The Magical World Beyond Time and Space : Maya Deren

“In film, I can make the world dance” 

Maya Deren

Maya Deren is an important female filmmaker and avant-garde cinema legend. In addition to her interest in cinema, Deren was also a dancer, poet, writer, choreographer and photographer; and her interest in different branches of art is also reflected in her experimental films. Her famous essay “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality”, published in 1960, discusses the differences between photography and cinematography and how these two areas can create different realities. She stated that sound technology “opened a door for verbalists and dramatists” (p. 151), on the other hand editing of a film can create a whole different reality with new meanings to images (p. 160). Deren showed that these creative editing methods (like slow motion or reverse motion) can manipulate time and space and “create a relationship between seperate times, places and persons” (p. 165). 

“Meshes of the Afternoon”, one of Deren’s first and most remarkable experimental films, is black and white. This film was shot without audio, there was no dialogue or diegetic sound. Teihi Ito’s soundtrack was added to it later in 1959. Blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy,  Meshes of the Afternoon offers the viewer a “poetic psychodrama” (Korossi, 2020) with a cyclical narrative. This film storifies paranoia and distrust between two lovers by depicting their dreamlike world. 

This film starts with the scene of a hooded figure putting a flower in the middle of the frame. The audience does not see anyone's face in the film for the first four minutes and this creates an overwhelming curiosity. Deren herself appears as the enigmatic woman, silently observing through a window. She takes a nap on a couch but her journey is repeating over and over and this repetition creates out of body experience to her. As the number of repetitions in the film increases, the main character starts to feel an acute sense of discomfort and alienation, even trying to kill herself that she encountered. The uncanny doubling, tripling and quadrupling of Deren’s character guides the audience to question the reality of existence and the manipulation of time and space plays with the perception of reality of audiences. This movie adds many meanings to the image and successfully conveys the emotions of the dreamer. One of the most interesting “characters”, the hooded figure with a mirror face, reflects back to identity who looks into his/her face and projects the repressed desires and fears

Meshes of Afternoon includes dance and choreography; John Martin, New York Times dance critic,  used the term “choreocinema” to describe this film. I can say that this film was inspired by Eisenstein’s concept about rhythmic montage, which is based on the relationship between action and tempo. In the film, the movements of characters were sharp as and emphasized by the rhythm of the soundtrack. 

“At the Land” is Deren’s second experimental film that she was the only director. Focusing on the human body’s movement, this film includes jump cuts and juxtapositions of spaces. This film begins by reversing the natural rhythm of waves, flowing back to the ocean and immediately manipulates the perception of reality. Deren comments on the reality of this scene “...from the natural blowing of the hair, the irregularity of the waves, the very texture of the stones and sand - in short, from all the uncontrolled, spontaneous elements which are the property of actuality itself.” (p. 156) and describes this natural and spontaneous occurings which is an evidence of actuality as “controlled accidents”. 

This film features Deren herself again. She climbs a dead tree, then she suddenly crawls on a dinner table. The guests of this party, or we can say civilized world, ignore Deren. She creeps to the chessboard and drops down a pawn from her hand. She goes back to the beach from the dining hall all in the same sequence, again, Deren manipulated space in this film. At the end of this film, she encounters with her other versions, one is running away with a pawn she stole and one is picking up stones on the beach. At the Land is an unique experiment which plays with social rituals and the human body’s location in nature. 

Deren’s films have an authentic dynamic and kinetic narrative, the human body is seen as an important equipment to express motion in her films. The repetitive nature of her films offers a circular timeline instead of the progressive timeline we are used to and also makes the audience question the existence. Deren is interested in creating a whole new reality that only exists in cinema, that’s why she uses editing peculiarly. She uses slow motion in both of her film that I discussed and she does not describe slow motion as slowness of speed, instead she states that slow motion “can be statement of either ideal ease or nagging frustration, a kind of intimate and loving meditation an a movement or a solemnity which adds rituals weight to an action; or it can bring into reality that dramatic image.” (p. 158). The editing techniques that she uses manipulate time and space, and play with the perception of reality. This new reality creates a new narrative type independent of time and space, leaving the “introduction-body-conclusion” narrative type functionless. The dream-like structure of her films and the editing she uses reminded me of the (a darker version of) Méliès magical world.

Even though the title card suggests that the films are “made in Hollywood”, Deren’s films and Hollywood genre are totally unlike. When we look at the Hollywood movies of that period, it can be seen that flamboyant and exaggerated dialogues are very prominent and used as the evident of actuality, however Deren prefers to play with reality with cinema’s power to manipulate time and space and leaves the diegetic structure. 

Bibliography

Deren Maya, 1960, Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality, The Visual Arts Today (Winter, 1960, pp. 150-167)

Korossi, G. (22 May 2020). Maya Deren: seven films that guarantee her legend. BFI. Retrieved from https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/maya-deren-meshes-of-the-afternoon

Halsem, W. (December 2002). Deren, Maya. Senses of Cinema. Retrieved from https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/deren-2/