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| Curtis | Arnheim | Sitney | Essential Cinema | Top Menu |
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Deren was born in Russia in 1917. Her family moved to the United States when she was five. Her father, a psychiatrist, worked in Syracuse, New York. Her high school education took place in Switzerland and she attended Syracuse University as a journalism student. She got married, and moved to New York City where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University. At this time she also became active in left-wing radical politics. Her early creative interests were focused around poetry and dance. After her first marriage ended in divorce Deren became more involved in her creative life, especially with dance. In 1941 while on tour as an assistant with Katherine Dunham's dance company she met Alexander Hammid in Los Angeles. Hammid, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, was a film-maker. Deren and Hammid fell in love and got married in 1942. Together they collaborated on the film Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943. The film was shot in and around their Los Angeles home in two and a half weeks. Deren completed five other films before her death in 1961.
David Curtisfrom Experimental Cinema- A Fifty Year Evolution. Dell Publishing, New York. 1971
The first American to reach a wide audience with "personal" films was Maya Deren. She pioneered a dynamic approach to the screening of films by the film-makers themselves that led to a complete restructuring of non-theatrical distribution in the United States...Unable to place her films with a commercial distributor, she hired them out herself from her home in New York. Early in 1946 she rented the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street, New York, for a one-night show of her first three films. They generated such an interest that repeat screenings were arranged at once. This sudden success led to a whole series of performances all over the [United] States, a highpoint being their showing at the Film in Art series in San Francisco. (pages 65-67)
Rudolf Arnheimfrom "To Maya Deren" in Film Culture No. 24. Spring, 1962There is another, quieter but more magical [miracle of photography], one, which is that of the transformation of reality accomplished by the medium itself. While photographs earn gratitude by preserving corporeal appearance, we admire the new technique even more for its being able to dematerialize the familiar face of the girl into a precise shape of transparent whiteness...This transformation is the true miracle of the photographic image; and Maya Deren was one of its most delicate magicians....She was one of the artists and thinkers who speak of the great paradox of our time; who say that, although our civilization has come closest to penetrating the secrets of inorganic and organic matter, we are less familiar with the world of tangible things than any human tribe has ever been. And thus, in Maya Deren's films, the familiar world captures us by its pervasive strangeness... Maya Deren was always interested in ritual. She went to Haiti in search of the remnants of a culture in which symbolism of the human gesture and of the space in which the body moves was still standardized by what psychologists call "consensual validation." We, in the New York of the twentieth century, no longer profit from that sort of consensus. Our common standards are reduced to the practical. But we are still accessible to a picture language that, half-shrouded in personal meanings, half-revealed by common sensation, can call upon us, distant thought the caller may be.
P. Adams Sitneyfrom Visionary Film. 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press. New York. 1978
Essential CinemaWhen Anthology Film Archives first opened on December 1, 1970 it was described by its founders as the "first film museum exclusively devoted to the film as an art. "The art of cinema surfaces primarily when it divests itself of commercial norms." A group of five individuals who "[did] not represent a single school of taste or thought" selected those films which best represent film as an art form. The Film Selection Committee included: James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney.The following three works by Deren were selected as "essential works of the art of cinema" by the Film Selection Committee:
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Maya Deren- 1999 Cosmic Player Plate URL: http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/deren9.html Published: December 7, 1998 Copyright © 1998-1999 by the Cosmic Baseball Association email: editor@cosmicbaseball.com 726 |
