Maya Deren > Quotes

“Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.”
― Maya Deren

“The universe was once conceived as the passive stage upon which the dramatic conflict of human wills was enacted and resolved. Today man has discovered that that which seemed simple and stable is, instead, complex and volatile; his own inventions have put into motion new forces, toward which he has yet to invent a new relationship. Unlike Ulysses, he can no longer travel over a universe stable in space and time to find adventures; nor can he solve intimate antagonisms with an adversary sportingly suitable in stature. Rather, each individual is the center of a personal vortex; and the aggressive variety and enormity of the adventures which swirl about and confront him are unified only by his personal identity.... The integrity of the individual identity is counterpointed to the volatile character of a relativistic universe.”
― Maya Deren, The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works

“When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it. Because you think that somewhere between sentences and words, the secret will slip out. I am trying to give you that secret; it isn't a secret at all, but it is building solidly, not using secrets. I had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension; that film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite; the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than a single life. My films were built on an incline, an increase in intensity. I hoped to make a form which was infinite, the changingness of things. I thought I would want to find a total form which conveyed that sense, particularly in reference to an Oriental subject. My impression was: one is walking down a corridor of a hotel. One hears a sound, opens a door and a man is playing; one listens for three minutes and closes the door. The music went on before you opened the door and it continues after you close the door. There was neither beginning nor end. Western music increases in intensity to a climax and then resolves itself. Oriental music is infinite; it goes on and on. The Chinese theater goes on for hours and hours with time for lunch moving scenery, etc.”
― Maya Deren

“If someone from politics got up to give a lecture on New Guinea without having read the literature in the field or been there, the anthropologists would be horrified out of their wits, and properly so. Yet these people get up and lecture on social systems without having read Trotsky or Lenin or Hook. A hell of an attitude for people who make a fetish of scholar!”
― Maya Deren

“The labor to achieve inspired, intelligent form is a single continuity, a work in progress which is eventually interrupted when the dynamic consciousness which it reflects ceases. From time to time one may pause to give integrated shape to a stage of one's progress, in order to best pursue it further. And so these films have each been brought to an end, in order to be better abandoned.”
― Maya Deren, Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film