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We celebrate the experimental cinema legend for her centennial.

This Saturday is the 100th anniversary of Maya Deren’s birth, making it a time to honor the filmmaker, her work, and her significance and legacy within not just the arena of experimental cinema but film history in general. Regardless of the surreal, poetic content of her films, which include Meshes of the Afternoon (with husband Alexander Hammid) and At Land, she’s important as a pioneer and theorist of independent film. It’s mostly through the latter that we can find her filmmaking advice and lessons, all of them more than 50 years old but still relevant to aspiring cinema artists today. Here are six of the tips, collected from her writings, lectures, and interviews:

1. Amateur Filmmaking is for Lovers

If you’re looking for advice on breaking into Hollywood, Deren’s tips are not for you. She was a big proponent of “amateur” filmmaking, which...

Inspired by similar feminist film weeks in London and Berlin, the co-founders of Woman With a Movie Camera are bringing New York Feminist Film Week to the city’s Anthology Film Archives. Designed to illuminate cultural and cinematic approaches to feminism — intersectional, transnational and everything in between — the first annual Nyffw features a hearty slate of films directed by filmmakers both known and rising, but you don’t have to be in attendance to catch up on some of the most seminal screenings on their calendar.

Read More: Female Filmmakers Are ‘Grossly Underrepresented’ When It Comes to Directing Opportunities, New Study Finds

The inaugural Nyffw has divided its slate into a series of thoughtfully curated programs which tackle topics as wide-ranging as “Dismantling Islamophobia,” “Trans/Action” and “Bodies,” along with a special tribute to Barbara Hammer and an entire program dedicated to “feminist film genealogies.” Animation fans and those who...

From The Berkshire Evening Eagle, August 1, 1947:

Photo caption: Maya Deren: Looking for a flying saucer?

The samples of modern “art” which demand (and are given) a thousand lines of carefully written prose to explain the artist’s meaning have nothing on three short films to be shown tonight at the Berkshire Museum as one of the features of members’ night. Maya Deren, who conceived and is featured in each of the silent strips of acetate sent along a few pages to explain what the spectator will see tonight.

She writes of the first film, “Meshes of the Afternoon,” “It is concerned with the relationship between the imaginative and objective reality. The film begins in actuality and eventually ends there. But, in the meantime, the imagination, here given as a dream, intervenes. It seizes upon a casual incident and elaborating it into critical proportions, thrusts back into reality the product of its convolutions.

The next big things in comedy, theatre, dance, art, film and music feature in a packed programme

Every September the Melbourne Fringe festival lurches over the horizon. Last year, 3400 independent artists mounted shows in more than 147 venues across Melbourne, ranging across visual arts, film, music and every kind of performance you could shake a stick at. And then there's the after-show parties at the Fringe Club and the Warren. Between now and 6 October, you need never go home.

The Fringe is proudly open access, so make it part of your schedule to see some artists you've never heard of before: they might be the next big thing. Choosing among hundreds of acts is tough, but I screwed up my courage, plunged into the programme and excavated some promising acts. Here, in no particular order, are my top 10 picks.

Yes Dance

Choreographer Rennie McDougall is one of the up-and-coming talents of the Melbourne dance scene.

Working on and scanning through Bad Lit’s Underground Film Timeline periodically, I am continually struck and impressed by the strong efforts of a certain, key few individuals who have both set down an official historical course and have charted a definitive future for avant-garde and experimental film. Without these individuals’ efforts, perhaps there would not be a history for me to attempt to chronicle on this website.

Typically, these individuals have worn multiple hats in their artistic careers, serving as filmmakers, curators, lecturers, journalists and such. While much of their work was about promoting underground film as a valid and to-be-respected art form, there is also a strong component — if not a guiding component — of self-preservation.

That is not to imply a disparagement on their accomplishments as being merely self-serving, but the survival of the one does lead to a survival of the many. That is, if one can...

July 16

8:00 p.m.

Millennium Film Workshop

66 East 4th St.

New York, New York 10003

Hosted by: Cinema 16

The legendary Cinema 16 avant-garde film society is making a comeback. And it’s making a big splash in a big way with this special music and film performance as a benefit show for the Millennium Film Workshop.

Curator Molly Surno is pairing modern music acts with classic cinema for an innovative and once-in-a-lifetime auditory and visual experience. Performances at this event include:

Maya Deren‘s groundbreaking avant-garde classic At Land will screen accompanied by a live performance by Forma, a minimal-synth trio out of Brooklyn.A Wild Roomer, one of the films directed by and starring silent film star Charley Bowers, will have a soundtrack by Nick Yulman, a Brooklyn-based sound artist.The 1976 Japanese puppet animated film Dojoji Temple will have musical accompaniment by Ablehearts, the performing name of Brooklyn sound and video artist Thomas Arsenault.

 

Director Adam Rehmeier has this cool film called The Bunny Game coming to film festivals this year. The Bunny Game follows a prostitute looking for her next meal hitches a ride with a trucker that leaves her praying for her next breath. This film isn't for everyone but for the fans who love shocking moments  and torture scenes this will be a treat for you.  The cast and crew took this film past the limits. Actress Rodleen Getsic gives a standout performance and shows just how much she'll "Really Do" for a project she believes in! Check out my latest "Versus" with Adam Rehmeier as he gives GeekTyrant the first sneak peak at the making of The Bunny Game. Film Festival don't pass up this cool film!

 

Brian  S- Hey Adam, first off how did you get into the film making biz?

Adam Rehmeier- I've always been interested in storytelling.

A lot of hay has been made lately about the future of Netflix streaming movies over the Internet for its subscribers as opposed to their original business model of being a mail-order DVD rental service. A good recent article on the subject was written by Chuck Tryon, who waded through all the hype and arguments against to try to figure out what impact Internet streaming of movies has on the movie industry.

Well, forget about the industry for the moment. How is Netflix streaming affecting the underground filmmaker?

Personally, I’m not a Netflix subscriber, so wading through their offerings is a bit more difficult for me. However, I was still curious if the company was streaming any underground movies. To find out if they were, I ended up searching a website called Instant Watcher, which is a company independent of Netflix, but uses a Netflix developer Api to scan...

In the fall of 1946, Frank Stauffacher mounted a major, and very influential, retrospective of avant-garde film in the U.S. at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The series was called “Art in Cinema” and it featured ten different programs from filmmakers in the U.S., France, Germany and Canada.

By the mid-’40s, the avant-garde hadn’t taken a strong hold in the U.S. yet, so the majority of the films screened came from Europe, or by Europeans who relocated to the U.S. However, by that time also, the European avant-garde had pretty much completely petered out. Still, Stauffacher wanted to show that there was a continuity to avant-garde film history that, up until that point, had yet to be fully considered.

In conjunction with the series, the San Francisco Museum of Art published a catalog, pretty much like one would find with any major art exhibit.