikitable"
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| Denotes posthumously released
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{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
! rowspan="2" scope="col" | Title
! rowspan="2" scope="col" | Year
! colspan="4" scope="col" | Credits
! rowspan="2" scope="col" class="unsortable"| Notes
! rowspan="2" scope="col" class="unsortable" |
|-
! width=65 |Director
! width=65 |Writer
! width=65 |Producer
! width=65 |Editor
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!scope="row"|Meshes of the Afternoon
|1943
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|co-directed with Alexander Hammid
|style="text-align:center;"|
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!scope="row"|The Witch's Cradle
|1944
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|unfinished
|style="text-align:center;"|
|-
!scope="row"|At Land
|1944
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|style="text-align:center;"|
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!scope="row"|Season of Strangers
|1959
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|also known as Haiku Film Project, unfinished
|style="text-align:center;"|
|-
| 1978 ||Unknown ||Meringues and Folk Ballads of Haiti||Lyrichord Discs||Recorded by Maya Deren
|-
| 1980 ||Unknown ||Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti||Lyrichord Discs||Recorded by Maya Deren; design [cover]: Teiji Itō; liner notes: Cherel Ito
|}
Written works
Deren was also an important film theorist.
- Her most widely read essay on film theory is probably An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, Deren's seminal treatise that laid the groundwork for many of her ideas on film as an art form (Yonkers, NY: Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946).
- Her collected essays were published in 2005 and arranged in three sections:
- Film Poetics, including: Amateur versus Professional, Cinema as an Art Form, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality
- Film Production, including: Creating Movies with a New Dimension: Time, Creative Cutting, Planning by Eye, Adventures in Creative Film-Making
- Film in Medias Res, including: A Letter, Magic is New, New Directions in Film Art, Choreography for the Camera, Ritual in Transfigured Time, Meditation on Violence, The Very Eye of Night.
- Divine Horsemen: Living Gods of Haiti was published in 1953 by Vanguard Press (New York City) and Thames & Hudson (London), republished under the title of The Voodoo Gods by Paladin in 1975, and again under its original title by McPherson & Company in 1998.
See also
- List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1946
- Women's cinema
Notes
References
Works cited
- Brody, Richard (November 16, 2022). "How Maya Deren Became the Symbol and Champion of American Experimental Film". The New Yorker. Retrieved March 21, 2023.
- Deren, Maya. Edited by Bruce R. McPherson. New York: McPherson & Company, 2005.
- Keller, Sarah. "Frustrated Climaxes: On Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle." Cinema Journal 52, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 75-98.
- Nichols, Bill, ed. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2001.
External links
- Deren bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
- Martina Kudláček (director of "In the Mirror of Maya Deren") by Robert Gardner BOMB 81/Fall 2002
- Maya Deren Collection at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center
- Divine Horsemen (book): excerpts
- Article on Maya Deren: seven films that guarantee her legend
- Maya Deren biography from Jewish Women's Archive
- Journal from MIT Seeing the Invisible: Maya Deren's Experiments in Cinematic Trance
- Maya Deren Biography from Project MUSE
- Hammer, Barbara. "Meshes with Maya Deren." Online at European Graduate School Video Lectures, 2011. Accessed January 28, 2023.