Microcinema DVDs - In the Mirror of Maya Deren

2007-05-22 Film Threat
By Phil Hall

As a filmmaker, Maya Deren's output was fairly limited: only six short films, all made in 16mm, created during a 10-year period. Yet Deren's influence, both in the creative process and in the exhibition of independent cinema, is still felt to this day.

"In the Mirror of Maya Deren" is an excellent new documentary by Martina Kudlacek that focuses on the extraordinary life and astonishing productions of this groundbreaking artist. Perhaps it is a bit strange that it took so long for a film about Deren to be made, but this engrossing and fascinating feature more than makes up for the wait.

Deren was born Eleanora Derenkovskaya in Kiev in 1917. Her family emigrated to America when she was five and she was educated a posh Swiss boarding school and at Syracuse University and New York University. An early marriage to a Socialist activist did not pan out (the man's name is coyly not presented here), and the young Deren found work in various secretarial positions, including a stint with legendary choreographer Katherine Dunham (who recalls Deren in this film with very measured fondness). Deren came to Hollywood with Dunham's company and met Alexander Hammid, an exiled Czech filmmaker. Deren and Hammid fell in love and married, and in their first collaboration she purchased a second-hand 16mm Bolex camera to create an avant-garde short film.

The result of their collaboration was the 1943 "Meshes of the Afternoon." The silent, black-and-white film served up surreal imagery reminiscent of the Buñuel-Dali collaborations of the late 1920s, but its ethereal quality plus Deren's exotic on-screen presence as a woman lost in a strange dream made it stand out as a distinct and original work of art. "Meshes of the Afternoon" would later win an award at Cannes for experimental filmmaking, the first time such an honor was given to an American and a woman. (Sadly, Deren and Hammid divorced after the Cannes award was presented.)

"In the Mirror of Maya Deren" presents generous excerpts from Deren's films, mercifully in their original silent versions and not with the new scores added years later by her third husband, composer Teijo Ito. As a filmmaker, Deren broke new ground and taboos with her stunning imagery. "At Land" (1944) brings three women into a contact of an obviously Sapphic nature, while "Ritual in Transfigured Time" (1946) dared to erase color lines by having Trinidad-born Rita Christiani in a starring role where race is not an issue. Deren's fascination with capturing the grace and poetry of modern dance on film provided her audiences with "A Study in Choreography for Camera" (1945) with Talley Beatty as the lithe focus of the lens, "Meditation on Violence" (1946) with Chao-Li Chi mixing martial arts into balletic movements, and "The Very Eye of Night" (1955), with choreography by the legendary Antony Tudor and performances by his Metropolitan Opera Ballet School.

Working outside of the Hollywood system and with no chance for mainstream theatrical release of her film, Deren single-handedly wrote new rules, which are still in effect for the indie film world. She sought self-financing via an application for a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, making her the first filmmaker to seek and obtain such funding. In 1946, she leased New York's Provincetown Playhouse to present her short films on a single bill called "Three Abandoned Films," thus simultaneously inventing the notion of a shorts anthology as a feature and the concept of four-walling a theater. Deren later booked national tours of her films, also laying the groundwork for self-distribution (an avenue which has more than come into its own in the past few years). And, of course, her pursuit of avant-garde filmmaking clearly inspired the later works of such iconoclasts as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas (the latter two are among those interviewed in this film).

One of the joys of "In the Mirror of Maya Deren" is the ultra-rare presentation of material, which could have been Deren's masterpiece. Between 1947 and 1955, Deren conducted extensive research into Haitian culture, filming voodoo-inspired rituals and ceremonies and recording the island's folk music. While her time in Haiti produced the classic book "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti" (1953), her plans to create a documentary on the Haitian culture never came anywhere near completion. For the first time, portions of this long unseen are shown here and the result is astonishing. Deren's hand-held camera brought her into the middle of celebrations, capturing the rapture and frenzy of participants who seemed possessed by both the force of ritual and perhaps the power of voodoo, while the singing and instrumentals she recorded is a raw, rich slice of Haiti's unique musical heritage. In many ways, Deren's unfinished material rivals the genius of Orson Welles' aborted Brazilian-based documentary "It's All True."

Sadly, Deren's work did not generate consistent financial stability and her death by cerebral hemorrhage in 1961 may have been caused in part due to periods of hunger brought about by simply having no money for food. While "In the Mirror of Maya Deren" does not speculate on where her career could have gone had she survived, it nonetheless offers a remarkable tribute to one of the few people who genuinely deserves to be known as a pioneer of filmmaking. In the genre of films about films, "In the Mirror of Maya Deren" is among the best.

2007-05-22 ReelTalk
By Donald Levit

A mite long at 103 minutes (but why quibble?), In the Mirror of Maya Deren is a visually and spiritually rewarding documentary. Young Prague-based Austrian writer-director Martina Kudláček brings a background in Super-8 and 16 mm filmmaking and –preservation, in video, theater and art history to bear on her avant-garde subject, whom she obviously admires but from whom she keeps enough distance to notice both beauty marks and warts.

Moreover, because the too little-known subject of this spiritual biography was herself physical and visual (a dancer-choreographer and astounding filmmaker as well as writer and poetess), this documentary sidesteps the usual lineup of talking heads commenting about someone or something. Instead, we are treated to a wealth of Deren’s own work, lyric passages on time, mutability, various forms of dance and movement, reflecting surfaces and the sea. Even in those free-form interviews here, attention is drawn, not to speaking faces and mouths, but to busy hands shuffling photographs of Maya, unwinding her film, and beating ringed-finger tattoos on shiny conch shells or painting in Haiti, and to effective touches where, for instance, an eighty-ish former dancer conquers a tear by raising her long skirts and shuffling gracefully.

Born Eleanora Derenkovskaya in Kiev to cultured, leftist Jewish parents, Maya – an ancient word for water, we are told, and Buddha’s mother’s name – came to the U.S. at five. Educated at the League of Nations School in Geneva and then at American universities and earning a Master’s Degree in English literature, the young woman’s initial attraction was to dance. Soon, using a second-hand 16 mm Bolex, she turned to experimental films. She never really left the world of choreography, however, for her haunting black-and-white films are paeans to what Faulkner called "non-stasis," to the flux and beauty of change in forms and position, human and otherwise.

Creating a poetic dream intimacy between camera and object in her short "chamber films" – excepting two (unfinished) compilations, all under twenty-nine minutes – the filmmaker emphasized the duality inherent in things. Women are veiled then unveiled, land turns into sea, stark chess pieces acquire their female players’ egos, scrim stars cross the sky. All is movement, the fiery Heraclitean wheel of becoming, particularly the human body. Recording herself running up stairs or along sand to enter surf, or the explosive grace of dancers, she captured the otherworldly in and behind the human form. One thinks of Riefenstahl’s monumantalistic Olympic athletes, but simpler, without noxious sociopolitical implication.

Distinct from this age of many militant ism’s, Deren did not emphasize "feminism," but "female," the child-bearing, patient insight that sees vertically, deeply, through time to metamorphosis, rather than the "masculine" horizontality of the "now" moment. This view led her to a wide variety of projects – half of her films were unfinished or unpublished – including a fascination with children’s games as ritual and, to a greater degree, almost an obsession with Haiti, where she spent months filming voodoo ceremony and dance. Together with the latter work (the uncompleted four-hour Haitian Film Footage.), her early essay, "Religious Possession in Dancing," and an ethnographical study titled Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, testify to a vision of dance-induced trance as a gateway to man’s spiritual side.

Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the first American as well as first woman to be awarded the Cannes Festival Grand Prix for experimental 16 mm film, active in the coterie of famous Greenwich Village artists in the ‘forties and ‘fifties, Maya Deren died in 1961, of perhaps debatable causes. She was forty-four.

Although at least one close friend says that she had peaked and would not have dealt well with the aging process, still one wonders how this brilliantly talented avant-garde figure can be so unknown today. Here, talented artists and dancers and collaborators comment on her work; Utne has included her among its "40 Past Masters Who Still Matter"; and New York City’s important Anthology Film Archives has its film and video Maya Deren Theater. One hopes that In the Mirror of Maya Deren will restore this remarkable woman to a deserved niche among our visionary creators.

2006-12-20 www.sensesofcinema.com
By Rebecca Bachman

Martina Kudlácek's 2002 documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren mines an extant archive in the creation of cultural citizenship. It does so in the form of Deren “material”, weaving, layering and collaging 16mm film, audio clips, contemporary interview footage, photographs of paper-based archival material (handbills, movie posters) and the like, creating, in effect, a moving image, audio, photograph, and manuscript-based archive including, among other things: photographs of the young Elaenora Derenowksy, an emigrant from Kiev, Russia in 1917; silent 16mm black-and-white ethnographic footage of Haitian Voodoo ceremonies filmed from approximately 1947 to 1958; clips from Deren's films Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) and The Very Eye of Night (1959); recorded interviews with Deren's second husband (Czech cameraman) Alexander (Sasha) Hammid, as well as her third husband, Teiji Ito. Layered non-diegetically across the film is the unforgettable voice of Maya herself, painstakingly preserved. One might say it's a voice of the archive, from the archive – and we're lucky to hear her speak.

The archive is a sub-theme running throughout the film, beginning with footage of Anthology Film Archives' Executive Director Jonas Mekas standing in his organisation's famous East Village, New York City archive and exhibition venue, addressing the camera, reminiscing about Deren whilst fondling spools of 16mm film. Again and again, we see the leitmotif of Deren's archive: in “preservation” quality 16mm cans, or in Stella D'Oro coffee cans. These are used as cutaways, presumably to denote the role of the archive, the materiality of the film and the role that Kudlácek herself played in the archive while making this film (1).

Kudlácek's “author-function” was as an archivist and filmmaker while in the process of producing her film on Deren. When I ran into her at Anthology Film Archives in the spring of 2003, she said that her work on the Deren footage in the archive was an essential part of the deal she had struck enabling her to access the footage for her film on Maya (2). Kudlácek should be lauded for her willingness to engage in the extremely labour intensive practice of archival work – an activity that very few documentary filmmakers would have the patience or the wherewithal to endure.

Another motif that runs across the film, although perhaps not as obviously evident, is the notion of the artist, intellectual, and/or religious or spiritual personage as a cultural citizen, another type Kudlácek sees Deren as the embodiment of. Repetition also brings the viewer, over and over, face to face (through the interview footage) with the discourse of immigration: Jonas Mekas, the Vogels, Sasha Hammid, Teiji Ito. Yet, one senses that the discourse of citizenship is as much about that of the filmmaker and her interviewees as it was about Deren and her constellation of friends, collaborators, lovers, mentors. Perhaps the image in the mirror of Maya Deren is the filmmaker Kudlácek herself; but then again, identification with a “star” persona such as Deren's is possibly one of the ways in which a documentary filmmaker can recoup symbolic capital, given the limited possibilities for remuneration offered by the documentary form, unless one is distributed by Miramax and produced by Michael Moore.

In an era when classic US documentaries such as the award-winning PBS series The Eyes on the Prize are pulled from distribution because of copyright and licensing problems (3), one can only be grateful that a documentarian (such as Kudlácek) would take the time to painstakingly process – and by that I mean accessioning, cataloguing, re-housing and (at the very least) re-organising – the various strands and pieces of miscellaneous Deren footage and audio ephemera housed at Anthology. Because there is a lack of funding for archiving what are known as “orphan” films – films that do not necessarily have clear ownership for copyright purposes – artist's estates such as those of Deren's rely on the vicissitudinous nature of state archival funding initiatives for preservation. This has meant that films, videos, audio, and manuscripts collections falling into this category have, for the most part, been in such IP and/or preservation disrepair they've been unusable for production purposes.

Nonetheless, Martina Kudlácek, the “author as archivist”, has not only created a new work of art, but has engaged in a feat of archival cultural citizenship that functions to preserve the Deren legacy, by bringing the work out of the archive and into the public sphere. And for those lucky enough to view this documentary in a theatrical setting, that surely is worth the price of admission alone.