In revolutionary moments, time seems to accelerate, and changes usually marked out in decades take place in a matter of months. There’s a special, melancholy tinge to the fate of those who were themselves at the forefront of the very revolutions that left them behind. (Elvis Presley comes to mind.) That’s the story told in “Maya Deren: Choreographed for Camera,” Mark Alice Durant’s new biography of the filmmaker (published by Saint Lucy Books), and it’s thrilling and terrifying. It’s the tale of an artist who, in the mid-nineteen-forties, in the span of four years, by the age of thirty, remade her artistic world—drastically and definitively. Despite, or thanks to, her youth, she nearly single-handedly put experimental cinema on the American cultural map, and also became its iconic visual presence. Then, just as quickly, she fell out of that world, never to return in her too-brief lifetime. She died in 1961, in poverty and obscurity. She fulfilled the destiny detailed by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his 1835 story “Wakefield”: “By stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.” A woman, even more so.
Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky in 1917 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her parents were Jewish, prosperous, and educated. (Her father, Solomon, was a doctor; her mother, Marie, had studied piano and economics.) After the October Revolution, her father was conscripted into battle with Bolshevik forces, and Eleanora and her mother endured illness and poverty at home. The family snuck out of the country in the early nineteen-twenties and made their way to Syracuse, New York, changing their last name to Deren. In 1930, Marie, who was unhappy in the provincial city, took her daughter to Geneva, where the precocious girl was acclaimed as a poet by her classmates and also became an enthusiastic photographer. Three years later, mother and child returned to Syracuse; Deren enrolled—at sixteen—at Syracuse University, where she and another student, Gregory Bardacke, a Communist and a football player, fell in love. They married in 1935, he graduated in 1936, and they moved to Greenwich Village, where he became a labor organizer and she, in the midst of her last year of college at N.Y.U., became a Socialist activist. She left Bardacke (they soon divorced), entered Smith College for a master’s in English, and then returned to New York. In 1939, while employed as an elder writer’s secretary, Deren eventfully pursued an obsession.
As a woman in her mid-twenties, Deren was an artist without portfolio, endowed with a poet’s imaginative flamboyance and a photographer’s sense of visual composition, to which she added an activist’s revolutionary fervor, aptitude for advocacy, and organizational practicality. She became fixated on Katherine Dunham, a Black dancer (working on Broadway and in Hollywood), the founder of a dance company, and an academically trained anthropologist. Deren, as Durant notes, was already deeply devoted to the art of dance, even though she had no training, and she more or less imposed herself on Dunham as a secretary and assistant. In 1941 and 1942, Deren travelled with Dunham and her dance troupe throughout the United States. (Durant reports that, in their travels together in the Jim Crow South, the blue-eyed Deren—who had a mighty mass of curly red hair—was taken for Black or of mixed race.)
In 1942, while in Hollywood with Dunham, Deren met a filmmaker named Alexandr Hackenschmied. Born in 1907 in Linz and raised in Prague, he became, in his early twenties, a pioneer of experimental cinema in Czechoslovakia. In the late nineteen-thirties, he worked on a pair of crucial anti-Nazi documentaries, and left the country soon before the Nazi invasion, making his way to Los Angeles, where he was promised work. He was an acclaimed cameraman and still photographer; he and Deren quickly fell in love and married. (Soon after he and Deren met, he changed his name to Alexander Hammid.) Living on the margins of Hollywood, they went to movies, thought about movies, met filmmakers, and got inspired. In early 1943, Deren’s father died and left her a small sum of money, with which she bought a movie camera, a 16-mm. Bolex. That summer, she and Hammid made a fourteen-minute film, “Meshes of the Afternoon,” on a budget of two hundred and seventy-five dollars.
So far, so good—the very essence of movies is to be the art for artists who don’t have an art. Deren was not quite a dancer, untrained as an actor, but endowed with charisma and temperament, craving not so much to be seen as to be recognized, turning her tumultuous private social life into a kind of performance. “She would do almost anything for attention,” Dunham said. “She felt that she was physically irresistible. She would work like a bee to get noticed, shaking around, carrying on. She went after anybody including someone who belonged to someone else. She worked at it. I think sex was her great ace. I liked her curiosity, her vivaciousness. She was alive. I liked her bohemianism—she had no hours. Any hours were all right, just like mine.”
Deren was an avant-garde version of Lana Turner (a young non-actress who was discovered at the counter of a soda fountain), but Deren was ready not to be discovered but to discover herself, by way of a movie that she would make. Like the brightest stars of classic Hollywood, Deren was both too much and too little an actress to ever be anything onscreen but herself. She was exactly the kind of personality and performer, of limited technique but hypnotically photogenic, for whom the cinema was made. Her mere presence beamed onto the screen her vast inner worlds of emotion and intellect.
Deren, who conceived “Meshes of the Afternoon” (Hammid, who did the camera work, credited her as the film’s artistic creator), is its main actor. Though she repudiated any connection of her work to Surrealism, “Meshes” is at least a work of unrealism—of fantasy that explicitly links its action to dreams and imagination. (Regarding Deren’s academic literary studies, Durant writes that “her research on the Symbolist and Imagist poets gave her foundational language on which she would rely, at least intuitively, when she approached filmmaking in the early 1940s.”) She rejected Hollywood in toto, and allowed the dime-store macabre of B movies to infiltrate her sensibility. In “Meshes,” a woman falls asleep at home and imagines an episode involving multiples of herself, a recurring slippage of her house key out of her mouth, a flower that she finds in the street, a knife that she finds on the table, a black-shrouded figure with a mirror for a face, and Hammid himself, who comes home, sees one of the Derens in bed, and approaches her with a tentative eroticism. Then Hammid comes home again to discover the gruesome aftermath of violence.
Deren in “Meshes of the Afternoon.”
The hectic distortions and special effects that Hammid created give the movie its mind-bending intensity, whereas Deren’s presence gives it its allure and its personality. (For the purposes of the movie’s credits, Deren took the name Maya, and kept it, onscreen and off.) She certainly didn’t invent experimental cinema, nor introduce it in the U.S., but, with this short silent film, Deren became the genre’s Orson Welles, realizing her own original ideas by a fruitful collaboration with an experienced cinematographer (as Welles did with Gregg Toland) and putting those ideas over by way of onscreen star power. She became the name of avant-garde cinema by becoming its face: a still of her, at a window in “Meshes,” is, to this day, the prime iconic image of American experimental filmmaking, the single-frame synecdoche for the entire category. Yet, unlike Welles, who made his movie fame when he was hired by a studio that then released his film, and when critics recognized his originality, Deren created “Meshes” in the absence of institutional, organizational, or even intellectual frameworks—which she took upon herself to construct, too.
In 1943, Hammid was hired by the federal Office of War Information, in New York, to make documentaries, Durant writes, that supported the war effort. The couple left California for Greenwich Village, renting a fifth-floor walkup apartment at 61 Morton Street (where Deren lived for the rest of her life). Deren was quickly introduced to high artistic circles through her work as a portrait photographer for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. She made a film with Marcel Duchamp (which she never finished), and, in the summer of 1944, she made another film of phantasmagorical imagination, “At Land.” Where “Meshes” ends with Deren as a bloody corpse, “At Land” begins with her body washing up on a beach—alive, as it turns out. Deren pulls herself up on a hefty bit of driftwood and, peering over its edge, finds herself in a banquet room, at the long table of a dinner party, where she crawls on the tablecloth between the cheerful and unfazed guests. The movie also has elements of erotic fantasy, as when she strolls with a man who turns out to be four different ones (including Hammid and the composer John Cage), she follows Hammid into a cabin and instead finds yet another man there in a bed, and—back on the beach—she stumbles upon two women playing chess and joyfully caresses one player’s head. In “At Land,” Deren more conspicuously acts, with a newly athletic, choreographic element. Her performance is full of overtones of other performers: her puckish sidelong glances evoke Katharine Hepburn; and, when she over-earnestly and campily strains in her physical tasks, she brings to mind Bette Davis. (While filming on the beach at Amagansett, Deren chanced to meet Anaïs Nin, and they quickly became friends.)
Deren, whose coterie had expanded to include many in the downtown artistic beau monde, became a major socialite in bohemian circles, turning the couple’s apartment into a center of parties and gatherings, and her connections proved galvanic. Durant quotes from Nin’s diary regarding the force exerted by Deren among the Village culturati: “We are subject to her will, her strong personality, yet at the same time we do not trust or love her wholly. We recognize her talent. We talk of rebellion, of being forced, of tyranny, but we bow to her projects, make sacrifices.” Nin cites “the power of her personality” and notes “her determined voice, the assertiveness and sensuality of her peasant body, her dancing, drumming; all haunted us. We spent a great deal of time talking about her.” In a frenzy of creation and organization, Deren seemingly ordered the world around her, at least for a crucial moment, to fit into a pattern of her own design.
With no extant theatre for the kinds of movies she was making, she held private screenings at home and, eventually, a midtown art gallery. In April, 1945, she made another film, “A Study in Choreography for Camera,” featuring the dancer Talley Beatty, also a Dunham alumnus, and it attracted attention in the world of dance. “Strangers and vague acquaintances stopped her in the street asking how they might see her films,” Durant writes. Later that year, she sought to distribute her films, contacting museums and universities, writing a sales brochure called “Cinema as an Independent Art Form,” and taking out a print ad in a sophisticated literature and art magazine named View.
The lightning bolt in this primordial soup of Deren’s avant-garde celebrity came on February 18, 1946. She had rented the Provincetown Playhouse, a West Village theatre, for a screening of her films on that evening, and, as Durant details, she promoted the hell out of it. She edited a brochure with blurbs from notables (including Nin) and a short essay of her own, papered the Village with handmade fliers, and extended personal invitations to major critics. “The evening sold out in a matter of minutes, leaving hundreds on the street milling about in frustration,” Durant writes. “Deren’s films were, for weeks, the talk of the Village, even those who were turned away had an opinion about what was seen that night.”
Among the audience at the Provincetown Playhouse was a twenty-four-year-old Austrian Jewish immigrant named Amos Vogel, who said that the event made him recognize “a new kind of talent” in filmmaking, “an individual expressing a very deep inner need.” The following year, Vogel and his wife, Marcia, founded a film society called Cinema 16, which launched its screenings at the same theatre and, in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, was New York’s prime venue for non-Hollywood, independent, experimental, and international movies. (Vogel was also one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, which was launched in 1963.)
Deren’s accomplishments in the realm of experimental cinema were knit into the wider phenomenon of the Second World War as a peculiarly powerful real-time engine for artistic transformation in the U.S., from Abstract Expressionism conquering art galleries to bebop surging in jazz clubs. Abstraction, complexity, and vehemence came to the fore during the war and just after its end, a time when realities were so appalling as to be all but unrepresentable, when much of the worst was still unknown but loomed in forebodings, imaginings, hints, and rumors, and when, in a short and terrifying span, the Holocaust became known and nuclear war became a reality.
In 1945, Deren filmed another silent short, “Ritual in Transfigured Time,” the last of her films, as Durant notes, in which she appears. (She completed it after the first of the 1946 Provincetown Playhouse screenings; it premièred on June 1, 1946, and she showed it throughout the year, to warm acclaim.) The film is centered on the dancer Rita Christiani, a former member of Dunham’s dance company, whom Deren, in her script outline, considered, for the purposes of the film, “the same person” as herself. The film begins with Deren bearing a skein of yarn and, with forced gaiety, recruiting Christiani for its winding (as Nin looms in the background). Deren’s performance is arch, hectic, more artificial than stylized—her efforts at acting are exaggerated and flat, as if she were trying and failing to put herself over.
However, “Ritual” contains a nearly four-minute sequence of ingeniously conceived and thrillingly crafted stylization, which I consider the most fascinating scene that she ever filmed—and it’s one in which she doesn’t appear. It’s a party scene, shot in her own apartment, featuring the literati and glitterati of her circle (including Howard Moss, then the poetry editor of The New Yorker); it’s also Deren’s modern-day filmed adaptation of Antoine Watteau’s painting “The French Comedians,” from around 1720, which she’d seen at the Met. The scene, featuring about thirty people and centered on Christiani’s efforts to connect with the other guests, is filmed in slow motion; the framings emphasize the layering in depth of the revellers’ comings and goings, and Deren evokes their cold-hearted conviviality with keenly discerning and precisely imaginative direction. (She instructed them, “When you hail each other, hail with your palm up.”) As Durant observes, “In Deren’s edit, shots and gestures are rhythmically repeated, elevating casual movements into the realm of the choreographic.”
A still from “Ritual in Transfigured Time,” with Rita Christiani, Anaïs Nin, and Deren in the foreground.
The sudden success that Deren seemingly willed into being also brought on a classic case of “be careful what you wish for.” Six weeks after her Provincetown Playhouse triumph, she was awarded a Guggenheim grant, with which she financed a trip to Haiti. She had been interested in that country, and its religious rituals, since her time alongside Dunham; from late 1946 to mid-1947, her intellectual and personal relationship with the anthropologist and filmmaker Gregory Bateson sparked her quasi-ethnographic ambitions to make a film there. (Deren and Hammid divorced in 1947. Her relationship with Bateson ended in disaster—he snuck off to Germany without telling her.) Her three trips to Haiti occupied much of her time—nineteen months—through 1950. (Between trips, she made another short dance film, “Meditation on Violence.”)
Along with her furious repudiation of Hollywood formulas, celebrity worship, and commercialism, Deren also rejected the prevailing notions of documentary filmmaking. Documentary, she complained, lacked art and imagination; she envisioned nonfiction filmmaking, of the sort that she was undertaking in Haiti, to be as creative as the fantasies that she filmed at home. In a notebook, she described her desire to film a street scene in Haiti—“the passings, the crossings, the meetings and greetings”—as “a piece of music not haphazard at all but rhythmic, with motifs and developments, a fugue form where each individual is pursuing his own destiny.” She wrote, in 1946, that “for more than anything else, cinema consists of the eye for magic—that which perceives and reveals the marvelous in whatsoever it looks upon.” In Haiti, Deren befriended Haitians and immersed herself in the religious rituals of vodou, but—judging from a posthumous assemblage of her footage—she neither fulfilled her vast ambition for creative nonfiction nor offered an illuminating reportorial depiction of what she was experiencing. She wrote a book, “Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti,” about her travels, but she never completed her film. Durant suggests that she left the film unfinished on “ethical” grounds, regarding the uses and abuses of the visual representation of a religion and a culture that was neither hers nor that of most of her likely viewers. And, in any case, Durant adds, she didn’t have the money to finish it.
By the time Deren had put those journeys to rest and returned to Morton Street as her steady base of action, the scene of avant-garde, independent, nonnarrative filmmaking that she advocated had quickly caught on, in Greenwich Village and beyond—but in ways that she disliked. Instead of an impresario, she became an embittered rival to her successors. With her detailed written scenarios, her careful visual compositions, and her contrapuntal schemes of editing, she characterized her work as “films in the classicist tradition,” but much of the movie scene that she’d inspired was far more freewheeling in method, substance, and tone. She was openly critical of other avant-garde filmmakers, even while remaining collegial, and encouraging, in practice; in the mid-fifties, she established an organization, the Creative Film Foundation, to channel small amounts of grant money to experimental filmmakers. She became friends with a young filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, whose films she didn’t like but whose creative spirit she admired. (He knocked on her door to pay homage to her; she put him up for several months.) Another fervent advocate and practical-minded activist for experimental cinema, the critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, came to the fore of Village life, including at the Village Voice; she judged his work harshly, but they nonetheless collaborated in the promotion of experimental films.
Deren’s last decade was a depressing decrescendo. She’d started using Benzedrine to fuel her long days and nights of activity while travelling with Dunham, and kept with it afterward. In New York, she took frequent “vitamin” injections, which likely included amphetamines, from the infamous Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson (who also treated John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and many other household names before losing his license in the seventies). She had severe health issues (in 1954, she had major surgery for an abdominal hemorrhage and peritonitis) and serious money trouble; she refused to take a regular job. “Because of her sometimes-difficult nature,” Durant writes, Deren’s social life and her artistic activities, which were so closely connected, narrowed. “There were few left in her New York circle who were willing to subject themselves to her demands.”
Deren and her partner, the composer Teiji Ito, who became her third husband in 1960, were threatened with eviction and faced real hunger. Her dispute by mail with her landlord was epic and obsessive. Meanwhile, she turned to her mother to pay her utility bill, and she literally asked friends for food. Her last completed film, “The Very Eye of Night,” which transformed live-action footage of the choreographer Antony Tudor’s student dancers into animation, was shot in 1952 and finished only in 1956. Owing to legal issues after its producer’s death, the film didn’t show in New York until 1959, at which time it made hardly a ripple. Deren died on October 13, 1961, of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Durant’s book itself, twenty years in the making, bears the illumination of fanatical research and passionate empathy for—practically an inhabiting of—Deren’s inner world. The book’s one crucial lack is notes: footnotes or endnotes. Durant offers fictionalized sequences, the biographical equivalent of reënactments in documentaries, but doesn’t identify them as such, and leaves the sourcing of events and descriptions unclear. For instance, extended narrations and detailed descriptions of crucial scenes in Deren’s life, such as the Hollywood party where she and Hammid met and the Morton Street party at which he decided to leave her, have the feel of literary compositions—persuasive and moving ones—but I found myself wondering which details were Durant’s inventions and which were nuggets emerging in correspondence, notebooks, interviews, or elsewhere.
Paradoxically, the most exciting and absorbing drama that emerges from Durant’s book isn’t, as one might expect from the life story of a crucially significant filmmaker, the behind-the-scenes efforts that went into the making of Deren’s movies. Rather, it’s Deren’s miraculous transformation from a private do-it-yourself artist to a public figure, and then a historic one—from an outsider, working at home, to the spokesperson and the heroine not only of her own cinematic venture but of the entire form of cinema in which she worked, for which she advocated, and that she established as a prime art form of her time.
By achieving worldwide recognition for films that she made on her own, with family and friends, on trivial budgets, she spurred generations of experimental filmmakers to follow in her footsteps; their films then found a home in institutions that she’d helped bring to life. As for the specific influence of Deren’s artistry, it radiated outward in many directions and inspired a wide range of avant-garde filmmakers, such as Shirley Clarke (who began her career with highly aestheticized dance films), Yvonne Rainer (who filmed personal psychodramas), Mekas (who built his first feature around disjointed, B-movie-like fantasies), and Barbara Hammer (who derived from Deren’s work a radical feminist cinema). The most conspicuous, and perhaps the most significant, adaptation of Deren’s far-rangingly associative yet meticulously composed fantasies may well be in the movies of David Lynch.
Deren’s completed films are home movies, made mainly where she lived; that fact stands at odds with their nonrealistic pursuit of what she called “inner realities” and “the laws of the invisible powers.” In throwing out the bathwater of Hollywood commercialism, she also threw out the baby of narrative. “I could move directly from my imagination into film,” she wrote—and so she did, with hardly a trace of her lived experience. Her imagination was fertile, but her wide-ranging life was a veritable engine of stories that seemed ready-made to be put on film, with a first-person imaginative inventiveness of a sort that would hardly be found in Hollywood. Deren’s relentless quest for what was extraordinary about her inner life came at the expense of what was already extraordinary in her outer one. The first craving aroused by her silent films is to hear the literal sound of her voice.
But Deren’s prime achievement reaches even beyond her artistry, her personality, the filmmakers she inspired, and the institutions she fostered. Above all, she both championed and embodied the idea that movies were art and, indeed, the art of the time. The high-art audience that she galvanized for her films—the audience that then filled the seats at Cinema 16 and devoured Mekas’s column in the Voice—would soon be ready to see the high art of movies in places where Deren didn’t, in Hollywood films. It took another batch of independent filmmakers—the young French critics who then became the filmmakers of the French New Wave—to export Hollywood successfully from Paris to Greenwich Village (and another Voice critic, Andrew Sarris, to broker the import). But the downtown ground had been prepared by Deren. The careers of the American independent filmmakers who rode that new wave—whether the ones who made it to Hollywood, such as Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, or the ones who didn’t, such as Juleen Compton and Peter Emanuel Goldman—would be unthinkable without hers. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
