Gio Films Productions

Maya Deren: The Mistress of Illusion

Shadow of a girl arrives: her hand picks up flower (Cleghorn, 2019b). Elianora Derenkowsky, also known as Maya Deren, was born on April 29, 1917 in Kyiv months before the Russian Revolution. A period of change and rebirth, the raising of new intellectual ideas to a static land. Along with that, the birth of one of the founders of avant-garde cinema and experimental films, the genius Elinka, who had the dream of becoming an artist and showing cinema as an art form. To her “for more than anything else, cinema consists of the eye for magic—that which perceives and reveals the marvelous in whatsoever it looks upon.” (Maya Deren 1960, p.153). With her basis in Freud, Maya believed in the theory that dreams represent unconscious desires, a way of expression. However, she never explained what she was “expressing” in her artwork. With her mysterious personality, nobody knew Maya’s real persona. The only things that stayed with Maya from her first breath until her last were her artistic fundamentals – The Amateurism, The Body, and The Illusion. But, according to the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1897), “Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.” So, what Elianora was trying to communicate in her most known works, or, even better, how Elianora Deren became Maya Deren?

Her hand in languorous caress of her body (Cleghorn, 2019b). The Derenkowskys became Deren. Elianora came from a Russian family that left Ukraine in 1922 and went to Syracuse, New York, leaving the conturbated conditions of the country during the Russian Revolution. This transition developed a feeling of lost identity in Maya’s life, by leaving her home country as if she also left all her culture behind with the conflict. Maya’s aunt Pauline Penn talked about how Maya dealt with being away from the fatherland, “I think she would have felt that she came out of a country that was no longer her own. Her parents were steeped in Russian culture. She didn’t have anybody, especially Americans to relate to.” (Penn 1984, p.169). Her father, Solomon Deren, an intellectual and respected psychologist with basis in Vladimir Bekhterev’s advanced neurological fundamentals. Her mother, Marie Deren, a musician and dancer with basis in creative freedom. They were two different souls that constantly collided in ideologies and emotions. Maya didn’t know who she should focus on, as they were so diverse, who should she follow as a model? The answer seems obvious, but there is always a distortion of reality if Maya is the poet. In 1928, she was sent to Geneva to complete her school studies. There, a lot of maternal interferences generated in Maya her first illusion image of her parents. When she came back from Geneva, she seemed like a grown woman with her own ideas and future objectives. Maya found a perfect image in her head about her relationship with her father. To Maya, Solomon became her inspiration, as if they had a strong connection, which was not the reality. They did not even spend much time together and he did not support her in writing about poetry and developing her first contact with art. As Dr. Phelan, who was Solomon’s second wife, declared in an interview, “She wanted him to accept and appreciate all the things that she was doing or thinking. She listened to her father to talk about things related to psychology that impressed her very much.” (Phelan 1984, p.172). Something that few people know is that Maya was born in a Jewish Russian family. This was one important aspect of her life that she simply rejected. Being a jew in Russia at that time was complicated. They could not have good education and good jobs, only if they had a skill required by the government. Jews were seen as inferior by the Russian community, maybe that was something that bothered Maya as she was a proud Russian socialist and did not want her image to be considered less valuable for this label. According to Maya’s close film collaborator Miriam Arsham, ” She was very very very embarrassed about being Jewish. It was antisemitic, let’s just say it straight out. For two reasons: first of all, because she hated it, it seemed very ordinary to her. But more than that, much more than that was the self-image she wanted at that time.” (Arsham 1984, p.156). In Maya’s works, we can notice her looking for something missing; a part of her that should be there and it is not. These past experiences in her life certainly manifested during her artwork and contributed to the formation of Maya’s artistic personality of approaching the topic of mind exploration and the constant search for her lost identity.

Of her eye, closing with sleepiness (Cleghorn, 2019b). Ok, but why the name Maya? Maya means goddess of illusion in Hindu, which had values much appreciated by Maya, as she focused on this lifestyle for a period of time. The illusion was something stuck with Maya’s personality, as they were soulmates. The way Maya was able to portray her stories in her own reality was unique. In one of her essays she declared, “When we agree that a work of art is, first of all, creative, we actually mean that it creates a reality and itself constitutes an experience.” For her it did not make any sense to reproduce reality the way we see it, there was no value in portraying something that already exists. Maya appreciated a lot when she saw young filmmakers being risky and creating something that she never had the opportunity to experience before. The use of camera and space were the key to build this illusion in her art. “The moving frame of a motion picture camera also makes it possible to determine not only what the audience sees (which is the completed intention of a still photograph) but also when they see it. ” (Maya Deren 1946, p.134). She gave an example in her essay “Creating Movies with a New Dimension: Time” (1946) about one shot in Meshes of the Afternoon – The film uses camera tilting to create the illusion of a staircase rocking and frustrating the protagonist’s attempt to climb it. This effect was achieved by synchronizing the actress’s falls with the camera operator’s tilting. The use of camera movement was not just a technical display, but a deliberate choice to convey a specific emotion. The focus was on composing movement over a series of frames rather than individual spatial composition within a frame. We can see that Maya, with the limited equipment available, created the most interesting effects through her wide comprehension of self-expression, space, and storytelling.

Fall now as if floating against a ceiling of stairs, in space (Cleghorn, 2019b). The other essential element of Maya’s works was the relationship between the body, the space, and the camera. Playing with time and movement, she states that the best way to comprehend motion pictures is through the art of dancing and music. In “A Study In Choreography For Camera” (1945) it is clear the connection of dancing and space, enhancing the meaning of this theory in a way that would not be possible with a simple and ordinary walk movement. Her objective with this project was not to portray a theatrical space to the audience but to put the viewer at the feet of the dancer and release the dancer from the theater prison. On her untitled notes about this project she says, “Acting expression should be rather as if the dancer is acting under a larger compulsion, rather than as an extension of his own will. In this way the audience is identified with the actor against the compulsion; is sympathetic with him in his reactions to this outside source.” (Maya Deren 1945, p.268). Maya was not a fan of tripods either, the on-hand shots enhanced the freedom of the “poet” and added to the story a much stronger message than with a static and organized shot. Her point was to preserve the mobility of motion pictures and think about the shots without the physical limitation of the tripod, and prioritize the artistic message that she wanted to transmit to the audience. “Once you get the camera off of the tripod, you will find a new world of filmic possibilities. As a supporting structure, the human body has no peers. This flexibility is an advantage even in shots in which the camera is inactive; but the notion in motion-picture medium can and should refer not only to activity within the frame but to the action of the moving frame itself.” (Maya Deren 1960, p.172).

1st dream girl looking through window, seen from outside (Cleghorn, 2019b). During her professional life, Maya had it clear the type of cinema that she wanted to make – not the Hollywoodian. She valued the freedom of independent movies, not made for capitalism, and yes for the sake of art. Hollywood-made movies sacrifice the visual drama to endless words and constant “products” exhibitions, always expecting a return profit with this entertainment formula. With that, we have a notable artistic scarcity in motion pictures today. By prioritizing the money, we throw the poetic strength of the seventh art in the shadows and become victims of elaborate propaganda. First, the necessity of supplying the cost of production. Second, the numerous crew behind the scenes that interfere in the poet’s vision. Third and last, the superfluous and constant misuse of cameras. The comparison between the camera and the human vision is mostly responsible for the use of the camera as a recorder of reality, instead of a creative instrument. Nevertheless, it is in the mind behind this vision trajectory that the material presented has importance. In the film industry, this theory has been neglected. As Maya stated in her essay “Cinema as an Art Form”, “In the end, the imagination as a way of life does not pay. The imaginative individual is represented either as a psychic criminal who will receive his just deserts at the hands of a society determined to reestablish the sane way of life; or as a psychically diseased organism which should be restored to a normal condition. Thus, the imaginative experience which is, for the artist, a desired normality, is, for the motion picture industry, a dangerous, psychic illegality.” (Maya Deren 1946, p.25). As cited in the past paragraph, Maya appreciated the lack of equipment in her amateur productions. To her what mattered was to put the cinema as an art form and use what you had available to make it a real project, without the prospect of profit and the rules of capitalism. “Cameras do not make films; film-makers make films. Improve your films not by adding more equipment and personnel but by using what you have to its fullest capacity. The most important part of your equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your imaginative mind, and your freedom to use both. Make sure you do use them.” (Maya Deren 1965, p. 17).

Man reaching top of stairs, picks up flower (Cleghorn, 2019b). As a final point, Maya Deren was a defender of cinema’s artistic value and an innovative avant-garde filmmaker who was key to the foundation of the New American Cinema, also known as the Hollywood Renaissance. Her personal experiences like the absence of the Russian culture, the paternal image and the Jewish heritage certainly manifested in her work as the identity that she was looking for in “At Land”, or the multiple personas in “Meshes of The Afternoon”. The manner that she encountered to express her art was unique, with strong beliefs prioritizing the value of the seventh art. Through illusion, body, and amateurism, she became one of the most influential filmmakers in film history and a symbol in the world of experimental and independent short films. Girl’s face, eyes closed, with bits of broken mirror and seaweed, and a little blood running from the corner of the mouth (Cleghorn, 2019b).