Maya Deren (1917–1961)
Author of Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
About the Author
Sometimes called "the mother of the American avant-garde cinema," Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in the Soviet Union. At age 5, she fled the country with her parents and settled in New York. She attended Syracuse University, where she majored in journalism and became involved in political show more activism of the Left. She also studied at New York University and at Smith College, where she received an M.A. in English. In 1941, Deren took a job with choreographer Katherine Dunham and became fascinated by dance and movement, which was to serve as a subject for some of her films and inspired her thinking about camera movement as an art of dance. Her interest in film was sparked by Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who became her second husband in 1942. They collaborated on her first two films, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At the Land (1944). Both films use slow motion and subjective camera angles to disrupt the realist conventions of narrative film, undermining the coherency and continuity of time and space. Meshes of the Afternoon explores irrational violence, the unconscious, and female subjectivity in surrealist fashion, whereas At the Land more overtly manipulates time and space. A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and Meditation on Violence (1948) are all "dance films," in which the camera's constitutive role for film is explored through camera movement. Particularly striking is the use of the camera as a sparring partner for the boxer featured in Meditation on Violence. Throughout the 1940s, Deren worked in independent, experimental cinema, lecturing extensively and developing a network of nontheatrical exhibit spaces across the country. She also wrote a theoretical tract in An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946), which is testimony to her dictum that artists need to educate themselves in old and new knowledge---what she called philosophy. The fruit of her efforts was the Creative Film Foundation, which she established in 1954. Four years later, Deren made her last film, The Very Eye of Night, which she described as cool and classicist, contrasting it with the romanticism that she had come to despise in the work of some other avant-garde filmmakers. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Maya Deren
Meshes of the Afternoon 8 copies
At Land 3 copies
Ritual in Transfigured Time 2 copies
The Very Eye of Night 2 copies
Meditation on Violence 2 copies
A Study in Choreography for Camera 2 copies
Associated Works
The Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writings on the Cinema: The First Fifty Years (2006) — Contributor — 20 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1917-04-29
- Date of death
- 1961-10-13
- Burial location
- Mount Fuji, Japan
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- USA (naturalized | 1928)
- Birthplace
- Kiev, Ukraine
- Place of death
- New York, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
Syracuse, New York, USA
Geneva, Switzerland
Greenwich Village, New York, USA - Education
- League of Nations School, Geneva
New York University(1936)
Smith College(1939 ∙ MA English Lit.)
Syracuse University
New School for Social Research - Occupations
- film maker
film critic
choreographer
dancer
poet - Relationships
- Hammid, Alexander (husband & collaborator)
Dunham, Katherine (dance company leader)
Tudor, Antony (collaborator) - Organizations
- Creative Film Foundation (founder, 1954)
- Awards and honors
- Guggenheim Foundation fellowship(1947)
Cannes Film Festival (Grand Prix Internationale, 1947) - Short biography
- Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky, during the Russian Revolution, to a Russian-Jewish family in Kiev. She is said to have been named after the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse. She and her parents fled anti-Semitic progoms perpetrated by the anticommunist White Volunteer Army. In 1922, at the age of five, she emigrated to the USA, settling in New York. Her parents anglicized the family name to Deren. The family was separated when she was sent to Geneva to attend the League of Nations School and her parents continued their own studies in Paris and New York. She went to Syracuse University, where she became involved in left-wing politics. She then transferred to New York University, where she was awarded her undergraduate degree in 1936. She completed a master's degree in English Literature with a thesis on symbolist poetry at Smith College in 1939. After college, she worked as an assistant to dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, touring and performing with the Dunham Dance Company across the USA. In Los Angeles in 1941, she met Alexander Hammid, a Czech film producer, with whom she collaborated on several innovative films such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At the Land (1944). Returning to New York City two years later, she changed her name to Maya and married Hammid. Maya Deren became a passionate supporter of experimental cinema, writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing such noted films as A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and The Very Eye of Night (1958). She wrote An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946). She parted from Hammid and married Teiji Ito, a Japanese composer. In 1947, Maya won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study voodoo ritual in Haitian culture. This resulted in the documentary Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti (1977), which was released posthumously. Maya Deren served as a muse and inspiration to many other avant-garde filmmakers. She died at age 44 from a brain hemorrhage.
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What she found in Haiti was what a lot of her bright, restless, arty friends in the US were looking for – a complete, ‘authentic’ spiritual system, unburdened by the baggage of Western religion, and one that put physical movement and personal contact with the divine at the heart of the spiritual process. Her project thus shifted from being about dance to being about her integration into vodou society.
If Divine Horsemen had been written today, it would be written as a ‘personal journey’, undoubtedly with one of those enormous subtitles that the American publishing industry loves so much, like Divine Horsemen: How I Uncovered the Secrets of Voodoo, Met God, and Learned to Love My Inner Zombie. Instead, what we get is something – ironically – altogether more dispassionate, a meticulous description of a religious practice and its associated worldview. Though Deren clearly participated in a lot of vodou ceremonies over many years, the first-person pronouns are refreshingly rare, and she limits herself to talking about the religion per se rather than how she was drawn into it.
The one exception to this is her account of when she was mounted by a lwa – that is to say, when she was possessed by one of the vodou deities. It's an extraordinary passage, and Deren wisely withholds it to the final section, by which time she has set up the overarching philosophy so well that the reader is ready to accept what she is saying (even if, like me, you are inclined to interpret the experience in psychosomatic terms).
Other moments are harder for Deren or her reader to explain. At one point, Ghede, a spirit of death and misrule, possesses a mambo (roughly, a priestess) during a ceremony to heal a seriously ill child. Deren relates the following exotic incident (male pronouns are used when a male lwa is inhabiting a body):
He took the blood of the goat and, undressing the child, anointed her with it. Then, singing fervently, he reached down between his legs and brought forth, in his cupped palm, a handful of fluid with which he washed the child. It was not urine. And though it would seem impossible that this should be so, since it was a female body which he had possessed, it was a seminal ejaculation. Again and again he gave of that life fluid, and bathed the child with it, while the mambos and hounsis sang and wept with gratitude for this ultimate gesture.
The child survived. Moments like this make you aware of the extraordinary flexibility with which vodou can endow gender: there are also regular sacred marriages, for example, between a woman and a male lwa who, during the service, happens to be mounted in a female body.
But such bizarreries aside, Deren's real value is in elucidating the more everyday aspects of practising vodou – the physicality of it, the centrality of rhythmic movement and the deep spirituality that can be induced through repetitive dance; she is very sensitive to these matters, and makes several perceptive comparisons to the different moods brought about by dancing a waltz rather than a rumba.
By the time she left Haiti, Deren had, during some quick but productive trips home, picked up husband number three, who would eventually edit the rushes of her Haitian trip together into the film of Divine Horsemen (1985), which was released more than twenty years after Deren's death. She was a remarkable person and this is a remarkable book – creative, self-effacing, generous, full of something that feels a lot like wisdom.… (more)