Maya Deren: Incomplete Control

Film and Culture Series

by Sarah Keller

Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a dream-like experiment with time and symbol, looped narrative and provocative imagery, setting the stage for the twentieth-century's groundbreaking aesthetic movements and films.

Maya Deren assesses both the filmmaker's completed work and her numerous unfinished projects, arguing Deren's overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Combining the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film, Deren created a wholly original experience for film audiences that disrupted the subjectivity of cinema, its standards of continuity, and its dubious facility with promoting categories of realism. This critical retrospective reflects on the development of Deren's career and the productive tensions she initiated that continue to energize film.

Genres: Film, Biography

296 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2014

Reviews

[Dany · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Perhaps nothing is more difficult than to comprehend the emotional quality and emotional value of an experience which does not have its counter-part in one’s own emotional history.”
(1942 article “Religious Possession in Dancing”)

“Seeing them as they had never seen themselves
My gaze was a small wind from an alien sea
Like gulls they turned into it”
(haiku for unfinished film, Season of Strangers)

[M- S__ · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm open to being totally wrong on this, but this felt like a nonbook. There's pretty scant evidence for "incompletion" being any kind of intended metaphor in Deren's work. And the argument laid out in the book seems intent on imbuing Deren's every misstep with deeper meaning without going into more than a surface level account of her actual life. Which I feel like might have given us better context for her failures than just like a priori assigning them to a narrative that's set on sainting Maya.

I may have totally misread this book. I got through it in a couple sleepy train rides. But it also felt super repetitive and just didn't lay its arguments out clearly enough for me. Kind of a bummer because I really was interested in learning more about Maya Deren.