When the name Maya Deren is mentioned, the first picture that comes to everybody's eyes is the figure of a woman standing on the window sticking to the glass and looking out. There is a reason for that. Maya Deren's opus and artwork can be described and depicted with that photo. From her view, the essence of her experimental film is read - frivolousness, opposing a different, question of identity, (auto) reflection, femininity. The phrase that best serves as an introduction to the art of this director, dancer and choreographer is her own quote: "It was as if I found a fitting glove. When I was writing poetry, I had to write down what I saw. Capturing movies, I no longer had to translate ... I could directly go from imaginative to film.
Maya Deren today represents the vision and the beginning of the growth of the experimental film, but her work, except in professional circles, is nowadays unrecognized, and her films are most often used as one of the weapons in feminist circles. Deren is one of the earliest directors who were looking for inspiration and motives in surrealism. Originally named Eleanor, at the beginning of her film career she changed her name to Maya, which in the translation of the Sanskrit means an illusion.
Birth and growth of the idea
Maya Deren is a woman who is difficult to put in a particular mold. She is not only a pioneer of experimental film, but an inspirational and successful dancer, choreographer, photographer, actress and poet, while she has performed all the roles of the film set-from the initial director to the role of screenwriter, cinematographer, actress. Born as Eleanor Derenkowski in 1917 in Kiev, so during World War II she emigrated whith her family to the United States where she studied journalism and political science and mastered European literature.
Her second husband, director Alexander Hammid, had a major role in her artistic development. They worked together on some of her most famous works, starting with the first and most significant Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943 and slowly moving her field of interest from dance to film. Namely, Deren takes part in dance during and immediately after studying and works as a personal assistant to Katherine Dunham, a successful choreographer and dancer whose work is based on anthropology and her own interest in African culture. Here Deren begins to interest in rituals, ethnography and iconography, which is later visible in her filmmaking.
After filming their first joint film, Deren and Hammid went to New York and gathered around the powerful art stream : Anais Nin, Salvador and Gala Dali, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas. Deren continues to shoot movies and increasingly incorporate her own reflections on identity and femininity. The first such film was At Land shot in 1944. In it, the director introduces criticism of social rituals and continues to use rhythm as a dominant art instrument. In her work, the rhythm comes from a combination of variations and repetitions, which is most clearly in the movie Meshes of the Afternoon.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
This fourteen-minute movie marks Maya Deren as the symbol and main icon of the American experimental movement. The main actors in it are her and her husband, Alexander Hammid. The film is based on surrealist tendencies, meaning a completely new form of expression of the subconscious, opening up to dreams and psychology. For a strong introspective role in this film, Deren received the Grand Prix Prize in Cannes in 1946. She states that film Meshes of the Afternoon was filmed to solve her own psychological doubts.
Though originally shot as a silent film, in 1959 her third husband, Teiji Ito, adds a sound that is very much inspired by traditional Japanese music. This film begins with Deren's talk about the issue of women and identity in general. Meshes of the Afternoon is the first narrative film in which the female figure is a self-criticizing male-female, personal identity and subconscious in the center. Deren is obviously influenced by directors such as Méliès whose magical style of editing with changing objects without any warning can be found in her work.
This film is a vision of the nightmares and projection of the dreamers cravings and fears. The protagonist of the film (Deren) is a woman who, coming back home, goes to sleep and slowly begins to realize that her dream is actually a reality. Deren says that everything in the dream has its foundation in the motifs seen in the first sequence: the knife, the key, the repetition of the stairs, the figure disappears behind the bend on the road. The shadow that the character of the film doesn't have has no clearly defined identity or power. The shadow represents the woman alone, her questionable and vague essence and mystery that she constantly returns and tries to reveal. What Daren wanted to show is, amongst other things, how reality differs when viewed from different perspectives and that each of us has his own reality.
Note: This was my translation from Croation to English from Zihr hr article ''Filmski Vremeplov: Maya deren, ženska vizija eksperimentalnog filma'' by T.Trstenjak