Maya Deren: Establishing the American Avant-Garde
When exploring the work of a filmmaker such as Maya Deren, it is hard not to talk about her untimely death. On October 13, 1961, Deren passed away at the age of 44 from a brain haemorrhage. This was very premature and sudden, depriving the world of many more films and projects that she had been working on. But even then, she still managed to leave a strong mark on the independent and avant-garde scene in America, being an inspiration for experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Barbara Hammer, as well as influencing Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, and countless others with only 6 finished short films under her belt.
Eleonora Derenkowska was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1917, and she migrated with her parents to New York in 1922 to escape anti-Semitic persecution from the USSR. Her father shortened their name to Deren, and later in life she changed her first name to Maya. Showing a strong artistic sensibility from a young age, she became interested in photography, music, art, literature, theatre and cinema. It was during her marriage with Czech photographer Alexander Hammid that she started making short films, the first being 1943’s Meshes of the Afternoon.
Made on a measly budget of around $250 and shot on a grainy 16mm Bolex camera, the short is a seminal piece of work not only for avant-garde filmmaking, but for American independent cinema as a whole. Inspired by Jean Cocteau’s surreal drama The Blood of a Poet, Deren made the most of her super-low budget with sheer ingenuity and creativity: rooting the narrative in an endless loop of increasingly more disturbing dreams, she utilised slow-motion, Dutch angles, quick cutting, and extreme close-ups to give the film a strong aesthetic that was unlike anything being produced in America at the time. There is no clear meaning, no message, no proper closure to the film; if anything, it only leaves the viewer with more questions than answers by the time the final image of Deren’s bloodied corpse appears on screen. Many of the images in the picture have become iconic, from the mirror-faced figure to the multiple versions of Deren’s character sitting at a table, with the recurring presence of a mysterious key being heavily reminiscent of the blue key from Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
Deren famously said, “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.” This quote perfectly encapsulates her politics of filmmaking, where the artist should not rely on big budgets and producers to make the art they want, instead only needing like-minded individuals and a camera to support them. Her sophomore short, At Land, saw her crafting an even more oneiric experience, where a woman keeps wandering from location to location in a seamless way, following a chess piece and ultimately escaping from all the past versions of herself. It is more impenetrable than Meshes of the Afternoon, which makes it even more intriguing and worthy of examination. The imagery on display is striking, and Deren perfectly captures the haunting state of getting lost inside a dream, as if the body was moving beyond the mind’s control. Two girls playing chess on a beach automatically bring to mind the incipit of The Seventh Seal, where Bergman had Knight Antonius Block challenge Death to the same game, while the introduction to Deren on the beach was replicated in the most iconic scene of the Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity.
It was during this period that Deren became increasingly less interested with cinema as a storytelling medium, and more as a tool to capture and manipulate reality. The movement of her body was a key visual element of her first films, and going forward, her fascination with dance became increasingly prevalent. With 1945’s A Study in Choreography for Camera, she brought the worlds of dance and film together, creating something that could only exist in cinematic form: dancer Talley Beatty moves around different locations, the camera closely following his movements, creating a pleasant visual rhythm complemented by the editing, which slows down, speeds up, and reverses the movements of the choreography, smoothly connecting the moves from one location to another. This manipulation of time and motion was further expanded upon in Ritual in Transfigured Time, where the metaphor of a girl escaping a populated ball stands for the abandonment of societal rituals, as well as Deren’s own abandonment of filmmaking conventions, embracing a style of filmmaking that was wholly personal and dismissive of what other auteurs were producing at the time.
It was in the late ‘40s that Deren became obsessed with Haiti and voodoo practices. She ended up travelling to the Caribbean country multiple times, getting sucked into an ethnographic research for a documentary that never truly materialised into anything outside of hundreds of hours of unsorted footage that her third husband, Teiji Ito, and his fourth wife, Cherel, assembled together into Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. The same incompleteness applied to many other projects that she started working on during that time, with only 1948’s Meditation on Violence and 1958’s The Very Eye of Night being released before her unfortunate demise. These works were more conventionally experimental in the modern sense, meaning that the subversive, hard to grasp narratives of her first films became audio-visual experiments that used filmmaking as a means in and of itself to capture and manipulate real images, without the pretence of conveying a message to the viewers.
In a way, it is fitting that many of Maya Deren’s works were left unfinished, some being edited posthumously following some of her guidelines. The esoteric Witch’s Cradle (produced in 1944) features a circle that appears over and over, reading, “The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning is . . . ” Loops, circles, repetitions, Moebius strips, and a lack of finality always fascinated Deren, and the efforts of certain academics trying to reassemble much of the unedited footage that she left behind are a worthy attempt to bring closure to an artist that left the world too soon. This is part of the allure of discovering the films of this director: seeing her style change over time, the stories becoming looser and the experiments more alienating, leaving behind more unfinished projects than completed ones.
Maya Deren created a type of cinema that was immensely creative, ambitious, properly independent, and personal. She made films her own way, without the approval of studios or wealthy producers. She is the epitome of the strong female artist and avant-garde auteur, pushing the boundaries of her favourite art form, and leaving a strong mark in a prevalently male-dominated industry. She united her European sensibilities and penchant for the surreal and occult with the ambition of the American Dream, fully succeeding in paving the way to a new generation of artists. Deren proved that big budgets and large casts were not needed to make a memorable piece of art, which led young filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Barbara Hammer to pick up a camera and start making films on their own terms, regardless of conventions of the time and expectations of the mainstream, developing a strong branch of the American avant-garde. They did not see cinema as a business or piece of entertainment, but as an expression of the self and the world surrounding them, which is what Deren always fought for, her legacy one that will never be forgotten.