Maya Deren

Maya Deren is known as a pioneer in experimental filmmaking, however her role a performer is the most pertinent form of expression in her early films. I will argue that Deren is primarily performance artist, simply working in the medium of film. Deren is drawn to film’s ability to capture the poetry of movement.

I believe that if video had been accessible to her, she would have preferred it. Given the difficulty she had acquiring the funding to make her films, she may have been inclined to make a much larger body of video work because of its comparative affordability.

The narratives in Derens works are much more ambiguous than conventional film. Instead of being driving by story, her performances are comprised of a series of gestures. Maya’s use of gesture is derived from various traditions of live performance including dance. Maya brings the presence of dance into her films simply through the way she moves through the space. She has been described as a dancer, who is not dancing.

Film enabled Deren to explore spaces outside of the conventional live performance environments. Deren performs in remote locations and vicariously brings her audiences to these locations on screen. For instance, in her experimental film “At Land” she creates the metaphor of being a mermaid washed up at shore. Additionally, she is able to manipulate the limitations of time is space. Through film editing, Maya’s performances weave seamlessly between various locations giving the impression that she is navigating through a dream.

In Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren performs multiple characters in her films and through editing she constructs implied relationships between these characters. Through this process, identity is longer a slave of the singular body of live performance. Thus identity becomes decentralized and hangs loose in an altered state of reality.

Later in her career, Maya created collaborative works with artists who expressed themselves through dance (A Study for Choreography for Camera) and martial arts (Meditation of Violence). In relationship to her later works, Deren states, “special attention must be given to the creative possibilities of Time, and that the form as a whole should be ritualistic”. This idea was most clearly articulated in her finished film Ritual in Transfigured Time. As an extension of her art practice, she visited Haiti where she immersed herself within the Haitian Voudoun traditions.