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Maya Deren
Maya Deren was a brilliant filmmaker and theorist whose
films and writings have nevertheless paled beside the even larger legend
surrounding her life and death. From the early 1940's until her sudden
(and some would say supernaturally-caused) death in 1961, Maya Deren both
evoked and exemplified the American avant-garde film movement virtually
by herself - as filmmaker, distributor, lecturer, theorist and promoter
— all in one fiery personality. She worked completely outside the
commercial film industry and made her own inner experience the center
of her films.
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.
All the arts lacked subsidies in the forties, but film was one of the
poorest. Charismatic and determined, Deren peddled effectively for herself
and her peers. She worked ceaselessly to establish facilities and funding
for the independent film movement which subsequently grew up in America.
She lectured everywhere from Yale University to the Dave Garroway show.
In 1946, she was the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship
(for work in "creative motion pictures") as well as the first
to establish a non-profit film foundation, the Creative Film Foundation.
Her work led ultimately to the establishment of the first Film-Makers
Co-op in New York. She also wrote numerous theoretical and technical articles
for film magazines and in 1946 published a pamphlet, "Anagram
of Ideas on Art, Form and Film." Her work was crucial in building
an atmosphere of respect for the art of film.
Deren became involved in modern dance, and while she was not trained as
a dancer, she was enchanted by the power of movement and the challenges
of space and time. While working as publicity assistant, photographer,
and secretary to the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe on tour, she met the
Czech emigre filmmaker, Alexander Hammid (nee Hackenschmied,) whom she
later married. Though she made only seven films, Deren is credited as
being the first dance filmmaker, someone who, Stan Brakhage said, "Made
people both think and feel, and dared to give sense its full meaning."
In her Statement of Principles she wrote: "My films might be called
poetic, referring to the attitude towards these meanings...My films might
be called choreographic, referring to the 'design and stylization of movement
which confers ritual dimension upon functional motion... My films might
be called experimental, referring to the use of the medium itself... I
am addressing myself not to any particular group but to a special area
and definite faculty in every or any man — to the part of him which
creates myths, invents divinities, and ponders, for no practical purpose
whatsoever, on the nature of things... The important truth is the poetic
one."
Deren inspired and stunned many people in her short life of forty-four
years. Her first film, "Meshes
of the Afternoon," was made with Hammid, a hand-wind Bolex camera
and funds from her own pocket in a period of two weeks in 1943. Fluidly
combining mysterious surrealist elements with decidedly female psychological
overtones to evoke an image of consciousness, its influence ranks with
that of Bunuel's "Un Chien Andalou." Her subsequent films continued
to explore space, time, the nature of form, the psyche, the possibilities
of cinematic manipulation and the magic of dance.
Deren used her Guggenheim Fellowship to go to Haiti to film Voudoun (voodoo)
ceremonies and dances. During this visit she became personally involved
in the mysterious religion, which led to her writing "The Divine
Horsemen." Although not trained as an anthropologist, she did a painstaking
ethnographic study and consulted at length with Joseph Campbell and Gregory
Bateson, with the result that the book became the definitive work on Haitian
Voudoun. Her film footage, shot between 1947 and 1951, never finished
in her lifetime and never seen before 1978, was later culled and edited
by her third husband and collaborator, Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel.
They added to the footage an anthropological structure and narration (true
to the facts and spirit of her book) which though perhaps at odds with
the original film's rhythm, clarifies the ceremonies for the viewer and
does no harm. This revealing and stunningly photographed documentary,
"Divine Horsemen: The Living
Gods of Haiti," is perhaps at the center of the Deren legend:
the legend of Deren the Voodoo Priestess. It is a film that conveys, perhaps
for the first time, the power and beauty of the Voudoun rites free of
both the false fantasies of Hollywood and the desensualizing distance
of ethnographers. It is a picture of Voudoun viewed by an artist, and
one privileged to conduct a study of emotional and psychological perceptions
on an intimate and subjective level. It is also the work of an insider;
Deren had not only gained the celebrants' trust enough to be permitted
to film authentic ceremonies, she also participated in them. In fact,
she had undergone initiation as a Mambo, or priestess, and had experienced
possession - the center toward which all the roads of Voudoun converge.
Of this experience, she wrote:"As sometimes in dreams, so here I
can observe myself [dancing]... my sense of self doubles again...except
that now the vision of the one who watches flickers, the lids flutter,
the gaps between the moments of sight flowing greater...wider...My skull
is a drum; each great beat drives that leg, like the point of a stake,
into the ground. The singing is at my very ear, inside my head, this sound
will drown me!...I cannot wrench the leg free. I am caught in this cylinder,
this well of sound. There is nothing anywhere except this. There is no
way out. The white darkness moves up the veins of my leg like a swift
tide rising, rising; is a great force which I cannot sustain or contain...The
bright darkness floods up through my body, reaches my head, engulfs me.
I am sucked downward and exploded upward at once. That is all."
Deren died suddenly in 1961, of a strange seizure or apoplectic fit or
cerebral hemorrhage, according to varying accounts. It would please her
that her picture language still calls out to us, for she concluded her
Statement of Principles with these words: "I am not greedy. I do
not seek to possess the major portion of your days. I am content if, on
those rare occasions whose truth can be stated only by poetry, you will,
perhaps, recall an image, even only the aura of my films."
P.S:
Sheldon Rochlin was a student at New York University when he first met
Deren and saw her films in 1960. He promptly dropped out of school to
become a filmmaker. In tribute to her legacy, he restored the negatives
of her films and converted them to video. The two volumes, Maya
Deren: Experimental Films and Divine
Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, were among the first to be distributed
by his then-fledgling company, Mystic Fire Video, in 1986.
This article is particularly indebted to the work of B. Ruby Rich, Deirdre
Towers, and Deren herself.
Buy Maya
Deren films at Mystic Fire Video
For further reading, see:
-"The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography, and Collected
Works", written by Millicent Hodson, Catrina Neiman, Veve Amasasa
Clark, and Francine Bailey.
-"Divine Horsemen: The Voudou
Gods of Haiti", by Maya Deren
-"Filmwise 2: Maya Deren", by George Landow, 1962
-"Visionary Film", (Oxford, 1974)
-back issues of "Film Culture"
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