Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (Film and Culture Series)
Sarah Keller
Language: English
Pages: 296
ISBN: 0231162219
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a dream-like experiment with time and symbol, looped narrative and provocative imagery, setting the stage for the twentieth-century's groundbreaking aesthetic movements and films.
Maya Deren assesses both the filmmaker's completed work and her numerous unfinished projects, arguing Deren's overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Combining the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film, Deren created a wholly original experience for film audiences that disrupted the subjectivity of cinema, its standards of continuity, and its dubious facility with promoting categories of realism. This critical retrospective reflects on the development of Deren's career and the productive tensions she initiated that continue to energize film.
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poetry, art, and photography that lead up to it and influence its shape. Her pre-cinematic career demonstrates Deren’s developing faith in the camera’s unique ability to create worlds and links her efforts to what she deemed her exigent artistic mission. Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren’s most-often studied film, and one that is treated most often as a closed text—one that uses an experimental structure, to be sure, but that offers various satisfactions associated with being a model for the
beach, where Deren’s body is thrashed by waves. Next, everything forward-moving is counteracted: the camera observes the sea rolling backwards and away, in reverse motion. Deren’s face, in close-up, provides the anchor for what is observed: this is what she is looking at. While we grant the first sea shots the logic of the world we know, simply observed—waves rolling forward in time and space—the second sea shots bespeak manipulation of that world (waves rolling backward in time and space). The
various sources for work on the footage and continued to advocate for its completion for the remainder of her life. Whether she meant eventually to realize her design for the film, or simply consigned the footage to the solitary dark of the Medaglia d’Oro coffee cans she used for safekeeping her films because it would not conform to her plans, the project went through a series of possible purposes that it more or less fulfilled at different phases along the way. Deren received the news that she
own movements), here “the camera is confronted,” albeit not yet obliged to battle, and the manner of filming echoes the increasing energy of the performer, with the camera dipping and bobbing in an effort to frame his movements. FIGURE 4.1 Parabola describing the structure of Meditation on Violence. (Courtesy Boston University Special Collections) The final section to be developed, Sword Shao-Lin, builds on this increase to lash out against the camera; Deren notes that here “The camera is
making art, and yet a recognition of “the vigor of not knowing quite what is going to happen” concatenate and vie for balance in the Deren oeuvre. She simultaneously acknowledges the life-giving force of accident and the need to assert what control we can over it. Indeed, Deren maintained both at once in her approach to documenting and transforming the world: “camera reality,” as she described it, uses the world before the camera as raw material for images wholly unique to cinema, through its
