The filmmaker Maya Deren nearly single-handedly put experimental cinema on the American cultural map. Then, just as quickly, she fell out of that world, never to return in her too-brief lifetime.
, and, in the summer of 1944, she made another film of phantasmagorical imagination, “At Land.” Where “Meshes” ends with Deren as a bloody corpse, “At Land” begins with her body washing up on a beach—alive, as it turns out. Deren pulls herself up on a hefty bit of driftwood and, peering over its edge, finds herself in a banquet room, at the long table of a dinner party, where she crawls on the tablecloth between the cheerful and unfazed guests.
Among the audience at the Provincetown Playhouse was a twenty-four-year-old Austrian Jewish immigrant named, who said that the event made him recognize “a new kind of talent” in filmmaking, “an individual expressing a very deep inner need.
However, “Ritual” contains a nearly four-minute sequence of ingeniously conceived and thrillingly crafted stylization, which I consider the most fascinating scene that she ever filmed—and it’s one in which she doesn’t appear. It’s a party scene, shot in her own apartment, featuring the literati and glitterati of her circle As Durant observes, “In Deren’s edit, shots and gestures are rhythmically repeated, elevating casual movements into the realm of the choreographic.
Along with her furious repudiation of Hollywood formulas, celebrity worship, and commercialism, Deren also rejected the prevailing notions of documentary filmmaking. Documentary, she complained, lacked art and imagination; she envisioned nonfiction filmmaking, of the sort that she was undertaking in Haiti, to be as creative as the fantasies that she filmed at home.
Deren and her partner, the composer Teiji Ito, who became her third husband in 1960, were threatened with eviction and faced real hunger. Her dispute by mail with her landlord was epic and obsessive. Meanwhile, she turned to her mother to pay her utility bill, and she literally asked friends for food.
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