Because it’s her birthday soon… and I adore birthdays. And the word “juxtaposition” which I have deemed her unofficial mantra.
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Maya Deren : Gorgeous, Genius, Film Maker Extraordinaire,
Let me (and somebody else’s descriptions) brief
you on the beauty of two of my
favorite films.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
A large flower, the silhouette of a figure briskly walking away, a house key, a bread knife, a telephone receiver resting off the hook, and a spinning phonographic turntable define the shifting functional elements in Meshes of the Afternoon from which the film’s evolving, malleable construct – the fragile and tenuously interconnected mesh of actual and perceived reality – is intriguingly (and ingenuously) mapped. A woman (Maya Deren) walking along the sidewalk near her home catches a momentary glimpse of a figure turning the corner, unlatches the front door and, after a cursory inspection of the empty household, proceeds upstairs to rest on an armchair situated by a front-view window. From this deceptively simple introductory premise, Maya Deren modulates the mise-en-scene of seemingly mundane objects to create overlapping, yet non-intersecting planes of existential reality, using permutations of recurring images – mirrored surfaces (the apparition’s face, polished metal spheres, a hand mirror), glass, duality and doppelgangers – to represent variably interlocking narrative fragments of observation, inference, deduction, and memory. Unfolding with the narrative discontinuity characteristic of nouvelle roman literature (creating an idiosyncratically dissociative filmic language that also characterizes Alain Resnais’ subsequent feature films, particularly Last Year at Marienbad and Je t’aime, je t’aime), the film posits a series of subtle structural, temporal, and logical mutations, creating a sublimely recursive, mind-bending meditation on the interaction between experience and memory, domestic banality and violence, imagination and causation.
At Land (1944)
At Land is another of Maya Deren’s dream like films. The message which it transmits to and its main subject rests on the idea of the mutability of a personality. Maya said once that this film was made to show people the struggle to maintain the personal identity. The whole film has only 15 minutes, in which a whole life is subjectively described. It was made in the year of 1944, and Deren was the one who wrote, directed and played, the featured role in it, just like in her first movie Meshes of the Afternoon. Maya Deren is laying on the sand, and the ocean’s waves are coming and going like if she had been spelled from it. This symbolic birth from the sea was particularly chosen to make us think of the role of education. She came from the sea, different from all the others who had influences and rules to follow since were born. Having the chance to find out by herself who she is and what she is doing there at that specific moment, like in a natural way Maya would say, make her run. The film is all about her world exploration, her curiosity to discover what is in there, criticizing the society at that time which was not curious to know if there was any truth besides television or Hollywood. At the end, she chooses to go back to the sea after her incessant odyssey at land to find an identity.
<<http://www.film-makerscoop.com/search/search.php?author=Maya+Deren>> (Because they’re better critics than I am)
You can rent her films at that link, too.
Or you can click my link to watch them FOR FREE on youtube.
Because Maya Deren’s kind of anti-establishment like that.
