Maya Deren

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A black and white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian vodou that was shot by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren between 1947 and 1952 and edited and completed by Deren’s third husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren’s death. Most of the film consists of images of dancing and bodies in motion during rituals in Rada and Petro services. Deren had studied dance as well as photography and filmmaking. She originally went to Haiti with the funding from a Guggenheim fellowship and the stated intention of filming the dancing that forms a crucial part of the vodou ceremony. The film that resulted, however, reflected Deren’s increasing personal engagement with vodou and its practitioners (Wilcken, 1986). While this ultimately resulted in Deren disregarding the guidelines of the fellowship, Deren was able to record scenes that probably would have been inaccessible to other filmmakers. Deren’s original notes, film footage, and wire recordings are in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archive Research Center.Read More »

“Created by Maya Deren as part of a Toronto Film Society workshop, this unpublished film ‘poem’ is a luminous work of nighttime choreography. It was also a trial run for her later film, The Very Eye of Night” — from the dvdRead More »

A young Oriental man with a headscarf and bare torso shadowboxes indoors in front of a series of unadorned walls, light, dark, both shades. He is then shown exercising outside with a sword in an area surrounded by a low stone wall and overlooking a river, before there is a return to the first sequence.Read More »

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“In 1944 Maya made a film at the Peggy Guggenheim Art of this Century Gallery with Marcel Duchamp called Witches Cradle. Deren used the camera, as she envisioned medieval witches and magicians did, to ‘defy’ time and space through the disappearance and reappearance of objects. Based on an article written by the Frenchman Charles Duits, colleague of Andre Breton and an extra in Ritual in Transfigured Time, Deren compared these medieval witches and magicians to the surrealists, and had a brief association with the movement. She resisted the label attached to her work and defended her position in scholarship and on tour for lecture/demonstrations.” (algonet.se)Read More »

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Ritual in Transfigured Time is like a dream, meaning that the various sequences don’t seem to have any connection to each other unless you try to approach this film in a different way and not as a conventional hollywood movie.

The main character in the film is Rita Christiani who after a strange scene with Maya Deren herself who disappears startling Rita, appears in this ball with ladies and gentlemen dancing. This film has one of the most beautiful scenes in a Maya Deren’s film when Rita Christiani while she’s dancing she appears to float in the air.Read More »

A man dances in several locations, edited to have a fluent effect.Read More »

A solitary flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a phone off the hook: discordant images a woman sees as she comes home. She naps and, perhaps, dreams. She sees a hooded figure going down the driveway. The knife is on the stair, then in her bed. The hooded figure puts the flower on her bed then disappears. The woman sees it all happen again. Downstairs, she naps, this time in a chair. She awakes to see a man going upstairs with the flower. He puts it on the bed. The knife is handy. Can these dream-like sequences end happily? A mirror breaks, the man enters the house again. Will he find her?Read More »

Silently, a woman wakes on a beach as the tides go in reverse. Her dreamscape unfolds as she tries to locate a chess piece traveling from the beach to a party to a country road and then back.Read More »

This evocative tribute to the mother of American avantgarde film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Friends and contemporaries float through her homes, recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren’s architectural and personal interior space. Clips from her films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know.”
BERLINALERead More »