Maya Deren

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Maya Deren

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. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer.

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[edit] Early life

Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine. It is said that she was named after Eleanora Duse, an Italian actress. In 1922, after a series of anti-Semitic pogroms and because of her father's sympathies for Leon Trotsky, the family fled to Syracuse, New York. Her father shortened the family name to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York. He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse. Her mother moved to Paris to be with her daughter while she attended the League of Nations School in Geneva, Switzerland from 1930 to 1933. In 1928, she became a naturalized citizen of the U.S.

[edit] College

Deren began college at Syracuse University, where she became active in the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League. Through the YPSL she met Gregory Bardacke, whom she later married at the age of eighteen. After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City. She and her husband became very active in various socialist causes in New York City. She graduated from New York University and separated from Bardacke. The divorce was finalized in 1939. She began her studies for a master’s degree in English literature at the New School for Social Research and completed it at Smith College.

After graduation from Smith, Deren returned to New York’s Greenwich Village where she worked as a free-lance secretary. In 1941 she became the personal secretary to choreographer Katherine Dunham. At the end of a tour, the Dunham dance company stopped in Los Angeles for several months to work in Hollywood. It was there that Deren met Alexandr Hackenschmied, a celebrated Czech-born photographer and cameraman who would become her second husband in 1942. Hackenschmied had fled Czechoslovakia after Hitler's advance. He changed his name at Deren's behest to Alexander Hammid (nickname Sasha) because Deren thought Hackenschmied sounded too Jewish (which he was not).

[edit] Cinema

In the early 1940s, Deren used some of the inheritance from her father to purchase a used 16 mm Bolex camera. She used this camera to make her first and most well-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), in collaboration with Hammid. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Ito in 1957.

In 1943, she adopted the name Maya Deren. Maya is the name of the mother of the historical Buddha as well as the dharmic concept of reality being but an illusion. In Greek myth, Maia is the mother of Hermes and a goddess of mountains and fields. Also in 1943, Deren began making a film with Marcel Duchamp, The Witches' Cradle, which was never completed.

At that time her social circle included the likes of André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Anaïs Nin.

Deren's second film was At Land, which she made in 1944. She made A Study in Choreography for the Camera in 1945. Ritual in Transfigured Time was made in 1946, which explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual.

In 1946 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures". In 1947 she won the Grand Prix Internationale for 16 mm experimental film at the Cannes Film Festival for Meshes of the Afternoon.

Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. Half way through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop.

In 1958, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The Very Eye of Night.

Deren distributed her own films and promoted them through lectures and screenings in the United States, Canada, and Cuba. She lectured on film theory and Vodoun. She wrote, directed, edited, and performed in her own films.

“To Maya Deren goes the credit for being the first since the end of the war to inject a fresh note into experimental film production,” claims Lewis Jacobs in his discussion of experimental cinema in America, postwar. (Jacobs279) In her first film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Jacob’s claims that, “ It attempted to show the way in which an apparently simple and casual occurrence develops subconsciously into a critical and emotional experience. A girl comes home one afternoon and falls asleep. In a dream she sees herself returning home, tortured by loneliness and frustration and impulsively committing suicide. The story has a double climax, in which it appears that the imagined, the dream, has become real.” (Jacobs279) Maya Deren uses specific cinematic devices in this film to convey deep meaning. In a particular seen, Deren is walking up a normal set of stairs, and each time she pushes against the wall, it triggers the camera to move in that direction, almost as if the camera is part of her body. As she pulls herself up the last stair, the top of the stairs leads her to a window in her bedroom, which completely breaks the expectations of the viewer. In doing so, Deren completely destroys our sense of time and space. We no longer have a sense of what the space she is in consists of, or how long she was there for. This was completely new for this time period, everybody was used to being able to watch a film without having to be attentive and work for anything. Deren constantly asks the viewer to pay attention and remember certain things by repeating the same actions over and over again, with only very subtle changes. In Meshes of the Afternoon, we constantly see images of the knife in the bread, the phone off the hook, the key, and the record player as Deren goes about the same actions. Deren uses familiar images to trigger our memories in certain situations in the film.

A recognizable trait of Deren’s work is her use of the subjective and objective camera. For instance, shots in Meshes of the Afternoon cut from Deren looking at an object, to Deren’s point of view, looking at herself perform the same actions that she has been through out the film. To me, this conveys the meaning of Derens dual personality and/or emotions towards the possibility of her suicide. Lewis Jacobs claims that, “the film is not completely successful, it skips from objectivity to subjectivity without transitions or preparation and is often times confusing.” (Jacobs279) An example of Jacobs comment would be when Deren cuts to her point of view, which normally is an objective shot, but in this POV shot she is watching herself, which is subjective. The viewer cannot expect Deren’s POV shot to contain herself. In Joseph Brinton’s essay called, “Subjective Camera or Subjective Audience,” he states that, “the symbolic picturization of man’s subconscious in Maya Deren’s experimental films suggest that the subjective camera can explore subtleties of hitherto unimaginable as film content. As the new technique can clearly express almost any facet of everyday human experience, its development should presage a new type of psychological film in which the camera will reveal the human mind, not superficially, but honestly in terms of image and sound.”(Brinton365) To relate Brinton’s comment to Jacobs’ comment about how Deren “the film is not completely successful, it skips from objectivity to subjectivity without transitions or preparation and is often times confusing,” I don’t feel that her use of changing from objectivity to subjectivity is confusing at all. I feel it is a direct representation on the characters thought patterns in a time of crisis. “Such a film should indeed endow the cinema with a wholly new dimension of subjective experience, permitting the audience to see a human being both as others se him and as he sees himself.”(Brinton365)

[edit] Criticism of Hollywood

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Deren attacked Hollywood for its artistic, political and economic monopoly over American cinema. She bragged, “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick”, and complained that Hollywood “has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form.” She set herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry’s standards and practices.

[edit] Haiti & Voodoo

The Guggenheim grant enabled Deren to finance travel to Haiti to pursue her interest in voodoo. Dunham wrote her master’s thesis on Haitian dances in 1936, which may have influenced Deren’s interest. In Haiti, Deren not only filmed many hours of voodoo ritual, but also participated in them, and adopted the religion. Her book, Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (1953), is considered a definitive source on the subject. However, the accompanying documentary remained incomplete in her lifetime and was edited and produced by Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren's death. All of the original film, wire recordings, and notes are held in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University.

[edit] Death

Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44, from a brain hemorrhage brought on by extreme malnutrition. Her condition was also weakened by the amphetamines she had been taking since she began working for Dunham in 1941, prescribed by Dr. Max Jacobson. Jacobson was investigated by The New York Times in 1972 for developing drug dependencies in his patients, and lost his medical license in 1975. Deren was taking amphetamines and sleeping pills on a daily basis when she died. Her father suffered from high blood pressure, which she may have had as well.

Her ashes were scattered in Japan at Mount Fuji.

[edit] Legacy

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.

Milla Jovovich's 1994 music video, "Gentleman Who Fell", pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon.

In 1994, the UK-based Horse and Bamboo Theatre created and toured Dance of White Darkness throughout Europe - the story of Deren's visits to Haiti.

In 2002, Martina Kudlacek directed a feature-length documentary about Deren, titled In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Im Spiegel der Maya Deren).

In 2004, English rock group Subterraneans produced new soundtracks for six of Deren's short films as part of a commission from Queen's University Belfast's annual film festival. At Land won the festival prize for sound design.

In 2005, American punk-blues group the Immortal Lee County Killers used a photo of Deren on the cover of their CD "These Bones Will Rise To Love You Again".

An interesting reference to Deren is published in the journals of New York critic and journalist Leo Lerman, published as The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman (New York: Knopf, 2007), page 244.

[edit] Filmography

  • Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) with Alexander Hammid, music by Teiji Ito added 1957
  • At Land (1944) photographed by Hella Heyman and Alexander Hammid
  • A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) with Talley Beatty
  • Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) choreographic collaboration with Frank Westbrook and Rita Christiani, featuring Anaïs Nin and Gore Vidal
  • Meditation on Violence (1948) performance by Chao-li Chi, Chinese flute and Haitian drums musical collage by Maya Deren
  • The Very Eye of Night (1952-55) with Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor, music by Teiji Ito

Unfinished

Unreleased

  • Ensemble for Somnambulists (1951) Toronto Film Society workshop

Collaborations

  • The Private Life of a Cat (1947) co-directed by Alexander Hammid

[edit] Bibliographies

[edit] See also

[edit] External links