A Life Choreographed for Cinema: Maya Deren

At the beginning of our course, we were first introduced to the works of Maya Deren a Ukrainian born American filmmaker. Deren attended the school of Social Research and it is evident in most of her films that she was very interested in alternate social realities. Deren was said to be the 'entrepreneurial promoter of avant-garde film making.' And she was praised on her wanting of creating new experiences and evoking new conclusions in her films. Deren had massive interests in things such as: dance, voodoo, and subjective psychology. She also had specific editing techniques of which she was fond: multiple exposions, jump cutting, super imposion, slow motion, and continued motion through discountinued space. Critics believed that Deren had the 'ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness.' Deren adopted Einstein's notion of the relavistic universe to explain the idea of constant metamorphosis. For Deren the spatial and temporal plasticity of moving images was perfectly suited to this phenomenon. 'Meshes of the Afternoon'