Maya Deren (and a little Kenneth Anger)

Maya Deren is becoming a new hero of mine. Her on-screen confidence and her strength as an artist and an individual (in her willingness to explore and share her own experience) makes her truly independent. I find that independence really admirable. It makes sense that she has a background in literature rather than in the visual arts. Her films feel like symbolist poetry to me. Although they are strongly aesthetic, she creates the kind of inexplicably beautiful imagery and uses strong but mysterious symbols one might try to decipher within a poem. And while it's tempting to call some elements of "Meshes" and "At Land" surrealist, they seem to me more of a mix of the Soviet style of montage and the symbolist style like Dulac's "The Seashell and the Clergyman." The fact that Deren is the protagonist of "Meshes" and her husband, Alexander Hammid, is behind the camera makes this film reminiscent of the degree of personal involvement Vertov had in "Man With a Movie Camera" and his inclusion of both his brother and his wife into the core of the film. Unlike Vertov's film, however, "Meshes" is highly personal. It does, after all, concern the "interior experiences of an individual," that individual presumably being Deren herself. This new profound interest in the identity of the filmmaker is something that makes American avant-garde more than just a melting pot of the previous traditions. For me, this aspect made the films we watched more of an intense emotional experience--especially Deren's films, I suppose in part because she is a woman. These filmmakers are fearless it seems, in their willingness to show so much of themselves on screen and for that, I have very much respect for them.