Cheap Maya Deren - Experimental Films (Video) (Maya Deren) Price

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But the rest of it, my god! What pretentious nonsense! People dancing around for five minutes, or floating against backgrounds of stars - it's like something a conspicuously untalented film student would produce. There aren't even any images that have any force (although we've already lowered the potential power of cinema to the lowest possible bar) - for the most part, I just found them incredibly monotonous. Once those white ghostly people started floating around the background of stars, they pretty much keep doing it - same thing with that dancing guy; he keeps dancing.

I have no idea about her Haitian movie: maybe it's good. The other movies on this tape actually reduced my opinion of Meshes of the Afternoon. Maybe it was a deliberate attempt at mystification that I had read far too much into. Someone else wrote something about how Deren fuses the aesthetic of Cocteau and Eisenstein: that's great, but these movies are bad! And those guys made good movies, that I enjoy watching. Deren can just go on fusing as many aesthetics as she'd like.

Only get this if you enjoy being confused and bored, or associate those qualities with works of art. Which, you know, it seems that many people do.

(The Changing Light at Sandover is great, by the way: go out and read that if you feel the need to be acquainted with Deren in some way.)

A crucial American avant garde artist
Maya Deren is, in many ways, the original American avant-garde filmmaker. Years--even decades--before many other filmmakers, Deren was engaging in a variety of experimental film projects. While these have never been widely seen and are not widely known, her work provided a model for a host of filmmakers seeking influences outside the Hollywood and European mainstream. To be honest, these are not, by today's standards, especially enjoyable films. Working with rather primitive equipment, with a rather low level of technical expertise, these films are more remarkable for their impressionistic, dreamlike, surreal subject matter. They are pieces that you respect and admire rather than love. Their greatest importance lies in their documenting the work of a true film pioneer. None of them have any plot to speak of, but function instead around movement or archetypal imagery. Much of Deren's significance lies in her suggesting alternatives to the narrative format prevalent in the larger filmworld.

I personally find Ms. Deren to be a remarkable beauty. It was not a beauty in vogue when she first started working in the forties, with her East European looks, exceedingly full lips, her wild and curly hair, and sometimes eerie gaze. As a personality, she crops up continually in literary and cultural reminiscences from the forties and fifties. She will pop up memorably in sections of Anais Nin's diary (or "liary" as many of those who appear in them will say). A memoir of a Greenwich Village party will mention her being in attendance. In her friend James Merrill's great THE CHANGING LIGHT AT ANDOVER, arguably the greatest long American poem after Williams's PATERSON, she is one of the persons Merrill tries to contact in the afterlife (her photo appears in the cast of characters in the inside covers). Deren may not be a household name, but she was well known to many people who were. She was a vital part of the hidden life of the American avant-garde.

My hope is that some company, preferably Criterion, will do a two DVD set of Deren's work, along the lines of their Stan Brakhage set (Deren's spiritual heir). The discs could contain both a fairly thorough collection of her highly influential short works, and her feature length documentary THE DIVINE HORSEMEN. I don't know that anyone will ever think of doing such a set, but if they do, it will be an essential item for anyone interested in American film or the American avant-garde.

To Receive With Our Eyes and Hearts
Eleanora Derenkovskaya was born in 1917 in the Ukraine. In 1922, Eleanora's family emigrated to the United States to escape social and political unrest. They settled with Eleanora's uncle in Syracuse, New York, officially shortening their last name to Deren.

Between 1933 and 1939, Eleanora studied journalism and English Literature at Syracuse University, New York University and Smith College. Upon graduation, she worked as an assistant to various writers, one of which was the choreographer/dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Eleanora's early experiences came to a climax in her 1939 essay titled "Religious Possession in Dancing".

In 1940, Eleanora married Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid and purchased a 16mm Bolex camera with a small inheritance from her father. It was around this time that she took on a new first name: Maya, meaning "veil of illusion" in Eastern mythology.

She used the new Bolex camera to create the startling unorthodox visual poetry of her first film "Meshes of the Afternoon"[1943]. Between 1944 and 1948, Maya created her major works: "At Land"[1944], "A Study In Choreography for Camera"[1945], "Ritual in Transfigured Time"[1946] and "Meditation On Violence"[1948]. All of which are featured here in "Experimental Films".

In 1953, in association with mythologist Joseph Campbell, Deren wrote a major work on the Vodoun religion titled "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti". Her final film, in 1955, was a choreographic collaboration with Anthony Tudor, that premiered in Haiti, titled: "The Very Eye of Night".

Maya's films were rediscovered in the 1970's and 80's at various women's film festivals, prompting Mystic Fire Video to release "Experimental Films" in 1987. A DVD version is now available which includes the bonus film "Private Life of a Cat" by Alexander Hammid.

For fans of "intensely personal, symbolic and surreal films", it does not get much better than this.