Maya Deren
During the 1940s and 1950s, Maya Deren and her first husband, Alexander (Sasha) Hammid, played an integral part in the creative life of
Greenwich Village. Deren came to filmmaking with academic degrees from New York University and Smith College, and with a background in literature, dance, and dance criticism. While creating her films she continued to write for
dance magazines and photography journals, and also worked as a still photographer, producing artists' portraits and interiors scenes for publication. Deren completed six films in these two decades, casting her friends, colleagues,
and avant-garde artists in prominent roles as well as insuring central ones for herself. Deren's devotion to masquerade was evident in her personal life as well as in her professional projects: she owned a collection
of exotic dresses that she wore to parties and other social events, where she vividly acted out the dramatic roles she envisioned. In her films, she concentrates less on strategies of disguise, more often seizing opportunities for
self-projection and multiplication. In her landmark and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon
(1943), which she co-directed with Hammid, Deren employs the strategy of doubling, showing herself in two roles and allowing past and future selves to meet. In At Land
(1944), she renders this possibility even more explicit, stating her intention to realize in this film "a mythological voyage of the twentieth century." Even in her terminology, she elides past and present, history and legend, conjuring up images of Homeric sagas collaged onto contemporary ventures, all in a film whose main character—characteristically played by Maya herself—traverses familiar oppositions. She negotiates between dream spaces and waking life, deserted wilderness and claustrophobic civilization, juxtaposing migrations through successive environments with rational meetings at chess matches, ultimately merging these contrary mental processes and separate physical spaces near the end of the film. Deren viewed her films as intersections between real
An inverted odyssey can also be understood as "a journey that takes place
exclusively within the confines of the mind." Deren's participation in and documentation of Vodou rituals in Haiti explores an actual cultural environment in which competing realms of space and time, life and death, sacred
and profane intertwine. She began her documentation of these rites with the support of a Guggenheim grant, traveling to Haiti in 1947 to study Vodou dance. During subsequent visits, she was initiated into the practices of the Vodou
religion. Vodou ceremonies involved periods of possession that enabled her to record, even to inhabit, the relativistic universe that she proposed in her films. By 1953 Deren had shot many reels of film footage in Haiti, but chose
instead to compile the documentation into her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. The following year she founded the Creative Film Foundation, which she oversaw, also travelling to lecture and screen her films
until her sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage in New York City in 1961.
and unreal, and through them pursued a goal of self- transcendence, seeking to achieve unity with the larger collective consciousness.