Maya Deren, Pioneer of the American Avant Garde Movement: A Profile of the Artist and Her Prominent Films

In 1943, Eleanora Deren changed her signature for the last time when she took on the name “Maya” - the Hindu Goddess of Illusion (Clark, Hodson & Neiman,1). Four of Deren’s best-known films were produced between 1942-47, marking her emergence on the American avant-garde scene as a hugely talented yet extremely controversial filmmaker. They reflected the radical inspired thinking and unfettered imagination that became the trademark of her creative expression. Deren’s emphasis was on creating states of consciousness that went beyond the normal waking experience (Clark, Hodson & Neiman, 1). In a masculinist avant-garde world, she was a relentless advocate of the woman filmmaker fighting against the dominant representations of women (Geller, 140). While many have described her work as ‘personal’, when viewed in the larger context of her continual quest for re-defining gendered boundaries, it can be seen as a form of cinematic autobiography (Geller, 140), a journey into the mind and soul of a woman who was an innovator, a revolutionary and a progenitor. 

Deren’s first film, Meshes of the Afternoon, is one of the most widely viewed films in the history of experimental cinema. Reviewed as a canonical work in artistic self-representation, the film attracted both praise and criticism for its technical simplicity and its contextual ambiguity. During its early years Meshes was received as the production of a ‘woman’ filmmaker and thus reviewed as a gendered piece, highly autobiographical in nature (Geller, 141). Sitney postulated a heavy surrealistic influence on her work, comparing it to the Bunuel and Dali masterpiece Un Chien Andalou. However, Deren denied any such influence whatsoever and strongly resisted the categorization of her work in narrowly defined compartments. She described her film as a reproduction of the way in which the sub-conscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience (Sitney, 9).



A brilliantly expositionary piece, refuting the conventional on-screen depiction of the male gaze, Meshes is one woman’s wild and sexually abandoned relationship with herself and with the camera (Schulman, MFJ). As she takes us on a suspenseful journey into the darkest depths of her soul, one by one Deren peels off the successive layers to herself until only the vulnerable fleshy core of her purest innermost existence remains- bared for all to see.

Meshes is littered with symbols of overt feminism and a certain defiance of culturally acceptable norms as were applicable to the women of that time. The sheer malevolence with which common, everyday objects are fetishised through close-ups (Geller, 143) in the film takes us by surprise and makes a strong statement about the inherent/ imagined evil in monotony. The portrayal of the man as the mysterious stranger in the film could be just Maya’s intense distrust of her lover, or maybe even a larger distrust of men in general. And the subsequent return to the male gaze just might be suggestive of the realization that her view is biased and that so far she has been just telling one side of the story and the viewer needs to acknowledge a possibly different interpretation. Deren very cleverly embeds in her film signs of an evocatively yearning desperation, a longing of the soul that seems to become a living, breathing presence in the warm shadows of her heightened imagination. 

In 1944 Deren made her second film titled 'At Land' described by Wendy Haslem as Deren’s reinforced interest in the juxtaposition of anachronistic spaces as well as a critique of social rituals (Senses of Cinema). Like Meshes, this film also has autobiographical elements; however they are discernible to the viewer only as the result of a deep contemplation of the fine complex structure created by Deren, and not presented simply as a story of the self.



At Land is a quest, an intense search for the abstract. It follows a cyclical structure, moving in and out of the two physical spaces of land and water (Turim, 93) using editing as a key device to bring together the dissimilar, although with a distinct purpose to not blend them (Pramaggiore, 248). Deren, as in her other works, has employed in the film distinct visual metaphors that allude to the deeper meanings of life and death; rich symbols of underlying secrets that tease our minds and play with our attention. In a sense, watching At Land is like swaying precariously on an extended tree limb; things appear to make sense but if the viewer does not pay adequate attention, they drift out of consciousness. 

Deren’s joint work with Talley Beatty, A Study in the Choreography of Camera, is a visual masterpiece in the lyrical symphony that his dance is. Whereas most of Deren’s films were silent, this one despite being so, seems to have a music, a rhythm of its own that does not need the presence of an audible soundtrack to appreciate. Deren combines her passion for dance as an art form along with her exploration of film as an artistic medium with a result that can only be described as poetry in motion. A New York Times review referred to the film as a dance film in which camerawork and editing appears to make the dancer move through a variety of settings without passing through the space in between. What the film does, in fact, is use physical space as an element in the finely constructed ballet that the dancer is a part of by blending together the natural space and the living space as one without any boundaries.



A Study in Choreography for the Camera is an amalgam of Deren’s constantly developing ideas on film as an art form. She freed dance from its physical confines giving it an entirely new fluidity of expression by blending it with film. In her own words Deren wrote “It was an effort to remove the dancer from the static space of the theatre stage to one which was as mobile and volatile as he himself” (qtd. in Franko, 140).
Like Deren’s other films, 'Ritual in Transfigured Time' also experiments with spatial movement and gestural forms, leading us into different worlds and living spaces. The gesture play invites us to move along with the films characters, abandoning that which is comfortably known, handing us over to many strange partners (Brennigan, Senses of Cinema). The film is one woman’s desperate pursuit of companionship echoed in the others expressions and gestures. In all of Deren’s works, this one is the most obvious rendition of a bisexual existence; Deren’s and Christiani’s relationship is embedded in a subtle romance.

Maya Deren chose to make films that were about her or the issues and concepts that fascinated her. What sets her apart from other filmmakers is the fact that she created a visual language of her own in an effort to make understood the depths of her creative imaginings. There are recurrent themes and images in all of Deren’s major works. As a filmmaker, she was deliberate and precise. Unlike her contemporaries who regarded the avant-garde as an improvisational refuge, she saw it as an art form that required meticulous planning and careful thought to achieve a clarity of expression. She was an advocate of a more structural and ordered approach to film. Events in her films are not accidental; everything happens because it is supposed to.



Deren used film as a vehicle not only to express her creative leanings, but more importantly to express her own personality. Self-representation is a common theme in her films. She uses many versions of her own self to try explore the multiple ways in which her character would react to different situations. Her films reject linearity of narrative, and they also refuse to adhere to conventional definitions of, or take steadfast positions on, homosexuality or heterosexuality, often featuring both in a single film (Pramaggiore, 240).

In her later work, Deren used “creative geography” (Fischer, 194) as a visual tool to allow her characters freedom of movement and an un-constrained interaction with the elements. In each of her films there is an interplay of the outside or natural world and the inside or living space, both colliding and overlapping in a symphonic harmony.

Deren’s intense fascination with the unconscious is revealed in the often complex narrative structures and characters that she created in her films. The many alternative worlds she created in her films are rich with implied meaning, her language original and her art sheer creative genius, making Maya Deren the creator of a radical cinema; the woman who inspired a thousand dreams.

References:

Brannigan, Erin. “Maya Deren, Dance and Gestural Encounters in Ritual in Transfigured Time”. Senses of Cinema. (Sept. 2002). 11 April 2007.

Clark Veve A., Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman. The Legend of Maya Deren. Volume 1 Part Two. Chambers (1942-47). Anthology Film Archives/ Film Culture, 1998.

Fischer, Lucy. “The Eye for Magic”: Maya and Melies. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California P, 2001. 185-204.

Franko, Mark. “Aesthetic Agencies in Flux: Talley Beatty, Maya Deren, and the Modern Dance Tradition in Study in Choreography for Camera”. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Ed. Bill Nichols.

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California P, 2001. 131-149.

Geller, Theresa L. “The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde.”  Biography. Volume 29, Number 1, (Jan. 2006). 140-158. Project Muse. Emerson College Library, Boston, MA. 20 Feb. 2007 http://muse.jhu.edu/

Hammer, Barbara. “Maya Deren and Me”. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California P, 2001. 261-265.

Haslem, Wendy. “Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema”. Senses of Cinema. (Nov. 2002). 19 Feb. 2007 <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/deren.html>

Nekola, Charlotte. “On Not Being Maya Deren”. Wide Angle . Volume 18, Number 4, (October 1996). 29-37. Project Muse. Emerson College Library, Boston, MA. 21 Feb 2007. <http://muse.jhu.edu/ >

Pramaggiore, Maria. “Seeing Double(s): Reading Deren Bisexually”. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California P, 2001. 237-260. 

Schulman, Sarah. “A Thought About Leni Riefenstahl, Maya Deren, and Gay and Lesbian Film.” Millennium Film Journal. Printed in MFJ No. 41 (Fall 2003) Lesbian and Gay Experimental Cinema/ Stan Brakhage Remembrances. 20 Feb 2007.  <http://www.mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ41/schulmanpage.html>

Sitney, Adam P. “Meshes of The Afternoon.”  Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000. Third Edition. Oxford University Press, 2002

Soussloff, Catherine. “Maya Deren Herself”. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California P, 2001. 105-129.

Turim, Maureen. “Ethics of Form: Structure and Gender in Maya Deren’s Challenge to the Cinema”. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California P, 2001. 77-102.