Experimental filmmaker Maya Deren is known
for her inventive editing and her imaginative
manipulations of time and space.
However, her film style represents more than
just playing with technique.
Deren was a thoughtful filmmaker who wrote
numerous essays on her film practice and about
cinema as an art form.
In this video, I’ll look at three key principles
that undergird Deren’s cinematic philosophy:
amateurism, an interest in the body, and the
manipulation of reality.
Deren wrote multiple essays for a magazine
called Movie Makers, the official magazine
of the Amateur Cinema League.
The League had been founded in the 1920s,
during a time when American culture valued
amateurism as a practice of invention, industriousness,
and a love of craft.
Amateur Cinema League members viewed themselves
as the ultimate cinephiles, free to discover
the artistic possibilities of cinema because
they were not bound to profit.
For Deren, amateurism meant freedom.
The freedom to pursue any theme or stylistic
experiment, without regard to commercialism,
because self-funded projects are not beholden
to anyone but the artist.
In her essay “Planning by Eye,” she writes,
“I am firmly convinced that a prerequisite
of really original and creative work is that
a production be scaled modestly enough to
“afford” failure.”
Like so many filmmakers in the first half
of the 20th century, Deren was preoccupied
with medium specificity, meaning that she
was interested in how cinema as an art form
was different from other art forms.
She and many of her contemporaries felt that
too many filmmakers – particularly commercial
filmmakers – relied too heavily on theatre
or literature, making static films with too
much talking instead of taking advantage of
cinema’s ability to construct and manipulate
movement and time.
Movement is at the core of the second key
principle of Deren’s cinema: the body.
We see this theme onscreen through her frequent
portrayal of dance and her visual treatment
of the moving figure.
But her interest in the body extends to the
filmmaker as well.
In such essays as “Adventures in Creative
Film-Making,” Deren encouraged amateur filmmakers
to free themselves of the encumbrances of
equipment, including the tripod.
Instead, she encourages the filmmaker to use
their own body as equipment, because for the
self-funded filmmaker, the body is the most
flexible and mobile instrument available.
Too often, she argues, the amateur filmmaker
puts the shot composition in the service of
the tripod, rather than putting the tripod
at the service of the composition.
She says, “…we tend then to shoot from
the position in which the tripod can most
comfortably assist us.”
The amateur filmmaker, working with limited
means, has less time to set up shots and may
be shooting in small spaces with limited control
over the location.
The adaptability of hand-held becomes an advantage,
as the body can move easily and quickly, adjusting
to the shooting conditions at hand.
Through the body of a skilled camera-person,
the camera can explore space dynamically.
In addition to the body and movement, Deren
was deeply invested in cinema’s ability
to construct new realities.
She wasn’t interested in abstraction, but
instead viewed our everyday world as the foundation
that the creative film artist should manipulate.
In her essay, “Cinematography: The Creative
Use of Reality,” she discusses the importance
of the “controlled accident” for constructing
believable cinematic worlds.
Controlled accidents are aspects of our everyday
life, outside the filmmaker’s control, that
make the action onscreen feel more real.
She uses the example of filming on the beach.
The scenario you film is invented but, she
says, it “borrows reality from the reality
of the scene – from the natural blowing
of the hair, the irregularity of the waves,
the very texture of the stones and sand – in
short, from all the uncontrolled, spontaneous
elements which are the property of actuality
itself.”
As anyone who’s watched Maya Deren’s films
knows, she is not advocating for realism.
Rather, she’s interested in how we can take
these pieces of our everyday reality, and
manipulate them to create a reality that could
only exist onscreen.
The most iconic example from her work is the
way her characters step through different
spaces with only a match-cut to link them.
They move from beach to dining hall and through
brush, all in the same sequence.
It’s important to point out that Deren’s
techniques are always at the service of the
film’s overall concept or theme, something
she emphasizes in her essays about filmmaking.
For example, in “Adventures in Creative
Film-Making” she writes, “The techniques
which I have described would have been of
no interest at all, if they were not conceived
for the purpose of conveying meaning.”
She considered the mind the most powerful
tool at a filmmaker’s disposal, and in her
writings, encouraged other amateur and independent
filmmakers to plan their films thoughtfully
and creatively, and to always keep in mind
the things that makes cinema a unique form
of art.
I’m Laura Ivins.
Thank you for watching.
