FILM ESSAYS OF MAYA DEREN

8.6 (Saturday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON [1943]
реж. Маја Дерен / Maya Deren, US, 14’

Undoubtedly one of the most important achievements of the American film avant-garde, "Meshes of the Afternoon" is Maya Deren's first experimental film, shot in collaboration with her then-husband, Alexander Hammid.

The plot of the film (if we can even call it that) follows a woman (played by Deren) who keeps returning to the same places and events in and around her home while unsuccessfully searching for a mysterious humanoid figure in a black cloak holding a mirror instead of a face. A flower, a key, a knife, a telephone handset, as well as doubles of Deren herself, are part of the recurring film motifs that, with each return, are exposed to different spatiotemporal manipulations.

Often described as a psychodrama, "Meshes of the Afternoon" is a unique exercise in introspective archaeology, a remarkable attempt to translate Joyce's "stream of consciousness" and the surrealist automatic record into a picture. А rather a cyclical mosaic of fragments of the unconscious mind, it seems to embody a series of unrelated psychological processes in hard-to-guess signs and symbols in whose dreamlike network, traumatically and obsessively, real events are transformed into a sumptuous and intense emotional experience.

8.6 (Saturday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
AT LAND [1944]
dir. Maya Deren, US, 15’

On a deserted beach, the raging waves and ocean tide wash up a woman's body. Soon after opening her eyes, the woman reaches for a log and, climbing its branches, begins a journey toward some mysterious and surreal heights. The vertical movement suddenly turns into a horizontal crawl along a long table where a group of bourgeois are dining, unaware of the woman's presence. At the end of the table, she sees a chessboard, on which the pieces begin to move without anyone moving them. One of the pawns falls to the floor, and she begins to look for him, but somewhere far from the table, along wide rivers and small waterfalls…

These are the first few scenes from "At Land", a silent short film poem from 1944. After the success of "Meshes of the Afternoon", Deren - again in the role of the protagonist - embarks on another strange journey, where she once again meets multiple versions of herself but also several male figures - Philip Lamantia Hamid, John Cage, Parker Tyler, Hamid - as the landscapes behind her morph, they become ever more surreal and ever more unreal.

The ending brings us back to the deserted beach. Two girls – in a scene so reminiscent of the iconic opening of Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" – reenact Andersen and Kizeritsky's immortal party. One move before the inevitable checkmate, just as the knight is about to take the white queen, Deren steals the piece unnoticed and triumphantly runs with it somewhere on the horizon, somewhere far from his former self, somewhere where he might finally be able to wake the sleeping female subject.

8.6 (Saturday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR CAMERA [1945]
реж. Маја Дерен / Maya Deren, US, 3’

"A Study in Choreography for Camera", Maya Deren's shortest film, follows the light and tireless steps of Talley Beatty as he dances in three different environments: a forest, a living room, and a museum gallery. And every time Beatty jumps from one environment to another – lifting her leg between trees to lower it between chairs – a new geographical reality is drawn along the film's timeline so that, within just three minutes, Derren and her camera cover vast spatial distances in a way that inevitably recalls the vague and sharp transitions that are present in dreams.

In the film, Beatty's movements and those of the film camera act as dancing partners whose synchronization allows for a fluid alignment between the filmic and bodily mediums. More of an etude than an independent work, "A Study in Choreography for Camera" can also be seen as a kind of preparation by Deren for her next few films. In each of them – just like here – she pioneerly tries to bring the dance movements and those of the camera and scissors into harmony, thus introducing choreography as a new film operation.

8.6 (Saturday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME [1946]
dir. Maya Deren, US, 15’

"Ritual in Transfigured Time" is an experimental silent film from the first post-war year that, exploring the relationship between dance movements and those of the film camera, comments on the nature of ritual and social norms.

Rita Christiani, a Trinidadian dancer, enters a room where Maya Deren is rapt and engrossed in the ritual of unwinding wool from a loom. While Anaïs Nin watches with disdain the almost telepathic interaction between the two, suddenly, from inside the home, Christiani is moved to the center of a cocktail party. While moving among the partygoers, she meets a young man [Frank Westbrook].

"Ritual in Transfigured Time" is the result of Deren's interest in dance, play, and ritual as social and collective processes that have the potential to displace notions of ego, personhood, and identity. The film establishes its cinematic wholeness through the integrity of movement between the various individuals and scenes, an act through which the effect of extended choreography and social ritual is produced.

8.6 (Saturday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE [1948]
dir. Maya Deren, US, 13’

Conceived as a commentary on the unfinished work of art – and inspired by the interplay of positive and negative principles in Confucius – Meditation on Violence is Derren's first sound film, structured, according to her notes, around one essential principle: “balance in constant flux".

The film shows the dancer Chao-Li Chi as he performs traditional, ritualized movements based on two ancient Chinese martial arts: Wu-tang [Wǔdāngquán/Wu-tang] and Shaolin [Shǎolín/Shao-Lin]. Starting from slow meditative moves that hypnotically graduate to fast and aggressive ones, the film's action blurs the distinctions between the potential violence inherent in the martial form and the elegance present in the dancer's performance.

Experimenting with film time, somewhere towards the middle of the piece, Deren cuts the linear flow of the film and it begins to rewind back to the beginning, creating a structure of a "parabolic arc stretching towards infinity" and an effect of eternal openness. The fact that the gesture can remain unnoticed is the result of the skillful use of the human body as a space in which the beauty and harmony of constant fluid movement can be literally embodied.

8.6 (Saturday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
THE VERY EYE OF NIGHT [1955]
dir. Maya Deren, US, 15’

A flickering constellation is the background against which several male and female dancers – recorded on a photographic negative – perform a series of ballet movements: solo, then pas de deux, then other larger formations. The dancers, unencumbered by gravity, seem to float through the night sky, giving the impression not so much of a dream as of a transcendental out-of-body experience, of some wondrous interstellar projection upon which the dance of the ancient gods can be traced.

"The darkness of night obliterates the horizontal plane of the earth's surface, so the movements of the dancers and the camera—freed from this point of reference—become as four-dimensional and oriented as those of birds in the air or fish in the water," Deren writes in her notes.

Her latest completed film, The Piercing Eye of the Night, is a non-narrative work that uses the negative and the night to infuse etherealness into dance movements, to transform the stars into dancers and then apotheosis the dancers into stars. As in Deren's previous "choreographies for camera", the film deals with rhythm, repetition, and ritual – three things inherent in the nature of dance.