Bill Nichols (ed.),
Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
ISBN 0 520 22732 8
331pp
US$19.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

[Bolded page numbers refer to the original page numbers of the reproduced version of Deren’s essay, “An anagram of ideas on art, form and film”, included in this book.]

“Top and tailing” the set of essays on American filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961) in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde are Bill Nichols’ introduction and Deren’s own essay on film form, “An anagram of ideas on art, form and film” published in 1946. Nichols explains that the anagram structure of Deren’s essay has informed the shape of his own volume and the contents page is laid out as Deren’s is, encouraging readers to map overarching themes and ideas across discrete sections by following any number of suggested reading sequences. In her essay, Deren puts the concept of the anagram another way when describing a “simultaneity” of operations in life and “great art”:

But man’s great dream is to achieve a whole whose character is far more mysterious and miraculous – that dynamic, living whole in which the inter-action of the parts produces more than their sum total in any sense. (13)

Whether or not this idea can be applied to Nichols’ book is debatable, but the connections across and between individual essays are multifarious and do, in fact, tie the discrete works together.

Having Deren’s own writing included in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde is appropriate to any discursive exercise surrounding this filmmaker whose legacy is firmly grounded in the relation between her films and written exegesis. “An Anagram… is an essay of its time, both surveying and critiquing the film practices in currency in the mid-’40s; documentaries (she gives particular attention to the documentation of WWII), mainstream Hollywood features, the films of the surrealists (particularly Marcel Duchamp) and Jean Cocteau (whom she admires), the post-war influx of progressive foreign films, and abstract animations. While she reserves plenty of analysis and a certain respect for the documentary form (her quotation of Alexander Hammid pre-empts the position of Jean Rouch regarding documentary film as “an illusion of reality”), her critique of the other genres and movements is based on their digression from the specificities of the film as a medium. Deren’s criticisms thus fall “within the tradition of modernist film theory” (47) as pointed out by Renata Jackson in her essay, “The Modernist Poetics of Maya Deren” (47-76). Deren is most strongly opposed to realism as a mode linked to photographic reproduction, accusing the realist of denying “the value of the original, artificial reality created by the rigours and disciplines of the art instrument’ and aiming at an effacement of the conditions of production” (12)..

More importantly, what Deren does promote in “An anagram of ideas on art, form and film” – and illustrate through examples from the silent film era and her own films – is art that responds to the culture from which it emerges in terms of its form, content and morals. It is also a film form independent of the literary model dominating the contemporary mainstream with its reductive gestural cliches, demonstrating a unique approach to characterisation. Her interest in what she terms “ritualistic form” (20) led her to create “depersonalized” figures who do not function as protagonists, but as one element of a larger dramatic whole. Nichols points to Deren’s uncredited performances in her films as evidence of her resistance to cinematic star-structures and her tendency toward a cinema akin to the ‘unsigned, collectively performed acts of magic, myth and ritual in other cultures’ (6).

In the final instance, the work Deren advocates explores “the manipulations made possible by the fact that [film] is both a space art and a time art” (42), and she lists the possibilities for truly “filmic film” as depth-of-field shots, the use of microscopic lenses, fast-forward, slow-motion, retrograded sequences as well as sound manipulation and an exploration of negative film. In her discussion of editing she uses as an example what she calls her “film dance”, Study in Choreography for the Camera (USA 1945), to illustrate the manipulation of spatial relations across a unified temporal trajectory marked by the choreographed performance, while At Land (USA 1944) demonstrates a continuity of space across a disjunctive representation of time.

Nichols’ introduction provides the backdrop of Deren’s personal history and the history of academic attention to her work which is of particular importance to the contextualisation of his book. Affirming her position as one of the key figures in the development of “the terms and conditions” of an enduring model for independent cinema (5), Nichols explains the relative scarcity of academic writing on Deren by pointing to the yet to-be-published second volume of The Legend of Maya Deren. The first volume (which is in two parts) has provided, as Nichols points out, the backbone for research on Deren since its publication by Anthology Film Archives in New York in 1984 and 1988. Holding off for the second volume has created a vacuum in analytical work on Deren’s films which ended with the 1996 San Francisco State University conference from which many of the essays were drawn.

In Annette Michelson’s essay, “Poetics and savage thought: about anagram“, she actually begins by discussing Deren’s contributions to “Poetry and the film: a symposium” which was organised for Cinema 16, an early New York film society, by Amos Vogel. Michelson contextualises this symposium as a significant event in the history of film theory, occurring as it did outside academia. She states that Deren’s presentation can be compared to Eisenstein’s contributions to film theory as another instance of “the determination to ground innovative practice in theory” (22-27). She compares Deren’s model of verticality in avant-garde film as a tendency working against the horizontal thrust of mainstream cinema, to Roman Jakobson’s dual linguistic structure of the metonymic and the metaphoric. Michelson’s comparison, along with her connection of Deren’s films to her university studies in Literary Symbolism, is ironic given Deren’s aversion to the application of literary models to film articulated by the filmmaker in “An anagram”. She ends with Deren’s interest in dance, ritual and play as offering the filmmaker access to the ahistorical, stating that Deren ultimately failed to apply her “onto-esthetic” to her research in Haiti due to the “complex dialectic of power relations among white men, Indians and blacks that subtends the rituals of Voudoun” (40).

As mentioned earlier, Renata Jackson begins “The modernist poetic of Maya Deren” by aligning her approach in “An anagram” to modernist film theory, adding that the upside of such an approach is “close formal analysis” and the development of a language for such an analysis (47-49). In an effort to locate Deren’s models or metaphors, Jackson eliminates ritual as an enduring motif for Deren, pointing to her shift away from the use of the term when discussing her work until she finally uses it only in relation to actual religious practice (50). Jackson suggests that Deren’s terminology shift in the early 1950s to “choreographies for camera”, “chamber films” and “cine poems” draws a connection between Deren’s film practice and music, dance and poetry, stating that all these forms deal with “rhythm or cadence” (52). Jackson finds in Deren’s writings evidence of the influence of Bergsonian scholar T.E.Hulme who was also associated with the New Criticism and the poetics of T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, (ie. symbolists and imagists) and Gestalt Theory. Most interestingly, Jackson compares Deren’s theory of cinematic verticality to Gilles Deleuze’s description of the time-image, and draws a final trajectory from Deren through the work of Chantal Ackerman and Yvonne Rainer to Sally Potter.

Maureen Turin’s essay, “The ethics of form: structure and gender in Maya Deren’s challenge to cinema”, marks a welcome turn in the book to film analysis. She focuses on key scenes in At Land, Meshes of the Afternoon and Ritual in Transfigured Time (USA 1946), analysing Deren’s use of socio-ritual and musical structures, the “transformation of game to dance” (85), the linking of sequences through repetitions and variations, and the stylization of physical performance. Turin contrasts Deren’s emphasis on formal structuration with another avant-garde tendency, toward immediacy and expressionism (represented by Jonas Mekas). She also provides an overview of the opinions surrounding Deren’s position asthe seminal female experimental filmmaker, concluding that while she was not the first, in terms of “innovative spurs, movements that launch new energies” (81), Deren was of major significance.

With Catherine Soussloff’s essay, “Maya Deren herself”, the examination of Deren’s position within film history continues. Soussloff explores Deren’s self-representation via the historicizing project of The Legend of Maya Deren, a publication she claims was presided over by Jonas Mekas as part of the “project of legitimating American independent cinema” (106). Soussloff also observes that a biography of such large dimensions contrasts with the more “natural” discourse surrounding the male artist. In her survey of critical writing on Deren (Adams Sitney, Tom Gunning, Judith Mayne), she concludes that there is a lack of feminism in and on Deren, controversially dubbing her a “prefeminist woman filmmaker” (124).
Dance theorist Mark Franko focuses on Deren’s relationship to American modern dance in his essay, “Aesthetic agencies in Flux: Tally Beatty, Maya Deren, and the modern dance tradition in Study in Choreography for the Camera“. He contrasts Deren’s films with Dwight Godwin’s 1941 film study of Martha Graham’s Lamentation, introducing Beatty’s own choreographic work in Southern Landscape to support his argument regarding the role of the black dancer in the 1940s. Franko finds a continuity between the depersonalization and self-reflexivity of Graham’s choreography and Deren’s films, stating that both aesthetics can be “collated with notions of the primitive” (134). Franko sees Beatty’s presence in Study…as “anti-universalising”, contrasting his “historical” presence with the “ahistorical” body of the white female performer. Combined with the overriding choreography of Deren’s cinematic approach, he argues that Beatty’s agency in Study…is defused and “remains unresolved” (146), bringing Franko’s historico-political, dance-based critique into line with other theories put forward in this book regarding agency in Deren’s films.

Ute Holl begins “Moving the dancer’s soul” with an account of the disagreement between Anaïs Nin and Deren regarding Ritual…in which Nin was cast. In this elucidating and convincing essay, Holl links the two artists via biographical details of their relations with their parents and their interest in psychology, leading into further discussion of Deren’s interest in possession through dance and the “psychological functioning of perception” (160). Holl unravels Deren’s opinion of Surrealism, which is articulated in “An anagram”, concluding that for Deren:

the task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls. (164)

While Nin was frustrated at Deren’s editing of the party scene in Ritual… which foils any dramatic tension, the cinematically choreographed movements that feature in the scene transform social interaction beyond specifics – exactly what Deren was after. As Holl explains, beyond symbolism, stream of consciousness and the binary significations of Hollywood, Deren built her cinema on “a theory on media as techniques of social transition” (169) which was in line with Deren’s understanding of trance and possession as “prestigious social transformation” (173).

Refreshing, but seeming a little out of place, Jane Brakhage Wodening and Barbara Hammer contribute personal stories, Wodening recounting anecdotes both first and second-hand, and Hammer describing the influence of Deren on her own filmmaking. Wodening’s fairytale tone both supports and gently mocks the tendency of Deren’s memory toward legend and myth, emphasising her practice of Voudoun to great effect. Hammer discovered Deren during her education as a filmmaker, thrilled to find a female artist whose aesthetic suited her own. She recounts her own “homage” films that build on Deren’s experimentation with space and time and the deployment of artist as protagonist. Hammer was also influenced by Deren’s theory of cinematic “verticality”, her commitment to the avant-garde and literally followed in her footsteps across the American University lecture circuit, confirming accounts of Deren’s influence on the experimental film culture in America elsewhere in Nichol’s book.

Striking out in a new direction, Lucy Fischer addresses a neglect regarding Deren’s link to primitive cinema in her essay, “‘The eye for magic’: Maya and Méliès”. Continuing a theme across the writing on Deren that finds significance in her name, Fischer begins with the translation of “Maya” as “Hindu goddess of sorcery” (186). In Deren’s writings and in her very presence, Fischer uncovers a strong connection with magic and particularly Méliès, comparing their cinematic “tricks” and role as “star” personalities. Fischer also draws an unlikely comparison between various edited leaps in Deren’s films and Fred Astaire’s gravity-defying dance in Royal Wedding (USA, 1951). Fischer points out that the “impossible voyage” of Méliès mutates in Deren to become “truly incoherent” (193-4), with matches on action linking diverse geographies and blurring subject boundaries. Popular cinema and the avant-garde collide.

Moira Sullivan offers the first dedicated discussion of Deren’s Haitian footage in the book, arguing for a reappraisal of the 5 400 feet of 16mm film shot during a Haitian Voudoun ceremony outside Port-au-Prince. (Sullivan provides a website address that lists her inventory of this footage.) Sullivan states that the well-known 1977 edited version of the total 20 000 feet, Divine Horsemen (USA, 1985) by Teiji and Cherel Ito, does not comply with the sequencing of Deren’s footage. Using techniques such as shoot to cut, and plan by eye, Deren’s final material charts the shape of the voudoun ceremony and, Sullivan argues, should thus be seen as is. The significance of ritual dance in the film is central to Sullivan’s argument that the footage is arranged in accordance with capturing “principled dance movement” (217) within the context of the whole ritual event. She quotes Deren:

whenever I tried to ‘stop’ a moment, to isolate it from its context, it projected an impression which was not at all what the Haitians meant…dance is only part of the ritual and its form is governed by the larger pattern, rather than being contained in itself. (213-4)

Sullivan goes on to outline the technical details of the “choreocinema” employed by Deren in her previous films and adapted here to the specific conditions of her subject. This establishes a continuity between her short films and this ethnographic project via Deren’s understanding of choreographic principles.

In “Seeing double (s): reading Deren bisexually’, Maria Pramaggiore develops her ideas regarding cinematic performance in Deren’s films, both in relation to figure and technique, which she introduced in her 1997 essay, “Performance and persona in the U.S. avant-garde: the case of Maya Deren”. [1] Pramaggiore turns to theories of bisexuality to unravel the subject/object relations in what she refers to as “Deren’s self-representation Trilogy”; Meshes, Ritual and At Land. Beyond psycho-analysis, Pramaggiore finds in these films a notion of otherness as a “mythic and abstract force beyond individual control – as is movement” (239). Again, dance plays a central role in this discussion of subjects destabilised through cinematic means, but the model of bisexuality provides the central motif of a breaking down of oppositions (ie. monosexualities). The narrative and formal properties that allow for such a reading are convincingly outlined, including the absence of a “coupled resolution”, and are applied to all three films.

Erin Brannigan,
University of New South Wales, Australia.

Endnotes

[1] Maria Pramaggiore,”Performance and persona in the U.S. Avant-garde: the case of Maya Deren”,  Cinema Journal, #36, No.2, Winter 1997, pp.17-40

Reference:
VéVé A. Clark,  The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works (New York: Anthology Film Archives, c1984).
Created on: Wednesday, 25 June 2003 | Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 June 2003