Maya Deren

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Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkovskaya, (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961) was a Ukrainian-born (then part of the Russian Empire, now independent Ukraine) American experimental filmmaker and important part of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s.  Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.

The function of film, Deren believed, was to create an experience.  She combined her expertise in dance and choreography, ethnography, the African spirit religion of Haitian Vodou, symbolist poetry and gestalt psychology (as a student of Kurt Koffka) in a series of perceptual, black-and-white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump-cutting, superimposition, slow-motion, and other camera techniques to her advantage, Deren abandoned established notions of physical space and time, innovating through carefully planned films with specific conceptual aims.

Early Life

Deren was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Russian Empire, now independent Ukraine, into a Jewish family, to psychologist Solomon Derenkowsky and Gitel-Malka (Marie) Fiedler, who supposedly named their daughter after Italian actress Eleonora Duse.

In 1922, the family fled the Ukrainian SSR because of antisemitic pogroms perpetrated by the White Volunteer Army and moved to Syracuse, New York.  Her father shortened the family name from Derenkovskaya to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York.  He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse.  Deren's mother was a musician and dancer who had studied these arts in Kyiv.  In 1928, Deren's parents became naturalized citizens of the United States.

Deren was highly intelligent, starting fifth grade at only eight years old.  She attended the League of Nations International School of Geneva, Switzerland for high school from 1930 to 1933.  Her mother moved to Paris, France to be nearer to her while she studied.  Deren learned to speak French while she was abroad.

Deren enrolled at Syracuse University at sixteen, where she began studying journalism and political science.  Deren became a highly active socialist activist during the Trotskyist movement in her late teens.  She served as National Student Secretary in the National Student office of the Young People's Socialist League and was a member of the Social Problems Club at Syracuse University.

At age eighteen in June 1935, she married Gregory Bardacke, a socialist activist whom she met through the Social Problems Club.  After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City.  She finished school at New York University with a Bachelor's degree in literature in June 1936, and returned to Syracuse that fall.  She and Bardacke became active in various socialist causes in New York City; and it was during this time that they separated and eventually divorced three years later.

In 1938, Deren attended the New School for Social Research, and received a master's degree in English literature at Smith College.  Her Master's thesis was titled The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry (1939).  This included works of Pound, Eliot, and the Imagists.  By the age of 21, Deren had earned two degrees in literature.

Early Career

After graduation from Smith, Deren returned to New York's Greenwich Village, where she joined the European émigré art scene.  She supported herself from 1937 to 1939 by freelance writing for radio shows and foreign-language newspapers.  During that time she also worked as an editorial assistant to famous American writers Eda Lou Walton, Max Eastman, and then William Seabrook.  She wrote poetry and short fiction, tried her hand at writing a commercial novel, and also translated a work by Victor Serge which was never published.  She became known for her European-style handmade clothes, wild red curly hair and fierce convictions.

In 1940, Deren moved to Los Angeles to focus on her poetry and freelance photography.  In 1941, Deren wrote to Katherine Dunham—an African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist of Caribbean culture and dance—suggesting a children's book on dance and applying for a managerial job for her and her dance troupe; she later became Dunham's assistant and publicist.  Deren traveled with the troupe for a year, learning greater appreciation for dance, as well as interest and appreciation for Haitian culture.  Dunham's fieldwork influenced Deren's studies of Haitian culture and Vodou mythology.  At the end of touring a new musical Cabin in the Sky, the Dunham dance company stopped in Los Angeles for several months to work in Hollywood.  It was there that Deren met Alexandr Hackenschmied (who later changed his name to Alexander Hammid), a celebrated Czech-born photographer and cameraman who would become Deren's second husband in 1942.  Hackenschmied had fled from Czechoslovakia in 1938 after the Sudetenland crisis.

Personal Life

In 1943, she moved to a bungalow on Kings Road in Hollywood and adopted the name Maya, a pet name her second husband Hammid coined.  Maya is the name of the mother of the historical Buddha as well as the dharmic concept of the illusory nature of reality.  In Greek myth, Maia is the mother of Hermes and a goddess of mountains and fields.

In 1944, back in New York City, her social circle included Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, John Cage, and Anaïs Nin.  In 1944, Deren filmed The Witch's Cradle in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery with Duchamp featured in the film.

Film Career

Deren defined cinema as an art, provided an intellectual context for film viewing, and filled a theoretical gap for the kinds of independent films that film societies were featuring.  As Sarah Keller states, “Maya Deren lays claim to the honor of being one of the most important pioneers of the American film avant-garde with a scant seventy-five or so minutes of finished films to her credit.”

Deren began to screen and distribute her films in the United States, Canada, and Cuba, lecturing and writing on avant-garde film theory, and additionally on Vodou.  In February 1946 she booked the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village for a major public exhibition, titled Three Abandoned Films, in which she showed Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944) and A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945).  The event was completely sold out, inspiring Amos Vogel's formation of Cinema 16, the most successful film society of the 1950s.

In her work, she often focused on the unconscious experience, such as in Meshes of the Afternoon.  This is thought to be inspired by her father who was a student of psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev who explored trance and hypnosis as neurological states.  She also regularly explored themes of gender identity, incorporating elements of introspection and mythology.  Despite her feminist subtext, she was mostly unrecognized by feminist writers at the time, even influential writers Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey ignored Deren at the time, though Mulvey later would give Deren this recognition, since their works were often in conversation with each other.

Major Films

In 1943, Deren purchased a used 16mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack.  This camera was used to make her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), made in collaboration with Hammid in their Los Angeles home on a budget of $250.  Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film.  Critics have seen autobiographical elements in the film, as well as thoughts about woman as subject rather than as object.  Originally a silent film with no dialog, music for the film was composed, long after its initial screenings, by Deren's third husband Teiji Ito in 1952.  The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film", full of dramatic angles and innovative editing.  It investigates the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations.  A woman, played by Maya Deren, walks up to a house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and seems to have a dream.  The sequence of walking up to the gate on the partially shaded road restarts numerous times, resisting conventional narrative expectations, and ends in various situations inside the house.  Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream.  Recurring symbols include a cloaked figure, mirrors, a key, and a knife.

The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities.  The camera initially does not show her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman, which creates a universalizing, totalizing effect- as it is easier to relate to an unknown, faceless woman.  Multiple selves appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting that the super-ego is at play, which is in line with the psychoanalytic Freudian staircase and flower motifs.  This kind of Freudian interpretation, which she disagreed with, led Deren to add sound, composed by Teiji Ito, to the film.

Director's Notes

There is no concrete information about the conception of Meshes of the Afternoon beyond that Deren offered the poetic ideas and Hammid was able to turn them into visuals, as she envisioned them.  Deren's initial concept began on the terms of a subjective camera, one that would show the point of view of herself without the aid of mirrors and would move as her eyes through spaces.  According to the earliest program note, she describes Meshes of the Afternoon as follows:

This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual.  It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons.  Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

By her fourth film, Deren discussed in An Anagram that she felt special attention should be given to unique possibilities of time and that the form should be ritualistic as a whole.  Ritual in Transfigured Time began in August and was completed in 1946.  It explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual, looking at the details as well as the bigger ideas of the nature and process of change.  The main roles were played by Deren herself and the dancers Rita Christiani and Frank Westbrook.

Criticism of Hollywood

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Deren attacked Hollywood for its artistic, political and economic monopoly over American cinema.  She stated, "I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick," criticizing the amount of money spent on production.  She also observed that Hollywood "has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form."  She set herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry's standards and practices.  Deren talks about the freedoms of independent cinema:

Artistic freedom means that the amateur filmmaker is never forced to sacrifice visual drama and beauty to a stream of words...to the relentless activity and explanations of a plot...nor is the amateur production expected to return profit on a huge investment by holding the attention of a massive and motley audience for 90 minutes...Instead of trying to invent a plot that moves, use the movement of wind, or water, children, people, elevators, balls, etc. as a poem might celebrate these.  And use your freedom to experiment with visual ideas; your mistakes will not get you fired.

Haiti and Vodou

When Maya Deren decided to make an ethnographic film in Haiti, she was criticized for abandoning avant-garde film where she had made her name, but she was ready to expand to a new level as an artist.  She had studied ethnographic footage by Gregory Bateson in Bali in 1947, and was interested in including it in her next film.  In September, she divorced Hammid and left for a nine-month stay in Haiti.  The Guggenheim Fellowship grant in 1946 enabled Deren to finance her travel and film footage for what would posthumously become Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.  She went on three additional trips through 1954 to document and record the rituals of Haitian Vodou.

A source of inspiration for ritual dance was Katherine Dunham who wrote her master's thesis on Haitian dances in 1939, which Deren edited.  While working as Dunham's assistant, Deren was given access to Dunham's archive which included 16mm documents on the dances in Trinidad and Haiti.  Exposure to these documents led her to write her 1942 essay titled, "Religious Possession in Dancing."  Afterwards, Deren wrote several articles on religious possession in dancing before her first trip to Haiti.  Deren filmed, recorded and photographed many hours of Vodou ritual, but she also participated in the ceremonies.  She documented her knowledge and experience of Vodou in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: Vanguard Press, 1953), edited by Joseph Campbell, which is considered a definitive source on the subject.  She described her attraction to Vodou possession ceremonies, transformation, dance, play, games and especially ritual came from her strong feeling on the need to decenter our thoughts of self, ego and personality.  In her book An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film she wrote:

The ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of the dramatic action, but as a somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole.  The intent of such depersonalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension and frees him from the specializations and confines of personality.  He becomes part of a dynamic whole which, like all such creative relationships, in turn, endow its parts with a measure of its larger meaning.

Deren filmed 18,000 feet of Vodou rituals and people she met in Haiti on her Bolex camera.  The footage was incorporated into a posthumous documentary film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, edited and produced in 1977 (with funding from Deren's friend James Merrill) by her ex-husband, Teiji Ito (1935–1982), and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947–1999).  All of the original wire recordings, photographs and notes are held in the Maya Deren Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.  The film footage is housed at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

An LP of some of Deren's wire recordings was published by the newly formed Elektra Records in 1953 entitled Voices of Haiti. The cover art for the album was by Teiji Ito.

Anthropologists Melville Herkovitz and Harold Courlander acknowledged the importance of Divine Horsemen, and in contemporary studies it is often cited as an authoritative voice, where Deren's methodology has been especially praised because "Vodou has resisted all orthodoxies, never mistaking surface representations for inner realities."

In her book of the same name Deren uses the spelling Voudoun, explaining: "Voudoun terminology, titles and ceremonies still make use of the original African words and in this book they have been spelled out according to usual English phonetics and so as to render, as closely as possible, the Haitian pronunciation.  Most of the songs, sayings and even some of the religious terms, however, are in Creole, which is primarily French in derivation (although it also contains African, Spanish and Indian words).  Where the Creole word retains its French meaning, it has been written out so as to indicate both the original French word and the distinctive Creole pronunciation."  In her Glossary of Creole Words, Deren includes 'Voudoun' while the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary draws attention to the similar French word, Vaudoux.

Death

Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44 from a brain hemorrhage, which has been attributed to a combination of malnutrition and drug use.  Her condition may have also been weakened by her long-term dependence on amphetamines and sleeping pills prescribed by Max Jacobson, a doctor and member of the arts scene, notorious for his liberal prescription of drugs, who later became famous as one of President John F. Kennedy's physicians.

Her ashes were scattered in Japan at Mount Fuji.

Legacy

Deren was an inspiration to such up-and-coming avant-garde filmmakers as Curtis Harrington, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger, who emulated her independent, entrepreneurial spirit.  Her influence can also be seen in films by Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Su Friedrich.  In his review for renowned experimental filmmaker David Lynch's Inland Empire, writer Jim Emerson compares the work to Meshes of the Afternoon, apparently a favorite of Lynch's.

Deren was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema, highlighting personal, experimental, underground film.  In 1986, the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor independent filmmakers.

In 1994, the UK-based Horse and Bamboo Theatre created and toured Dance of White Darkness throughout Europe—the story of Deren's visits to Haiti.

Deren's films have also been shown with newly written alternative soundtracks:

In 2004, the British rock group Subterraneans produced new soundtracks for six of Deren's short films as part of a commission from Queen's University Belfast's annual film festival.  At Land won the festival prize for sound design.

In 2008, the Portuguese rock group Mão Morta produced new soundtracks for four of Deren's short films as part of a commission from Curtas Vila do Conde's annual film festival.