Maya Deren - Biography

Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev – October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowsky, was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer.

Early life

Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine to psychologist Solomon Derenkowsky and Marie Fiedler, who supposedly named her after Italian actress Eleanora Duse.

In 1922, the family moved to Syracuse, New York. Her father shortened the family name to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York. He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse.

In 1928, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her mother moved to Paris to be with her daughter while she attended the League of Nations School in Geneva, Switzerland from 1930 to 1933.

College

Deren began college at Syracuse University, where she became active in the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League (1907). Through the YPSL she met Gregory Bardacke, whom she later married at the age of eighteen. After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City. She and her husband became active in various socialist causes in New York City. She graduated from New York University and separated from Bardacke. The divorce was finalized in 1939. She attended the New School for Social Research and received a master’s degree in English literature at Smith College. Her master's thesis was titled "The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry" (1939).

After graduation from Smith, Deren returned to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she worked as an editorial assistant and free-lance photographer. In 1941, Deren wrote and suggested a children's book on dance to choreographer Katherine Dunham and later became her personal secretary. At the end of a tour, the Dunham dance company stopped in Los Angeles for several months to work in Hollywood. It was there that Deren met Alexandr Hackenschmied (later Hammid), a celebrated Czech-born photographer and cameraman who would become her second husband in 1942. Hackenschmied had fled Czechoslovakia in 1938 after Hitler's advance.

Cinema

Deren wrote articles and books, made avant-garde films, conducted "lecture study demonstrations", received a Guggenheim fellowship (1947) for creative work in motion pictures, and created a scholarship for experimental filmmakers, the Creative Film Foundation. These efforts established her as an important voice in postwar avant-garde film.

In the early 1940s, Deren used some of the inheritance from her father to purchase a used 16 mm Bolex camera. She used this camera to make her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), in Los Angeles in collaboration with Hammid. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Itō in 1952.

In 1943, she adopted the name Maya Deren. Maya is the name of the mother of the historical Buddha as well as the dharmic concept of the illusory nature of reality. In Greek myth, Maia is the mother of Hermes and a goddess of mountains and fields. Also in 1943, Deren began making a film with Marcel Duchamp, The Witches' Cradle, which was never completed.

In 1944, back in New York City, her social circle included Duchamp, André Breton, John Cage, and Anaïs Nin.

Deren's second film was At Land, which she made in 1944. She made A Study in Choreography for the Camera in 1945. Ritual in Transfigured Time was made in 1946, which explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual.

In 1947, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures", and won the Grand Prix Internationale for 16mm experimental film at the Cannes Film Festival for Meshes of the Afternoon.

Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop.

In 1958, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The Very Eye of Night.

Deren distributed her own films and promoted them through lectures and screenings in the United States, Canada, and Cuba. She lectured on film theory and Vodoun. She wrote, directed, edited, and performed in her own films.

Criticism of Hollywood

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Deren attacked Hollywood for its artistic, political and economic monopoly over American cinema. She stated, “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick,” and observed that Hollywood “has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form.” She set herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry’s standards and practices.

Haiti and Vodoun

When Maya Deren decided to make an ethnographic film in Haiti, she was criticized for abandoning avant-garde film where she had made her place, but she was ready to expand to a new level as an artist. The Guggenheim fellowship grant in 1947 enabled Deren to finance travel to Haiti and to complete her film Meditation on Violence. She went on three additional trips through 1954 to document and record the rituals of vodoun.

A source of inspiration for ritual dance was Katherine Dunham who wrote her master’s thesis on Haitian dances in 1939, which Deren edited. Afterwards Deren wrote several articles on religious possession in dancing before her first trip to Haiti. Deren not only filmed, recorded and photographed many hours of vodoun ritual, but also participated in the ceremonies. She documented her knowledge and experience of Vodoun in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: Vanguard Press, 1953), edited by Joseph Campbell, which is considered a definitive source on the subject.

Deren filmed 18,000 feet of Vodoun rituals and people she met in Haiti. The footage was incorporated into a posthumous documentary film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti edited and produced by Teiji Itō and his wife Cherel Winett Itō (1947–1999) in 1977. All of the original wire recordings, photographs and notes are held in the Maya Deren Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. The film footage is housed at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

An LP of some of Derren's wire recordings was published by the newly-formed Elektra Records in 1953 entitled Voices of Haiti. The cover art for the album was by Teijo Ito (sic).

Death

Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44, from a brain hemorrhage brought on by extreme malnutrition. Her condition was also weakened by the amphetamines she had been taking since she began working for Dunham in 1941, prescribed by Dr. Max Jacobson. Deren was taking amphetamines and sleeping pills on a daily basis when she died. Her father suffered from high blood pressure, which she may have had as well.

Her ashes were scattered in Japan at Mount Fuji.

Legacy

Deren was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema, highlighting personal, experimental, underground film. In 1986, the American Film Institute created the Maya Deren Award to honor independent filmmakers.

Works about Deren and her works have been produced in various media:

• In 1987, Jo Ann Kaplan directed a biographical documentary about Deren, titled Invocation: Maya Deren (65 min)
• In 1994, the UK-based Horse and Bamboo Theatre created and toured Dance of White Darkness throughout Europe—the story of Deren's visits to Haiti.
• In 2002, Martina Kudlacek directed a feature-length documentary about Deren, titled In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Im Spiegel der Maya Deren), which featured music by John Zorn.

Deren's films have also been shown with newly-written alternative soundtracks:

• In 2004, the British rock group Subterraneans produced new soundtracks for six of Deren's short films as part of a commission from Queen's University Belfast's annual film festival. At Land won the festival prize for sound design.
• In 2008, the Portuguese rock group Mão Morta produced new soundtracks for four of Deren's short films as part of a commission from Curtas Vila do Conde's annual film festival.

Filmography

See also

• Women's Cinema

External links

• Deren bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
• In the Mirror of Maya Deren at IMDB
• Martina Kudláček (director of "In the Mirror of Maya Deren") by Robert Gardner BOMB 81/Fall 2002
• Maya Deren Forum
• Private Life of a Cat (1947) at the Internet Archive
• Maya Deren Collection at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center
• 'Divine Horsemen' (book): excerpts