In a 1961 Film Culture article titled “A Statement of Principles,” published just a few months before her sudden death, Maya Deren concluded, “I do not seek to possess the major portion of your days. I am content if…you will, perhaps, recall an image, the aura of my films. And what more could I possibly ask, as an artist, than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images.” Don’t let this poetic final missive from Deren, who was an experimental filmmaker, trailblazing film theorist, and lecturer, leave you imagining that she asked for little: she moved through life with ravenous determination. In the 1940s, when the two primary types of American films were Hollywood narratives or realist documentaries, Deren led the charge for a third: cinema as art. To Deren, movies—or, perhaps, their possibilities—were a miracle, and she spent her two-decade career harnessing and theorizing their subjective and symbolic powers.
The films for which she is best known, including Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), follow dream logic, making frequent use of doubles, slow motion, natural elements, and expressive body movements to evoke a collective ritual of transformation. Deren’s films are formal in structure, every frame and edit intentional and planned. “Each film was built as a chamber and became a corridor, like a chain reaction,” she reflected in a 1955 letter, “where it feels possible to move between these dreamlike worlds without waking.” In filmmaking, Deren found a refuge where at last ideas did not need to be translated through clumsy words: the images in her mind could become images on screen. To her, film was more akin to dance or music than a piece of literature or a photograph; she understood the form as a “time-space art.”
Meshes of the Afternoon, her first film and the work that ushered in the American avant-garde film movement, was co-created with her second husband Alexander Hammid in their small Hollywood Hills bungalow. Hammid, a Czech emigree, was already a successful filmmaker when he met Deren, and his technical prowess gave life to her ideas. Within the film, ordinary domestic objects and rituals become terrifying and repetitive as performed by Deren herself: a knife, a key, a mirror, a flower, a walk up the stairs. She later recalled a sequence in which four brief shots are edited together: her character’s footsteps on sand, then grass, then pavement, then a rug. “Those four strides,” she said, “in my intention, span all of time.” In her 1945 collaboration with the dancer Talley Beatey, A Study in Choreography for Camera, Deren again explores this time-and-space leaping: Talley begins one movement in the forest and seamlessly finishes it in an apartment. Deren had found her way to jump worlds and dimensions.
By 1944, Deren and Hammid had settled at 61 Morton Street in Greenwich Village, where she would spend the rest of her life. She was an unmissable icon of the postwar art scene, whose fondness for handmade folkloric skirts and peasant blouses recalled her Russian roots. She frequently hosted screenings of her films in her apartment, for which she charged entry—she lived in poverty but could be industrious when she needed to be. She hosted large parties, full of drumming, dancing, and, later, Haitian Vodou rituals. When she wasn’t traveling with her films or giving lectures, she would write into the night: furious letters to fellow artists, arguing about the state of experimental film; magazine articles; a published chapbook titled An Anagram of Ideas; film ideas; program notes. Deren railed against Hollywood for squandering this new visual medium’s abilities and for its commercial wastefulness. She shared the pleasures of micro-budget filmmaking, explaining there was no one to fire and no one to answer to.
In 1946, Deren became the first person to be awarded a Guggenheim grant for motion pictures, and she used the money to fund years of on-and-off travel to Haiti, where she filmed and photographed Vodou dance and ritual. Deren had worked as a secretary for the dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham and her dance company, and the two women traveled around Haiti together, Deren finding herself inspired not only by dance but by Haitian culture, which Dunham had studied during her work as an anthropologist.
Though Deren went on to capture over 20,000 feet of 16mm footage, she never completed her film about the country. In 1953, she instead published Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti, an anthropological yet subjective book. Her inability, or unwillingness, to complete the Haiti film is still the subject of critical debate: Was she unable to reconcile her own identity with those of her subjects? Or did she experience something that transcended cinematic language? Or, had she not died suddenly at 44, would she have returned to the project?
Brittany Shaw, independent scholar, 2025
