FREE ESSENTIAL DEREN: COLLECTED WRITINGS ON FILM PDF Maya Deren,Bruce McPherson | 263 pages | 05 Apr 2005 | McPherson & Co Publishers,U.S. | 9780929701653 | English | New York, United States Maya Deren & Bruce R. Mcpherson, Essential Deren Collected Writings on Film - PhilPapers Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer. The function of film, Deren believed, was to create an experience. Using editing, multiple exposuresjump-cutting, superimpositionslow-motion, and other camera techniques to her advantage, Deren abandoned established notions of physical space and time, in carefully planned films with specific conceptual aims. Meshes of the Afternoonher collaboration with Alexander Hammidhas been one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema history. She went on to make several films of her own, including At LandA Study in Choreography for Cameraand Ritual in Transfigured Timewriting, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heymanher camerawoman. Her father shortened the family name to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York. Inshe became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Deren began college at Syracuse Universitywhere she studied journalism [11] and political science, and also became a highly active socialist leader during the Trotskyist movement. She finished school at New York University with a bachelor's degree in literature [7] in June then returned Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film Syracuse in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film fall. She and her husband became active in various socialist causes in New York City; during this time they separated and eventually divorced three years later. She received a master's degree in English literature at Smith College. She supported herself from to by freelance writing for radio shows and foreign-language newspapers. InDeren wrote to Katherine Dunham —an African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist of Caribbean culture and dance—suggesting a children's book on dance; she later became Dunham's assistant and publicist. Dunham's fieldwork influenced Deren's studies of Haitian culture and Vodou mythology. It was there that Deren met Alexandr Hackenschmied later Hammida celebrated Czech-born photographer and cameraman who would become her second husband in Hackenschmied had fled from Czechoslovakia in after the Sudetenland Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film. They lived together in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film Canyonwhere he helped her with her still photography which focused on local fruit pickers in Los Angeles. Deren defined cinema as an art, provided an intellectual context for film viewing, and filled a theoretical gap for the kinds of independent films that film societies were featuring. Her entrepreneurial spirit became evident as she began to screen and distribute her films in the United States, Canadaand Cubalecturing and writing on avant-garde film theory, and additionally on Vodou. She then created a scholarship for experimental filmmakers, the Creative Film Foundation. Deren was a muse and inspiration to such up-and-coming avant-garde filmmakers as Curtis HarringtonStan Brakhageand Kenneth Angerwho emulated her independent, entrepreneurial spirit. InDeren purchased a used 16 mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. It is the first example of a narrative work in avant-garde American film; critics have seen autobiographical elements in the film, as well as thoughts about women and the individual. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film", full of dramatic angles and innovative editing. It seems to investigate 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 to her friend's house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and has 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. Certain symbols recur on the screen, including a cloaked, mirror-faced figure, and a key, which becomes twinned with a knife. The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. The camera initially avoids her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman. Multiple selves appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting that the super-ego is at play, which is in line with the psychoanalytic Freudian staircase and flower motifs. Another interpretation is that each film is Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film example of a "personal film". Her first piece explores a woman's subjectivity and her relation to the external world. Georges Sadoul said Deren may have been "the most important figure in the post-war development of Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film personal, independent film in the U. 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. 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". 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. 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:. 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. Taking on more of an environmental psychologist's perspective, Deren "externalizes the hidden dynamic of the external world 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 Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film 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. In the spring of she made A Study in Choreography for Camerawhich Deren said was "an effort to isolate and celebrate the principle of the power of movement. 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 Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film of the dancer transcends and manipulates the ideas of both time and space. 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 Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film belongs to dancer and choreographer Talley Beattywhose last movement is a leap across the screen back to the natural world. The edit its 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. 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 It explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual, looking at the details as well as the bigger ideas Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film the nature and process of change. Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 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 Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film it was not as successful in the clarity of that idea, brought down by its philosophical weight. Inshe moved to a Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film on Kings Road in Hollywood [2] and adopted Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film name Maya, a pet name her husband Hammid coined.