The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. 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. cinema as an art, form maya deren | Posted on May 31, 2022 | resultat rugby auvergne 1re srie sams secrtaire mdicale "Maya Deren's four 16 mm. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. 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. We spent a great deal of time talking about her. In a frenzy of creation and organization, Deren seemingly ordered the world around her, at least for a crucial moment, to fit into a pattern of her own design. (This article was completed with the assistance of Laura Stamm.). Deren, Maya. In 1986, the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor independent filmmakers. Biography 29.1 (2006): 140. My writing consists of critical and personal articles about film, artistic communication, and the societal impacts of cinema, as well as its impact on society. Her relationship with Bateson ended in disasterhe snuck off to Germany without telling her.) Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account. Essential Deren. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. A new era of strength competitions is testing the limits of the human body. "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti", McPherson & Company. The film is centered on the dancer Rita Christiani, a former member of Dunhams dance company, whom Deren, in her script outline, considered, for the purposes of the film, the same person as herself. Cinema As An Art Form. The first of these trajectories is Deren's interest in socialism during her youth and university years".[31]. 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. [13] The event was completely sold out, inspiring Amos Vogel's formation of Cinema 16, the most successful film society of the 1950s. 4 At other times, she selected other titles for the screenings as a way of marketing the films and guiding their reception Deren filmed At Land in Port Jefferson and Amagansett, New York in the summer of 1944. Abstraction, complexity, and vehemence came to the fore during the war and just after its end, a time when realities were so appalling as to be all but unrepresentable, when much of the worst was still unknown but loomed in forebodings, imaginings, hints, and rumors, and when, in a short and terrifying span, the Holocaust became known and nuclear war became a reality. US$19.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) [Bolded page numbers refer to the original page numbers of the reproduced version of Deren's essay, "An anagram of ideas on art, form . With her detailed written scenarios, her careful visual compositions, and her contrapuntal schemes of editing, she characterized her work as films in the classicist tradition, but much of the movie scene that shed inspired was far more freewheeling in method, substance, and tone. In 1943, Deren purchased a used 16mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. In 1942, while in Hollywood with Dunham, Deren met a filmmaker named Alexandr Hackenschmied. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account. The most conspicuous, and perhaps the most significant, adaptation of Derens far-rangingly associative yet meticulously composed fantasies may well be in the movies of David Lynch. 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. Her imagination was fertile, but her wide-ranging life was a veritable engine of stories that seemed ready-made to be put on film, with a first-person imaginative inventiveness of a sort that would hardly be found in Hollywood. Her parents were Jewish, prosperous, and educated. 125 ratings9 reviews. [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. 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. Its the tale of an artist who, in the mid-nineteen-forties, in the span of four years, by the age of thirty, remade her artistic worlddrastically and definitively. "[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. Strangers and vague acquaintances stopped her in the street asking how they might see her films, Durant writes. [27] She also regularly explored themes of gender identity, incorporating elements of introspection and mythology. See below. 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. If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutions website, please contact your librarian or administrator. [27] The film is also subtitled 'Pas de Deux', a dance term referring to a dance between two people, or in this case, a collaboration between Deren and Beatty. A lot of sources give other dates of birth: April 29, 1917. In her Glossary of Creole Words, Deren includes 'Voudoun' while the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary[49] draws attention to the similar French word, Vaudoux. She had been interested in that country, and its religious rituals, since her time alongside Dunham; from late 1946 to mid-1947, her intellectual and personal relationship with the anthropologist and filmmaker Gregory Bateson sparked her quasi-ethnographic ambitions to make a film there. 35 Copy quote. I liked her bohemianismshe had no hours. Deren was transformed by this relationship and embraced her new life by changing her name, in 1943, to Maya. With inheritance from her father, she bought a 16mm Bolex camera and made her first film with Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon, detailed by Kudlcek 2004. Deren was born May 12[O.S. In New York, she took frequent vitamin injections, which likely included amphetamines, from the infamous Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson (who also treated John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and many other household names before losing his license in the seventies). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2011. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer.BiographyEarly lifeDeren was born in Kiev, Ukraine to Solomon Derenkowsky and Marie Fiedler. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), her collaboration with Alexander Hammid, has been one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema history. Maya Deren and the American Avante Garde. Suzhou River, Reviewed: Gangland Romance as Political Critique. Until now, Maya Deren's essays on the art and craft of filmmaking have not been available in a comprehensive volume equally handy for students . Shed started using Benzedrine to fuel her long days and nights of activity while travelling with Dunham, and kept with it afterward. 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). 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. [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. 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. One action can be performed across different physical spaces, as in A Study in Choreography For Camera (1945), and in this way sews together layers of reality, thereby suggesting continuity between different levels of consciousness. Click the account icon in the top right to: Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. She fulfilled the destiny detailed by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his 1835 story Wakefield: By stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. A woman, even more so. An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. 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. 127847737-Cinema-as-an-Art-Form.pdf - Free download as PDF File (.pdf) or view presentation slides online. Thats the story told in Maya Deren: Choreographed for Camera, Mark Alice Durants new biography of the filmmaker (published by Saint Lucy Books), and its thrilling and terrifying. Documentary, she complained, lacked art and imagination; she envisioned nonfiction filmmaking, of the sort that she was undertaking in Haiti, to be as creative as the fantasies that she filmed at home. Summary Review--The Film Experience, Chapter 8, Experimental Film and New Media: Challenging Form FILM IN FOCUS: Meshes of the Afternoon Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren's enormously influential experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) saturates everyday objects and settings with meanings that are obscure to the viewer. Actor. Screen Dance adapts this idea to the strategic collaboration of many art forms that can . " The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde." Biography 29 (1): 140 -58. Kino has a reputation for releasing quality products that respectfully focus on the history and art of cinema. Focuses not simply on the facts of Derens life but tries to capture her persona on film through its experimental montage of 16mm film, sound clips, and archival material. A biographical sketch built from nine brief meditations on aspects of Derens history, filmography, and reception. By achieving worldwide recognition for films that she made on her own, with family and friends, on trivial budgets, she spurred generations of experimental filmmakers to follow in her footsteps; their films then found a home in institutions that shed helped bring to life. Bill Nichols (ed. She certainly didnt invent experimental cinema, nor introduce it in the U.S., but, with this short silent film, Deren became the genres Orson Welles, realizing her own original ideas by a fruitful collaboration with an experienced cinematographer (as Welles did with Gregg Toland) and putting those ideas over by way of onscreen star power. In April, 1945, she made another film, A Study in Choreography for Camera, featuring the dancer Talley Beatty, also a Dunham alumnus, and it attracted attention in the world of dance. Works about Deren and her works have been produced in various media: Deren's films have also been shown with newly written alternative soundtracks: Deren was also an important film theorist. Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev - October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowsky, was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s. It is said that she was named after [30], "For Deren, no transition is needed between a place outside (such as a forest, or a park, or the beach) and an interior room. 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.". this page. Ritual in Transfigured Time began in August and was completed in 1946. The cover art for the album was by Teiji It. ), Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. She left Bardacke (they soon divorced), entered Smith College for a masters in English, and then returned to New York. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. [13] She attended the New School for Social Research. 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. Shibboleth / Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutions website and Oxford Academic. Deren is often referred to as the archetypal example of independence, a filmmaker who managed to avoid the institutional regulation of American cinema. 1 Part 2 consists of hundreds of documents, interviews, oral histories, letters, and autobiographical memoirs.[9]. In Greek myth, Maia is the mother of Hermes and a goddess of mountains and fields. The Chinese filmmaker Lou Yes daring drama, from 2000, eludes censorship by means of intricate storytelling. Derens films were, for weeks, the talk of the Village, even those who were turned away had an opinion about what was seen that night., Among the audience at the Provincetown Playhouse was a twenty-four-year-old Austrian Jewish immigrant named Amos Vogel, who said that the event made him recognize a new kind of talent in filmmaking, an individual expressing a very deep inner need. The following year, Vogel and his wife, Marcia, founded a film society called Cinema 16, which launched its screenings at the same theatre and, in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, was New Yorks prime venue for non-Hollywood, independent, experimental, and international movies. Hurd, Mary G. Women Directors and Their Films. The concept of working in a multidisciplinary form across media and processes has become more prevalent in modern day culture. In the chapter Independents, Experiments, Documentaries Hurd presents a concise but comprehensive biography of Maya Deren. marcosdada. Her influence can also be seen in films by Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Su Friedrich. It shows a progression from nature to the confines of society, and back to nature. 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. SKU: 1658. Then Hammid comes home again to discover the gruesome aftermath of violence. And, in any case, Durant adds, she didnt have the money to finish it. Then, just as quickly, she fell out of that world, never to return in her too-brief lifetime. Publisher: University of California Press. Durant offers fictionalized sequences, the biographical equivalent of renactments in documentaries, but doesnt identify them as such, and leaves the sourcing of events and descriptions unclear. 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. Part 2 of the biography follows her transition from Eleanora to Maya, and the creation of her first four films. Details her formative years consisting of her childhood and education as well as her early publications, poems, and journalism. (For the purposes of the movies credits, Deren took the name Maya, and kept it, onscreen and off.) Deren, as Durant notes, was already deeply devoted to the art of dance, even though she had no training, and she more or less imposed herself on Dunham as a secretary and assistant. 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. Source for information on Deren, Maya (1908-1961 . as a poem might celebrate these. She and her husband became active in various socialist causes in New York City; during this time they separated and eventually divorced three years later. In the 1940s and 1950s, Deren (b. Ukraine, 1917-1961) was a pioneer of experimental cinema as an art form, independent and distinct from Hollywood production values or the dramatic narrative, closer to the modernist and avant-garde art practices of her generation. She felt that she was physically irresistible. [41] Deren filmed, recorded and photographed many hours of Vodou ritual, but she also participated in the ceremonies. Credit Solution Experts Incorporated offers quality business credit building services, which includes an easy step-by-step system designed for helping clients build their business credit effortlessly. The film begins with Deren bearing a skein of yarn and, with forced gaiety, recruiting Christiani for its winding (as Nin looms in the background). Deren was not quite a dancer, untrained as an actor, but endowed with charisma and temperament, craving not so much to be seen as to be recognized, turning her tumultuous private social life into a kind of performance. [17] The other article intended for Mademoiselle magazine was not published,[18] 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[19] and the Philadelphia Museum of Art,[20][21] all prints were from Janeway's estate. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. In order to support independent film artists, she established the Creative Film Foundation (CFF), which inspired Amos Vogels Cinema 16 as well as the British feminist film collective Circles, among others. Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and Latina/o Americans in Film and Television. She wrote a book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, about her travels, but she never completed her film. 1, Part 1: Signatures (19171942). Edited by Bill Nichols. The actor, a fixture of New Yorks experimental-theatre scene, did not become his characters; he stood, somehow, next to them, amused and delighted. In the Mirror of Maya Deren **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Martina Kudlacek. 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. Instead of an impresario, she became an embittered rival to her successors. 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. Deren was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema . Owing to legal issues after its producers death, the film didnt show in New York until 1959, at which time it made hardly a ripple. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. [9] He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse. [30] Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop. [4] Deren served as National Secretary in the National Student office of the Young People's Socialist League and was a member of the Social Problems Club at Syracuse University through which she met Gregory Bardacke, whom she married at the age of eighteen in June 1935. It explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual, looking at the details as well as the bigger ideas of the nature and process of change. An LP of some of Deren's wire recordings was published by the newly formed Elektra Records in 1953 entitled Voices of Haiti. [4] She became known for her European-style handmade clothes, wild curly hair and fierce convictions. Regarded as one of the founders of the postwar American independent cinema, the legendary Maya Deren was a poet, photographer, ethnographer, filmmaker and impresario. This kind of Freudian interpretation, which she disagreed with, led Deren to add sound, composed by Teiji It, to the film. filmography bibliography articles in Senses web resources Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema Maya Deren is recognizable as the woman with the enigmatic expression at Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions. A few decades later, Maya Deren would take a very different approach. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2002. It covers aspects of her personal life, her most famous films, and important references to her founding of the Creative Film Foundation and related involvement with Amos Vogels Cinema 16. 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. By twenty, she had completed her undergraduate degree and was divorced, struggling to support herself as a poet and journalist. (Elvis Presley comes to mind.) Meditation on Violence (1948, 13 minutes) Directed by Maya Deren. [38][39] She had studied ethnographic footage by Gregory Bateson in Bali in 1947, and was interested in including it in her next film. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde at the best online prices at eBay! Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: |links=no; - October 13, 1961) was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important promoter of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Mikah Ernest Jennings, Prince of a Lost World. In Meshes, a woman falls asleep at home and imagines an episode involving multiples of herself, a recurring slippage of her house key out of her mouth, a flower that she finds in the street, a knife that she finds on the table, a black-shrouded figure with a mirror for a face, and Hammid himself, who comes home, sees one of the Derens in bed, and approaches her with a tentative eroticism. The careers of the American independent filmmakers who rode that new wavewhether the ones who made it to Hollywood, such as Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, or the ones who didnt, such as Juleen Compton and Peter Emanuel Goldmanwould be unthinkable without hers. 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. I think sex was her great ace. 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. [26], In her work, she often focused on the unconscious experience, such as in Meshes of the Afternoon. Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev - October 13, 1961, . Footnotes. Indeed, she continues to inspire a wide range of artists, from filmmakers to visual artists and musicians. According to Nichols, "Taking up another neglected dimension of Maya Deren's work, Moira Sullivan's "Maya Deren's Ethnographic Representation of Ritual and Magic in Haiti" relies on primary source material in the Maya Deren Archive in Boston and Anthology Film Archives in New York.". [4] In September, she divorced Hammid and left for a nine-month stay in Haiti. 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). films have already won considerable acclaim. Clark, VV A., Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, eds. "If cinema is 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. Any hours were all right, just like mine.. 331pp. New York: Maple-Vail, 1984. Dunham's fieldwork influenced Deren's studies of Haitian culture and Vodou mythology. cinema as an art, form maya deren. After the October Revolution, her father was conscripted into battle with Bolshevik forces, and Eleanora and her mother endured illness and poverty at home. As most film historians agree, it carved a path for the American avant-garde and gave rise to underground cinema, shepherding European modernism into the film experiments of such filmmakers as Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, David Lynch, and Cindy Sherman.
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