Maya Deren, the symbol and champion of American experimental film (2022)

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.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/FhVdQvC