Maya Deren

Drawing upon Maya Deren’s panel contribution at the 1953 Cinema 16 Symposium and Martin Heidegger’s “Memorial Address” from Discourse on Thinking this paper uses Deren’s vertical/horizontal investigations theory and Martin Heidegger’s ideas on calculative/meditative thinking to describe how the mechanics of filmmaking contribute to the process of poetically creating meaning in film.
Maya Deren suggests two kinds of investigation in film, that of the horizontal and that of the vertical. The horizontal operates primarily to move the plot forward in sequence of action-after-action-after-action, while the vertical stops at a particular point on the horizontal plane of action and proceeds to move upward into the story or character, exploring meaning-upon-meaning-upon-meaning.
In the avid pursuit of the horizontal, popular filmmaking, in a distancing from the experimental, has lost concern for the vertical poetic investigation of Deren’s description, in the visual, the symbolic, and the act of characterization. What remains is a shallow preoccupation with pace, a perpetuation of action not story, an attraction to only the look of a character. What is forgotten is content - narrative and otherwise - the meaning of a moment, a character, an exploration. Such films can be seen as a reflection of present culture, which has come to reject the vertical poetic in thinking as well.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger presents a duality in thinking, similar Deren’s duality in filmic investigation. He observes two, contrasting kinds of thinking - that of the calculative thinking and that of the meditative - as approaches for how human beings think about the world. Calculative thinking, Heidegger says, concerns the technical and formulaic, while meditative thinking explores meaning. Meditative thinking, he believes, is practiced less and less by the modern human.
While Deren and Heidegger worked in different disciplines, film and philosophy, respectively, their thoughts can be seen as not only complementary to one another but when connected can advance an understanding of how meaning is poetically created in film. This process ultimately reflects cultural shifts in the way human beings think, understand, and create when guided by calculative practices instead of meditative. Discussion of the commonalities between the ideas and examination of Deren’s short films will serve as the vehicles by which this concept is explored. Film Theory is the field of academic discourse to which the paper contributes.

Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image is a rich exploration of the choreographic in cinema.  It traces the history of the dancefilm form from some of its earliest manifestations in the silent film era, through the historic avant-garde, musicals and music videos to contemporary experimental short dancefilms. In so doing it also traverses some of the most significant collaborations between dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers.  Bringing film theory and dance theory into dialogue, the book argues that the combination of dance and film produces cine-choreographic practices that are specific to the dancefilm form. As whole, the book thus presents new models of cinematic movement that are historically informed and interdisciplinary in nature.  An extensive companion website provide key video illustrations and links to online resources.

Colección "Mujeres en la historia", dirigida por Ada del Moral, doctora en Estudios Teatrales, periodista y escritora.
Prisanoticias Colecciones, Ediciones El País, Madrid, 2019
ISBN: 978-84-9907-103-9
143 páginas

· + info: https://elpais.com/promociones/mujeres-en-la-historia/

Contenido PDF: Cubiertas e índice del libro.

This article contributes to the scholarly discussion of the relationship between cinema and dance using Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of dance as gesture. To render Agamben’s critical framework operative, however, one needs to consider his reference to the concept of phantasmata (images) taken from Domenico da Piacenza’s Renaissance treatise on choreography. Agamben returns to this treatise to support his argument that dance is concerned first and foremost with time and memory rather than space and the present. To notate dance as a sequence of moving images is not simply to make visible on screen a series of bodily movements in space. Rather, it means acknowledging that dancing is primarily a mental activity. Taking Agamben’s reflections on dance and using Maya Deren’s work on screen dance as a case-study, this article discusses how cinema and dance together prompt us to undo the economy of bodily movements, restoring the body to us transfigured.

""Abraxas is a bi-annual journal of contemporary esoteric art and culture printed in a high quality format. The first special issue, titled ‘Charming Intentions: Occultism, Magic and the History of Art’, will be launched on 25 May, 2013.
Presented in its usual impeccable design and high quality format, it offers eight papers selected from the conference ‘Charming Intentions: Occultism, Magic and the History of Art’, held at the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge on 3-4 December 2012.

From the depiction of astrology in medieval manuscript illumination, to Renaissance magic stones, Tantric fertility rites, Surrealist painting and the influence of witchcraft on 20th-century American experimental films, this issue aims to attest the place of esoteric themes as a flourishing field in current art-historical research and to the formative influence which esoteric currents have exerted on Western and non-Western material and visual culture.

Contributors include Imma Ramos, Monika Winiarczyk, Dr Judith Noble, Dr Liliana Leopardi, Shandra Lamaute, Lisa Hanstein, Alexandra Marracini and Daniel Zamani.""

This chapter studies the relationship between the two film versions of The Stepford Wives (Frank Oz, 2004 and Bryan Forbes, 1975) and their source novel, by Ira Levin (1972), with a specific focus on the relationship between the representation of the female somnambulist in Hollywood cinema and the avant-garde films of Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon).

In the early 1940s, Katherine Dunham engaged the future experimental film-maker Maya Deren to act as her secretary. While The Katherine Dunham Dance Company was on tour, Deren helped Dunham write up the findings from her anthropological fieldwork in Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean in the mid 1930s. In 1946 Deren wrote about the importance of ritual in her films, two of which had been made with dancers who had been members of Dunham’s company, and the following year she made her first visit to Haiti to study and film voodoo rituals that had been the subject of Miss Dunham’s research. At that time, ritual was generally understood, within artistic and scholarly communities in Europe and the US, as a survival or retention from a more primitive stage of human development. It was thus supposed to belong to a world-view that modern educated people, like Dunham and Deren, would not be able to participate in. This paper proves that neither Dunham nor Deren saw ritual in these terms. It argues that each used their experiences of voodoo to define a modern approach to spirituality that was grounded in an Africanist approach to the dancing body that was very different from the idea of disembodied transcendence which runs through the European philosophical tradition.

The concept of working in a multidisciplinary form across media and processes has become more prevalent in modern day culture. The acceptance of integration has become widespread and as a result a more informed and evolved
society has elapsed. Screen Dance adapts this idea to the strategic collaboration of many art forms that can include fine art practices, music compositions, film and dance. With evolution of the filmic process, users of this dynamic medium
have been able to create a new language to communicate their narratives or in
the case of many fine art film pieces, the otherwise absence of narrative. As a result of this new filmic process filmmakers can express their ideas with boundless possibilities. Deirdre Tower, member of the Dance Films Association, New York, spoke about Screen Dance at the 2011 Dance-tech conference
defining it as:

The structure for a dance for the camera, otherwise known as a cine dance or screen dance, may be driven by a kinetic or visual design
concept, poetry or narrative, imagery from reality or dreams, traditional or idiosyncratic musical forms. The intention may be to produce what cannot be conceived in a live performance or to stretch and condense a multi-media form.

In the 1950s, Ukrainian American filmmaker Maya Deren traveled to Haiti and became initiated as a manbo (priestess) in Haitian Vodou. How did Deren become drawn to Vodou, and how did she cultivate relationships with fellow devotees? Further, what does her experience as a Vodouizan reveal about other North American whites converting to " exotic " religions practiced largely by people of color? In an exploration of race and religious belonging, this essay offers a theoretical framing of " whiteness, " and considers the history of North American conversions to Buddhism as a precursor to white initiation to African Diasporic traditions. The paper examines Maya Deren's identity as an immigrant artist, resulting in an alternate experience of whiteness, and allowing her to conceive of her journey to Haiti as a spiritual homecoming. Ultimately, I argue that Deren became enmeshed in a ritual kinship system whose bonds reached far beyond the boundaries of mortal geographies.

“Whiteness in the Ancestral Waters: Race, Religion, and Conversion within North American Buddhism and Haitian Vodou,” The Journal of Interreligious Studies, Special Issue: The Color of God: Faith, Race, and Interreligious Dialogue, Issue 23 (May 2018): 90-102. Eds. Axel Oaks Takács and Funlayo E. Wood.

Narrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson. In illustrating how avant-garde filmmakers draw from their own mental and perceptual capacities, author Paul Taberham offers a compelling account of how their works expand the spectator’s range of aesthetic sensitivities and open creative vistas uncharted by commercial cinema.

In dance, Deren appears to have located a model of affinity, collaboration, and transformation that both drew on Trotskyite socialism—to which she had been committed as a student—and also took further Trotsky’s arguments for the revo- lutionary potential of the arts. Deren’s casting of dancers of colour from Dunham’s company, including Trinidad-born dancer Rita Christiani, in leading roles in her films, demands to be read politically—and in doing so expands political readings of dance and film to include, and indeed be predicated on, “the language of the body.” Thus, Deren’s films offer a model for reading the implicit, and often-ignored, politics of embodiment in feminist filmmaking, on which her influence is pervasive.

È poi vero che la Tradizione escluda l’innovazione e l’invenzione? O, al contrario, i veri “principi” si manifestano in sempre nuove forme? Non è facile rispondere a queste domande. Certo è che, a partire dal Novecento, nel campo delle arti, ma non solo, si è diffusa ed in parte affermata, una tendenza che, sulla scia di Antonin Artaud e René Daumal, si può a buon diritto chiamare “metafisica sperimentale delle arti”, nella quale concezioni e pratiche, volutamente messe da parte dal Rinascimento in poi, sembrano trovare una nuova incarnazione. A tale “rinascita”, o addirittura “restaurazione”, come l’ha chiamata il compositore americano Steve Reich, sono dedicati i saggi contenuti in questo volume.

4-page film criticism of the 1943 experimental psychodrama Meshes of the Afternoon, directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid. Discusses the way Deren and Hamid use aesthetic properties of editing, framing, camera movement and angles to create meaning.

In " Technoetic Pathways towards the Spiritual in Art: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Connectedness, Coherence and Consciousness, " Roy Ascott sets in motion a twenty-first century momentum for art that fuses in a syncretic manner spiritual and shamanic traditions with advanced science and technology. He emphasizes the shamanic sensibility of double consciousness, which seems to parallel interactions with cybernetic and telematic systems and immersive, virtual and augmented realities. This mode of archaic consciousness that involves phenomena such as doubles and apparitions is presented in this article as pivotal for the comprehension of processes of creativity and emergent novelty, and as a major principle and reoccurring theme in the aesthetics of Networked Rites, Noetic Fields-Weaving, Learning Fields and The Transcendent Double Selfie App. These technoetic formulations are propelled by Ascott's theories as they engage with the speculative proposition of consciousness as fields and the correlation of the artist and shaman who invoke the dance of the networked mind within an all-encompassing hypercortex, weaving new realities and stirring resonance of communitas for the next nature and culture.

One thing seems certain, the technoetic principle will be at the centre of art as it develops, and consciousness in all its forms will be the field of its unfolding. —Roy Ascott, 1999

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo estudiar el fenómeno de la representación y la multiplicación de la identidad en Mulholland Drive de Lynch, y la denominada " Trilogía de la autorrepresentación " de Maya Deren. Para ello, se han analizado cinematográfica y conceptualmente las películas propuestas, centrándonos después en la representación que hacen de la identidad, revisando diferentes teorías aplicadas a la literatura, la estética y el cine en relación a la percepción y representación de los límites del yo. Tras analizar los filmes citados, se puede concluir que el fenómeno es muy similar en ambos y que se puede adscribir a diferentes teorías del pensamiento contemporáneo en cuanto a la percepción de una identidad compleja. Ambas películas podrían calificarse de " narraciones polifónicas " protagonizadas por un sujeto múltiple que habita un contexto de realidades también multiplicadas que tendría que ver con las dos realidades que plantea la fenomenología, los dos mundos entre los que cabalgan Lynch y Deren.
-------------
This article focuses on the representation and multiplication of identity in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Maya Deren's so-called “Selfrepresentation trilogy.” After the initial cinematographic analysis this text compares the representation of identity by deploying theories from literature, aesthetics and cinema, regarding the perception and representation of the limits of the self. We conclude that the respective representations can be ascribed to different theories of contemporary thought on the perception of complex identities. Both films can be described as "polyphonic narrations" carried out by a multiple subject that inhabits a context of multiple realities in line with the two realities posed by phenomenology, the worlds between which Lynch and Deren inhabit.

L’autoritratto è una forma artistica persistente: attraversa la storia delle arti, l’evoluzione dei dispositivi di costruzione dell’immagine, sconfina tra i generi, si appropria di nuove tecnologie, pervade le pratiche sociali contemporanee. Quali sono le sue caratteristiche e i suoi esiti? E perché in periodi diversi, con modalità espressive ed estetiche eterogenee, numerosi cineasti hanno scelto di confrontarsi con tale forma, presa in prestito dall’arte visiva, e di rielaborarla profondamente in territorio cinematografico?

A proposition, rather than a polemical argument; and one composed in the subjunctive or “as if” modality of art, rather than the diagnostic “as such” of descriptive analysis. Beginning as an epistemological inquiry, the point of departure explores the “possibility of thinking in cinema through cinema”— ultimately producing an ontological theorization, with multiple implications.  The notion of “thinking through” films, toward the production of concepts, is not metaphorical or analogical; rather, this serves as a key task, one that Gilles Deleuze has posed for us, through his practice of philosophy as constructivism, functioning to generate possibilities rather than to ossify established views. In this way my experimental and “metacritical” mode of inquiry proceeds, engaging with films that compel reconsideration and catalyze theorizations of new concepts:  Lynch’s latest works, Mulholland Dr. (2001), and Inland Empire (2006)—as well as antecedents such as Lost Highway (1997), Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Sunset Boulevard (Dir. Wilder, 1950), and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). With sensory logic rather than analysis, the theoretical image-body encountered is understood through film-thought as aesthetic, material, constructed, mediated, temporal, reflexive, and expressive.

'A study in choreography for the Camera' illustrates Deren's acknowledgement to film art in an abstract, subtle way. Using the mechanism of the camera as an entity with parallelled importance to the choreographed figure, Deren guides the viewer with in a manner echoing the movement of the dancer and the environments they are placed within.

I explore how and why she does this and where her influences derive. I examine this in the context of her other films and the films of some of the artists she influenced.

The New York journal VVV (1942–1944) manifests a desire for tangibility that was a major component of surrealist practice in exile during World War II. VVV’s design and contents at once reflect the forced relocation of the avant-garde across the Atlantic and the surrealists’ willingness to prolong their movement through portable projects accessible to those outside their vulnerable contingency. Due to wartime censorship and the uncertainties of geopolitical displacement, American David Hare was named as the publication’s editor while André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp served as an advisory committee. Like the installations on view in New York during the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition (1942) and at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery (1942–1947), the journal’s design encourages audience interaction. However, unlike its eclectic Parisian precursor Minotaure (1933–1939) or contemporary wartime journals View (1940–1947) and Dyn (1942–1944), VVV ultimately transcends the rarified space of the gallery through affinities with avant-garde film. A direct comparison between a selection of the maneuverable components in VVV and Maya Deren’s infatuation with the tangible parameters of Guggenheim’s gallery in her film project Witch’s Cradle (1943) conveys precisely how the journal reaches out to its readers.

This paper is concerned with the life and oeuvre of Maya Deren, born Eleanora Derenowskaia (1917-1961), unquestionably – one of the most intriguing personalities of 20th century art. She was a filmmaker, film theorist, photographer, dancer and most of all – someone that might be called a radical surrealist and a creative „shamaness”. The author seeks to describe the main ideas presented in Divine Horsemen. The Living Gods of Haiti – a book that was originally published in 1953, as a result of Deren's personal research on Haitian voodoo culture.

Tandis que dans les années 1940 Jean Rouch et Maya Deren s’attachaient aux phénomènes de possession pour élaborer, plus qu’une stratégie de tournage, une esthétique ritualiste du film, les anthropologues du Sensory Ethnography Lab à Harvard ou le cinéaste Ben Russell poursuivent aujourd’hui cette veine de la ciné-transe en l’inscrivant, à la suite de Robert Gardner, dans les mondes
confluents de la performance, du cinéma expérimental et de l’anthropologie sensorielle.

Esta ponencia analiza y expresa los inquietantes signos de éxtasis, dolor, profusión y anomalía inscritos en las películas y vídeos musicales de creación dirigidos por Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, Kenneth Anger, David Lynch y Nacho Vigalondo. A lo sumo en las cuatro producciones seleccionadas destacan por la presencia omnipresente de la música, que está en total sintonía con lo trágico expuesto, a más también de entenderla como un espacio ritual, pura materialidad sonora, y como forma de conocimiento, porque en todo ruido está poblado de dioses y también de demonios.

This presentation analyzes and expresses the disturbing signs of ecstasy, pain, profusion and anomaly inscribed in creative films and music videos directed by Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, Kenneth Anger, David Lynch and Nacho Vigalondo. At most, the four selected productions stand out for the omnipresent presence of music, which is in total harmony with the tragic exposed, in addition to understanding it as a ritual space, pure sound materiality, and as a form of knowledge, because in Noise is populated by gods and also demons.

Resumo: Este artigo pretende analisar a questão do amateur no contexto do cinema de vanguarda norte-americano e de que forma as obras teóricas dos realizadores Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren e Jonas Mekas contribuíram para elaborar uma concepção poética sobre esse termo. A análise do tema será feita a partir dos seguintes textos: Amateur versus Profesional (Deren, 1959), In defense of amateur (Brakhage, 1971) e A linguagem mutante do cinema (Mekas, 1962). A metodologia estará centrada nos aspectos socioeconômico, artístico e técnico. O artigo defende a posição de que esses textos possuem uma importância histórica e teórica sobre o termo e contribuem para compreender a sua poética.