The Maya Deren Collection

 

Born in Kyiv, Maya Deren is one of the most important American experimental filmmakers of all time. She was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer and photographer, bringing all of these disciplines together in her dreamlike and ecstatic films.

During the month of January, Filmatique is streaming a collection of Deren's seminal films. Perhaps her most famous work Meshes of the Afternoon and the lesser-known marvel At Land are available to watch alongside four of Deren's dance films, a portrait of voodoo ceremonies in Haiti, as well as Martina Kudlacek's 2001 documentary on the artist.

 
 

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Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid (1943)

 

Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid / USA, 1943

 

A flower on a sunny sidewalk. A woman in black enters an empty house, the record-player spinning, the telephone off the hook. Out the window, a shrouded figure strides out of view as the woman chases after her. Witness to herself, the woman embarks on an eerie journey of looped temporality and disassociation.

Produced for a mere $275, and exploring the elasticity of physical space and time through jump cuts, high-speed cinematography, and superimposition, Meshes of the Afternoon challenged contemporary notions of cinematic continuity, influencing generations of filmmakers to come.

 
 

At Land, Maya Deren (1944)

 

At Land, Maya Deren / USA, 1944

 

Considered the mother of avant-garde filmmaking, Maya Deren's At Land provides a psychogeographical journey where Deren washes up on a beach and encounters a multiplicity of selves.

 
 
 

A Study in Choreography for the Camera, Maya Deren / USA, 1945

 

Of her 1940s dance films A Study in Choreography for Camera, Ritual in Transfigured Time, Meditation on Violence, and The Very Eye of the Night, Deren wrote "I have attempted to place a dancer in limitless, cinemato-graphic space."

 
 

The Private Life of a Cat, Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid (1946)

 

The Private Life of a Cat, Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid / USA, 1946

 

Co-directed with frequent collaborator Alexander Hammid, The Private Life of a Cat casts an intimate lens on feline life, prefiguring the contemporary craze for cat videos.

 
 
 
 

Considered the mother of avant-garde filmmaking, Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen is a remarkable hour-long montage of Haitian Voodoo ceremonies.

 
 

In the Mirror of Maya Deren, Martina Kudlácek (2002)

 

In the Mirror of Maya Deren, Martina Kudlácek / Austria, Switzerland & Germany, 2002

 

Maya Deren is considered by many to be the most innovative avant-garde filmmaker in the history of American cinema. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Deren's family fled the USSR in 1922 to escape anti-Semitic pogroms. They settled in Syracuse, New York, where Deren attended university before moving to Greenwich Village, where her social circle was populated with fellow European émigrés including Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Anaïs Nin. Revolting against the Hollywood studio system, Deren's low-budget black-and-white films—including the groundbreaking Meshes of the Afternoon—expanded the form beyond a mere vehicle for plot and hegemony.

Delving into Deren's singular cinematic world, In the Mirror of Maya Deren portrays not only the famed Troyskyist and feminist icon of experimental cinema, but the process behind her work. Martina Kudlácek’s third documentary premiered at Stockholm, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam and Vienna, where it won the Vienna Film Award.

 
 
 

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Curation by Ursula Grisham
Head Curator, Filmatique

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