Maya Deren

  • Maya Deren – Witch’s Cradle (1944) (HD)

    1941-1950ExperimentalMaya DerenShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    “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 »

  • Maya Deren – Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

    1941-1950ExperimentalMaya DerenShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    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 »

  • Maya Deren – A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)

    Maya Deren1941-1950ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

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

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

    1941-1950Alexander HammidMaya DerenShort FilmUSA

    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 »

  • Maya Deren – At Land (1944)

    1941-1950ArthouseExperimentalMaya DerenUSA

    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 »

  • Barbara Hammer – Maya Deren’s Sink (2011)

    2011-2020Barbara HammerDocumentaryExperimentalMaya DerenUSA

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    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 »

  • Martina Kudlácek – Im Spiegel der Maya Deren AKA In the mirror of Maya Deren (2002)

    2001-2010ArthouseAustriaDocumentaryMartina KudlácekMaya Deren

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    With IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN, documentary filmmaker Martina Kudlácek has fashioned not only fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking and influential artist, but a pitch-perfect introduction to her strikingly beautiful and poetic body of work. Crowned “Fellini and Bergman wrapped in one gloriously possessed body” by the L.A. Weekly, Maya Deren is arguably the most important and innovative avant-garde filmmaker in the history of American cinema. Using locations from the Hollywood hills to Haiti, Deren made such mesmerizing films as AT LAND, RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME and her masterpiece MESHES OF THE AFTERNOONRead More »

  • Alexander Hammid & Maya Deren – The Private Life of a Cat (1944)

    1941-1950Alexander Hammid and Maya DerenExperimentalMaya DerenUSA

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    Quote:
    Alexander Hammid’s intimate study of a female cat and the birth and maturation of her five kittens.Read More »

  • Maya Deren – Witch’s Cradle (1944)

    1941-1950ExperimentalMaya DerenUSA

    Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Witches’ Cradles

    In Search of an Altered State
    “During the witchcraft persecutions in Europe, Inquisitors are said to have sometimes put an accused witch in a bag, which was strung up over the limb of a tree and set swinging. When witches’ learnt about this punishment they experimented with it themselves and found that the sensory deprivation or confusion of senses induced hallucinatory experiences. A similar swinging motion has long been used by shamans and dervishes and is sometimes known as ‘dervish-dangling’.”

    – Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology
    Read More »

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