Editing Maya Deren (section)

==Major films==

===''Meshes of the Afternoon'' (1943)===
{{main|Meshes of the Afternoon}}

[[File:Meshes of the Afternoon 1.png|thumb|Deren in ''[[Meshes of the Afternoon]]'' (1943)]]

In 1943, Deren purchased a used [[16 mm|16mm]] [[Bolex]] camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. This camera was used to make her first and best-known film, ''Meshes of the Afternoon'' (1943), made in collaboration with Hammid in their Los Angeles home on a budget of $250.<ref name="Athology Film Archive/Film Culture">{{cite book |last1=Clark |first1=VeVe A. |last2=Hudson |first2=Millicent |last3=Neiman |first3=Catrina |editor1-last=Melton |editor1-first=Hollis |title=The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works |date=1988 |publisher=Athology Film Archive/Film Culture |location=New York City |isbn=0-911689-17-6 |edition=Volume 1 Part Two}}</ref> ''Meshes of the Afternoon'' is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. Critics have seen autobiographical elements in the film, as well as thoughts about woman as subject rather than as object. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed, long after its initial screenings, by Deren's third husband [[Teiji Itō]] in 1952. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film", full of dramatic angles and innovative editing. It investigates the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. A woman, played by Maya Deren, walks up to a house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and seems to have a dream. The sequence of walking up to the gate on the partially shaded road restarts numerous times, resisting conventional narrative expectations, and ends in various situations inside the house. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. Recurring symbols include a cloaked figure, mirrors, a key, and a knife.

The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. The camera initially does not show her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman, which creates a universalizing, totalizing effect- as it is easier to relate to an unknown, faceless woman. Multiple selves appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting that the [[Id, ego and super-ego|super-ego]] is at play, which is in line with the [[Psychoanalysis|psychoanalytic]] [[Sigmund Freud|Freudian]] staircase and flower motifs. This kind of Freudian interpretation, which she disagreed with, led Deren to add sound, composed by [[Teiji Itō]], to the film.

Another interpretation is that each film is an example of a "personal film". Her first film, ''Meshes of the Afternoon'', explores a woman's subjectivity and relation to the external world. [[Georges Sadoul]] said Deren may have been "the most important figure in the post-war development of the personal, independent film in the U.S.A."<ref name="letter">{{cite book |title=Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology |editor-first1=Karyn |editor-last1=Kay |editor-first2=Gerald |editor-last2=Peary |chapter=A Letter to James Card by Maya Deren |location=New York |publisher=Dutton |year=1977 |isbn=978-0-52547-459-3 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/womencinema00rein}}</ref> In featuring the filmmaker as the woman whose subjectivity in the domestic space is explored, the feminist dictum "the personal is political" is foregrounded. As with her other films on self-representation, Deren navigates conflicting tendencies of the self and the "other", through doubling, multiplication and merging of the woman in the film. Following a dreamlike quest with allegorical complexity, ''Meshes of the Afternoon'' has an enigmatic structure and a loose affinity with both film noir and domestic melodrama.<ref name="Nichols" /> The film is famous for how it resonated with Deren's own life and anxieties. According to a review in ''The Moving Image'', "this film emerges from a set of concerns and passionate commitments that are native to Deren's life and her trajectory. The first of these trajectories is Deren's interest in socialism during her youth and university years".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Gadassik |first=Alla |date=2012-07-11 |title=Meshes of the Afternoon (review) |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/480559 |journal=The Moving Image |language=en |volume=12 |issue=1 |pages=139–142 |doi=10.1353/mov.2012.0015 |s2cid=191487240 |issn=1542-4235|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

==== Director's notes ====
There is no concrete information about the conception of ''Meshes of the Afternoon'' beyond that Deren offered the poetic ideas and Hammid was able to turn them into visuals, as she envisioned them. Deren's initial concept began on the terms of a subjective camera, one that would show the point of view of herself without the aid of mirrors and would move as her eyes through spaces. According to the earliest program note, she describes ''Meshes of the Afternoon'' as follows:

<blockquote>This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.</blockquote>

===''At Land'' (1944)===
{{main|At Land}}

[[File:Maya Deren from the still in the film At Land (1944).jpg|left|thumb|Deren in a still from the film ''At Land'' (1944)]]

Deren filmed ''At Land'' in [[Port Jefferson, New York|Port Jefferson]] and [[Amagansett, New York]] in the summer of 1944. Taking on more of an environmental psychologist's perspective, Deren "externalizes the hidden dynamic of the external world...as if I had moved from a concern with the life of the fish, to a concern with the sea which accounts for the character of the fish and its life."<ref name="letter" /> Maya Deren washes up on the shore of the beach, and climbs up a piece of driftwood that leads to a room lit by chandeliers, and one long table filled with men and women smoking. She seems to be invisible to the people as she crawls across the table, uninhibited; her body continues seamlessly again onto a new frame, crawling through foliage; following the flowing pattern of water on rocks; following a man across a farm, to a sick man in bed, through a series of doors, and finally popping up outside on a cliff. She shrinks in the wide frame as she walks farther away from the camera, up and down sand dunes, then frantically collecting rocks back on the shore. Her expression seems confused when she sees two women playing chess in the sand. She runs back through the entire sequence, and because of the jump-cuts, it seems as though she is a double or "doppelganger", where her earlier self sees her other self running through the scene. Some of her movements are controlled, suggesting a theatrical, dancer-like quality, while some have an almost animalistic sensibility as she crawls through the seemingly foreign environments. This is one of Deren's films in which the focus is on the character's exploration of her own subjectivity in her physical environment, inside as well as outside her subconscious, although it has a similar amorphous quality compared to her other films.

===''A Study in Choreography for Camera'' (1945)===
{{main|A Study in Choreography for Camera}}

[[File:Still from A Study in Choreography for Camera.jpg|thumb|Still from ''[[A Study in Choreography for Camera]]'']]

In the spring of 1945 she made ''A Study in Choreography for Camera'', which Deren said was "an effort to isolate and celebrate the principle of the power of movement."<ref name="letter" /> The compositions and varying speeds of movement within the frame inform and interact with Deren's meticulous edits and varying film speeds and motions to create a dance that Deren said could only exist on film. Excited by the way the dynamic of movement is greater than anything else within the film, Maya established a completely new sense of the word "geography" as the movement of the dancer transcends and manipulates the ideas of both time and space.<ref name="letter" /> <blockquote>"For Deren, no transition is needed between a place outside (such as a forest, or a park, or the beach) and an interior room. One action can be performed across different physical spaces, as in A Study in Choreography For Camera (1945), and in this way sews together layers of reality, thereby suggesting continuity between different levels of consciousness."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Szperling|first=Silvina|date=2017-05-05|title=Ritual in Transfigured Time: Narcisa Hirsch, Sufi Poetry, Ecstatic Dances, and the Female Gaze|url=https://screendancejournal.org/article/view/5710|journal=The International Journal of Screendance|language=en|volume=3|doi=10.18061/ijsd.v3i0.5710|issn=2154-6878|doi-access=free}}</ref></blockquote>At just under 3 minutes long, ''A Study in Choreography for Camera'' is a fragment depicting a carefully constructed exploration of a man who dances in a forest, and then seems to teleport to the inside of a house because of how continuous his movements are from one place to the next. The edit is broken, choppy, showing different angles and compositions, and even with parts in slow-motion, Deren is able to keep the quality of the leap smooth and seemingly uninterrupted. The choreography is perfectly synched as he seamlessly appears in an outdoor courtyard and then returns to an open, natural space. It shows a progression from nature to the confines of society, and back to nature. The figure belongs to dancer and choreographer [[Talley Beatty]], whose last movement is a leap across the screen back to the natural world. Deren and Beatty met through Katherine Dunham, while Deren was her assistant and Beatty was a dancer in her company.<ref>{{Cite news|date=2016-03-30|title=Talley Beatty|url=https://www.alvinailey.org/talley-beatty|access-date=2021-12-02|website=Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater}}</ref> It is worth noting that Beatty collaborated heavily with Deren in the creation of this film, hence why he is credited alongside Deren in the film's credit sequence.<ref name="Durkin 2013" /> The film is also subtitled 'Pas de Deux', a dance term referring to a dance between two people, or in this case, a collaboration between Deren and Beatty.<ref name="Durkin 2013" />

''A Study in Choreography for Camera'' was one of the first experimental dance films to be featured in the New York Times as well as Dance Magazine.<ref name="Durkin 2013" />

===''Ritual in Transfigured Time'' (1946)===
{{main|Ritual in Transfigured Time}}

By her fourth film, Deren discussed in ''An Anagram'' that she felt special attention should be given to unique possibilities of time and that the form should be ritualistic as a whole. ''Ritual in Transfigured Time'' began in August and was completed in 1946. It explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual, looking at the details as well as the bigger ideas of the nature and process of change. The main roles were played by Deren herself and the dancers [[Rita Christiani]] and Frank Westbrook.<ref>{{cite book |title=Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde |editor-last=Nichols |editor-first=Bill |publisher=University of California Press |date=2009 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NA8a2jbCUTcC&q=Rita+Christiani+%2B+Nichols&pg=PP12 |isbn=978-0-52022-732-3 |page=141 |access-date=September 18, 2017}}</ref>

===''Meditation on Violence'' (1948)===
{{main|Meditation on Violence}}

Deren's ''Meditation on Violence'' was made in 1948. [[Chao-Li Chi]]'s performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. It was an attempt to "abstract the principle of ongoing metamorphosis", found in ''Ritual in Transfigured Time,'' though Deren felt it was not as successful in the clarity of that idea, brought down by its philosophical weight.<ref name="letter" /> Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop.