Meshes of the Afternoon

Women Directors Week: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Women Directors Theme Week here.

Women with a Camera: How Women Directors Can Change the Cinematic Landscape by Emanuela Betti

What I saw… was the problem women have faced for centuries: the popularity of woman as art subject, not as creator. What critics and award judges seem to love are not so much women’s stories, but women’s stories told by men. Stories in which women’s agency is strictly and safely in the hands of a male auteurs. … We need more women filmmakers — not as a way to fill quotas, but because women’s stories are different, unique, and need to be told.

Why Eve’s Bayou Is a Great American Art Film by Amirah Mercer

The story of a family burdened by salacious and supernatural secrets in 1962 Louisiana, the movie has become one of the finer American films in the Southern gothic tradition; but with a Black director and an all-Black cast, Eve’s Bayou has been unceremoniously booted from its deserving recognition as the fantastic, moody art film it is.

Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon as Feminist Horror by Dawn Keetley

The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot. … Are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film…

When Love Looks Like Me: How Gina Prince-Bythewood Brought Real Love to the Big Screen by Shannon Miller

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s choice to center these themes around a young Black couple shouldn’t feel as revolutionary as it does. But when you consider that “universal” is too often conflated with “white,” Love & Basketball feels like such a turning point in the romance genre. It was certainly a turning point for me because, for a moment, Black love and romance, as told by Hollywood, weren’t mutually exclusive.

Sofia Coppola as Auteur: Historical Femininity and Agency in Marie Antoinette by Marlana Eck

Sofia Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

The Gender Trap and Women Directors by Jenna Ricker

But, when was the last time ANYONE sat down to write a story, or direct a project and asked themselves — Is this story masculine or feminine? Exactly none, I suspect. … Storytellers tell stories, audiences engage, the formula is quite simple. But, it only works one way — male filmmakers are able to make any film they want without biased-loaded gender questions, whereas women filmmakers always face more scrutiny and criticism.

Individuality in Lucia Puenzo’s XXY, The Fish Child, and The German Doctor by Sara Century

In the end, it is this focus on individuality that is the most striking common theme of Lucia Puenzo’s works. Each of her characters undergoes intense scrutiny from outside forces, be it Alex in ‘XXY’ for their gender, Lala in ‘The Fish Child’ for her infatuation with Ailin, or Lilith from ‘The German Doctor,’ who is quite literally forced into a physical transformation by a Nazi.

Andrea Arnold: A Voice for the Working Class Women of Britain by Sophie Hall

British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. … [The characters in Fish Tank, Wasp, Red Road, and Wuthering Heights] venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in.

Susanne Bier’s Living, Breathing Body of Work by Sonia Lupher

Women consistently make good films around the world, even if we have to look outside Hollywood to find them. Susanne Bier is one powerful example. Her vivid, probing explorations into family dynamics and tenuous relationships are fiercely suggestive marks of a female auteur that deserves recognition.

No Apologies: The Ambition of Gillian Armstrong and My Brilliant Career by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

However, Armstrong also doesn’t mock Sybylla’s ambition or treat it as a joke. In Armstrong’s world, the fact that Sybylla has desires and wants outside of marriage and men is treated seriously because Sybylla takes it seriously. She never needs to prove herself worthy enough for her desires. … [She is] a woman who bravely acts according to her own desires, someone willing to risk everything in order to have what she wants and who recognizes that men and romance are not the sum total of her world.

OMG a Vagina: The Struggle for Artistic The Struggle for Feminine Artistic Integrity in Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie by Horrorella

Carrie is a terrifying and compelling story, but there is certainly something to be gained and perhaps a certain truth to be found in watching the pain of her journey into womanhood as told by a woman director. … But even in the face of these small victories, we have to wonder how the film would have been different had Peirce been allowed to tell this story without being inhibited by the fear and discomfort of the male voices around her.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood by Lee Jutton

Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre. … Yet among all these films about outsiders, Near Dark will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

Fangirls, It’s Time to #AskForMore by Alyssa Franke

In the battle to address the staggering gender gap in women directing for film and television, there is one huge untapped resource — the passion and organizing power of fangirls.

Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season: Black Lives in a White Season by Shara D. Taylor

It is doubtful that anyone else could have made A Dry White Season as poignantly relevant as Euzhan Palcy did. Her eye for the upending effects of apartheid on Black families brings their grievances to bear. … The meaning behind Palcy’s work resounds clearly: Black lives matter in 1976 South Africa as they do in 2016 America.

Why Desperately Seeking Susan Is One of My Favorite Films by Alex Kittle

The character was created to be an icon, a model for Roberta and other women like her, an image to hold in our heads of what life could be like if we just unleashed our inner pop star. But she’s also real enough that it feels like you might spot her in a hip nightclub, dancing uninhibited and having more fun than anyone else there just because she’s being herself.

Movie You Need to Be Talking About: Advantageous by Candice Frederick

Directed and co-written by Jennifer Phang, Advantageous is a surprisingly touching and purposeful film that revitalizes certain elements of the sci-fi genre while presenting two powerful voices in women filmmakers: Jennifer Phang and Jacqueline Kim.

Concussion: When Queer Marriage in the Suburbs Isn’t Enough by Ren Jender

The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue is the Warmest Color: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

I’m a Lilly – And You’re Probably One Too: All Women Face Gender Discrimination by Rachel Feldman

Another obstacle to getting Ledbetter made is the industry’s perception of my value as the film’s director. There are certainly a handful of women directors whose identities are well known, but generally, even colleagues in our industry, when asked, can only name a handful of female directors. Of course, there are thousands of amazingly talented women directing; in fact there are 1,350 experienced women directors in our Guild, but for the vast majority of us our credits are devalued and we struggle to be seen and heard – just like Lilly.

Making a Murderer, Fantastic Lies, and the Uneasy Exculpation Narratives by Women Directors by Eva Phillips

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men.

Lena Dunham and the Creator’s “Less-Than-Perfect” Body On-Screen by Sarah Halle Corey

Every time someone calls to question the fact that Lena Dunham parades her rolls of fat in front of her audience, we need to examine why they’re questioning it. Is it because they’re wondering how it serves the narrative of ‘Girls’? Or is it because they’re balking at “less-than-perfection” (according to normative societal conventions) in the female form?

Female Becomingness Through Maya Deren’s Lens in Meshes of the Afternoon by Allie Gemmill

Her most famous work, Meshes of the Afternoon becomes, in this way, a reading of a woman working with and against herself through splitting into multiple iterations of herself. Most importantly, the film unpacks the notion that not only is the dream-landscape of a woman complex, it is bound tightly to her, defining who she is and guiding her constantly through the world like a compass.

Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy: Heartbreak in a Panning Shot by ThoughtPusher

Through the course of the film, Kelly Reichardt’s pacing is so deliberate that even the most ordinary moments seem intensely significant. Reichardt’s framing traps Wendy in shots as much as her broken-down car and lack of money trap her in the town.

Sofia Coppola and The Silent Woman by Paulette Reynolds

Many films touch upon the theme of female isolation, but I remain fascinated with Sofia Coppola’s three major cinematic creations that explore the world of The Silent Woman: The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette (2006). Each film delves into this enigma, forming a multifaceted frame of reference for a shared understanding.

The Anti-Celebrity Cinema of Mary Harron: I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page, and The Anna Nicole Story by Elizabeth Kiy

I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors. I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.

How Women Directors Turn Narrative on Its Head by Laura Power

Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl), Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), and the women directors of Jane the Virgin are infusing elements of whimsy into their work in strikingly different ways, but to similar effect. The styles they’re using affect the audience’s relationship with their stories and with the characters themselves by giving the viewer an insight that traditional narratives don’t provide.

Wadjda: Empowering Voices and Challenging Patriarchy by Sarah Mason

Haifaa al-Mansour casts an eye onto the complexity of navigating an autocratic patriarchal society in Wadjda. This bold voice from Saudi Arabia continues to empower voices globally.

Mary Harron’s American Psycho: Rogue Feminism by Dr. Stefan Sereda

American Psycho fails the Bechdel Test. … The script, co-written by Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron, eschews any appeal to women’s empowerment. … When the leading man isn’t laughing at remarks from serial killers about decapitating girls, he’s coming after sex workers with chainsaws (at least in his head). Yet American Psycho espouses a feminist perspective that fillets the values held by capitalist men.

21 Short Films by Women Directors by Film School Shorts

For Women’s History Month, we’ve put together a playlist of 21 of those films for your viewing pleasure. As you’ll see, no two of these shorts are alike. They deal with topics like autism, racism, sexism, losing a loved one and trying to fit in and find yourself at any age.

Evolution in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Chicken With Plums by Colleen Clemens

In a similar way to Marji (Persepolis), Nasser (Chicken with Plums) must be sent far away to have his journey of becoming. There is something in him — talent — that requires he must go beyond his home. But whereas in Marji’s case she must go away to protect herself, Nasser must go away so he can grow, get bigger and fuller and richer.

Vintage Viewing: Alice Guy-Blaché, Gender-Bending Pioneer by Brigit McCone

When was the last time we watched vintage female-authored films and discussed their art or meaning? Bitch Flicks presents Vintage Viewing — a monthly feature for viewing and discussing the films of cinema’s female pioneers. Where better to start than history’s first film director, Alice Guy-Blaché?

Female Becomingness Through Maya Deren’s Lens in ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’

Her most famous work, ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ becomes, in this way, a reading of a woman working with and against herself through splitting into multiple iterations of herself. Most importantly, the film unpacks the notion that not only is the dream-landscape of a woman complex, it is bound tightly to her, defining who she is and guiding her constantly through the world like a compass.

This guest post written by Allie Gemmill appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

What is it about Maya Deren that continually lures viewers to her body of work? Is it the enigmatic images that comprise her films? The depth of her symbolism? The notably non-mainstream depictions of the female form and psyche? Perhaps it is all of these things. One thing is for certain: Deren was unlike any woman working in film during the first half of the twentieth century. Consistently cited as a revolutionary in cinema, Deren lived and breathed the lifestyle of a working intellectual. She was seemingly cut from the large swath of men working in the postmodern arts of the WWII era and yet destined to re-shape it.

It’s easy to forget that there were active movements of artistic change working in film in the 1940s: Among the hard-boiled crime noirs, screwball comedies and heroic war epics being pumped out by Hollywood, there was also an equally tangible thrust towards surrealist and avant-garde aesthetics in film. The European approach to Surrealism, Dada and Futurism were swirling and manifesting into one great push towards what would be recognized as a post-modern art movement in America.

Well-educated and well-versed in the arts, Deren’s first foray into the arts was as a dancer. But her restlessness in dancing meant she did not succumb to traditional trajectories like her female peers — often settling to be chorus girls or struggling actresses. When it came to art, she was compelled to fulfill her own vision. The themes and ideologies she worked into her films are direct product of the culture in which she was working, yet it was wholly unlike anything being exhibited. Questions surrounding the social, spiritual and psychological place of woman are at the heart of Deren’s films. She was working against the Hollywood machine, against a male-dominated art form and against socio-normative ways of portraying the female self. This is what makes Deren so notable: her films deal with the uniquely female issues of time and the body in a considerate and challenging manner.

Deren’s rejection of the Hollywood machine fully emerges in her style, editing, storyline and characterization. Her push towards re-contextualizing the female body in relation to space and time can still strike us as wholly fresh and challenging. Her most famous work, Meshes of the Afternoon becomes, in this way, a reading of a woman working with and against herself through splitting into multiple iterations of herself. Most importantly, the film unpacks the notion that not only is the dream-landscape of a woman complex, it is bound tightly to her, defining who she is and guiding her constantly through the world like a compass.

In the documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren, Deren’s voiceover speaks carefully to us:

“What I do in my films is very distinctive. They are the films of a woman and I think that they’re characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think the strength of men is in their great sense of immediacy. They are a ‘now’ creature. A woman has strength to wait because she has had to wait. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. She sees everything in terms of the stage of becoming.”

Who or what does Deren become in Meshes of the Afternoon when time reconfigures her mental and physical self?

In Meshes of the Afternoon, we are presented with a simple mystery: What is haunting Deren and why? Is she dealing with real or imagined trauma? In order to find the true answer, we watch as time breaks Deren apart. Fragmenting her real body into multiple dream bodies, she must reassemble herself in order to understand herself. What we find out is that freedom is the separation of herself in life — through death — from the man who has tethered himself to her. He has brought her into a home which now feels destructive and alien to her. The key to release is, ultimately, death, leading her to the dreamlike sea, away from the claustrophobic villa that was slowly destroying her.

The film uses rituals here to better tease out the idea of how a woman can find release from a problem; in this case, the problem of a restrictive relationship. As Deren’s multiple selves enter into the house, examining the abandoned and cluttered space, they work in concert to work out the best means of release. With each step closer to the solution, the dream seeks to throw Deren off the scent, to disorient her enough to wake up back to the comfort of romantic confinement. To what lengths is she willing to go to be free? We watch the key and knife presented repeatedly. The women sit as the table, each representing a different path and trying to take the key to fulfill a separate purpose. Is escaping the confines of this house, and by extension the relationship best done with a key to open a doorway to a new world, to step into a better space? Or is it a knife to both destroy and release that which hurts her so deeply? More importantly, will the hooded figure be the person to release her or further harm her? Ultimately, it is only through death (decided through much struggle) that she can free herself and find freedom in the open waters of the afterlife.

What makes Meshes of the Afternoon so vital is not only its toying with a traditionally linear time narrative, but also its critical characterization of the fraught nature of a woman solving a problem so often attributed to her gender: the role she must play in a romantic relationship. By illustrating the doubts and confusions that occur when a woman comes to a love-based impasse, the film seeks its resolution in the psychological complexity that is woman herself. For if women are heteronormatively socially programmed to devote their entire being to the care and love of a man, then Meshes of the Afternoon makes the argument that a woman must find complete physical, mental and spiritual release in order to find herself again. The woman here feels so constricted and defined by a relationship that she must seek a dramatic escape. In her home, in her body and in her romantic life, she is caged. Released through death is what a woman becomes as time ekes out its purpose to weaken the female self.

We can appreciate that Meshes of the Afternoon is different in nearly every way from the typical cinematic fare of 1943. Deren’s thorough rejection of narrative made way for audiences to experience the psychological drama of a woman. In both this film and her successive short films, Deren vitally infused the fraught, passionate, dreamlike, maniacally repetitive and deeply complex nature of woman into each frame. In reframing female issues through the repurposing masculine art forms, Deren cemented herself as an eternally important female artist and director.

Allie Gemmill is a film journalist based in Tampa, FL. She is the founder and creative director of The Filmme Guild, a feminist film salon dedicated to examining the intersections of women and film. Follow her on Twitter and Medium.

Vintage Viewing: Maya Deren, Experimental Eccentric

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Maya Deren: spacetime surrealist

Born Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1917, the Derenkowsky family fled antisemitism to arrive in New York in 1922 and take the name Deren. Maya Deren became a pioneer in the development of experimental cinema in the USA. Like Germaine Dulac, she was film theorist as much as director. As a dancer and choreographer as well as poet, writer and photographer, however, Deren placed her own body at the centre of her most famous works, becoming a performance artist in a way that Dulac did not. Deren experimented with superimposition effects, and the unifying of diverse spaces through the movement of her body to create enmeshing, hallucinogenic dreamscapes recalling Alice’s trip down the rabbit-hole. Her film symphonies are composed using rhythm and the repetitions of ritual to probe questions of identity and the forces entrapping her heroines. Deren was an auteur in the fullest sense: director, writer, cinematographer, editor and performer.

A student of journalism and political science at Syracuse University, Deren was politically engaged. Her master’s, however, in English and symbolist poetry, point to her contrasting impulses towards abstraction and the poetic. Touring and performing across the USA with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, Deren met the Czechoslovakian filmmaker Alexander Hammid in Los Angeles, and produced her first and best-known experimental film in collaboration with him: Meshes of the Afternoon. Marrying Hammid and moving back to New York, Deren took the name Maya, the Buddhist term for the illusionary aspect of existence and, in Greek mythology, a messenger of the Gods. The film critic Thomas Schatz has pointed to Meshes as the first example of “the poetic psychodrama” a “scandalous and radically artistic” form of art film that “emphasized a dreamlike quality, tackled questions of sexual identity, featured taboo or shocking images, and used editing to liberate spatio-temporal logic from the conventions of Hollywood realism.” In this respect, poetic psychodrama was an important source for the art of music video, which illustrates the circular rhythms and alternative moods of the music, rather than limiting itself to the logic of linear storytelling. Though her work was silent, almost musical rhythms of repetitions and variations were central to all Deren’s films.

As an independent distributor, Deren exhibited her films and gave lectures on them across the USA, Cuba, and Canada, helping to nurture a D.I.Y aesthetic of countercultural arthouse film, directly inspiring Amos Vogel’s formation of Cinema 16, a film society promoting experimental films in New York. In 1947, Deren won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix Internationale, before receiving a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to research Haitian voodoo ritual, shooting over 18,000 feet of documentary footage and publishing the study Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren became a participant in the ritual and was initiated as a priestess, while remaining simultaneously an academic observer. Tensions between observer and participant were a running theme of her work. In the late 1950s, Deren herself formed the Creative Film Foundation to reward independent filmmakers. Deren died in 1961, aged just 44. She remains a key influence on New American Cinema, homaged by creators such as David Lynch.

Meshes of the Afternoon – 1943

“Everything that happens in the dream has its basis in a suggestion in the first sequence – the knife, the key, the repetition of the stairs, the figure disappearing around a curve in the road.” – Maya Deren

A luxurious Hollywood villa becomes an entrapping nightmare in Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren’s most influential film, where cycles of images become the meshes that bind the heroine. Opening with the delicately feminine image of a bare arm placing a flower carefully onto the ground and abandoning it, the heroine’s shadow, apparently detached, returns to grasp the flower before her body reenters the frame. Fragments and glimpsed body parts resist the tendency of cinema to pan over and survey women, defining Deren’s heroine rather by her actions and movements as the propulsive agent of the film, which shares her gaze as it roams over the house. A lost key falls downstairs in dreamlike slowmotion. A knife stabbing bread unites the feminine domesticity of cookery with a hint of violence. What is the meaning of the tall black figure whose face is a mirror as (s)he steals the heroine’s flower? Death? A male partner onto whom she projects herself? Stairs twist and distort around the angles of her writhing body, like an M. C. Escher optical illusion, until the heroine is looking down on the sleeping self that had started by imagining her. Key objects – knife, record player, key, flower – jump into new positions regularly, further destabilizing the reality of the film’s location and the logic of its timeframe. In an iconic image, the second “dream” version of Maya stands framed at the window, wistfully observing yet another version of herself performing the same looped actions she has just completed. Key becomes knife becomes key: death the only release? Seascape becomes patio becomes carpet in the space of a few steps, making a mockery of Hollywood realism in favor of dream logic. The knife-wielding version of herself becomes a male partner who wakes the dreamer, hangs up the phone and restores spacio-temporal logic. But another leap, from flower to knife, shatters the mirror (or illusory maya?) of reality to reveal a seascape beyond, and the man returns to find his floor covered in mirrored shards and his apparently dead lover draped in seaweed. Where was the “reality” within these meshes?

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSY0TA-ttMA”]

At Land – 1944

“The whole is so related to every part that whether one reads horizontally, vertically, diagonally or even in reverse, the logic of the whole is not disrupted, but remains intact.” – Maya Deren

Like an informal sequel to Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land opens with the heroine lying washed up on a wild seascape whose waves flow backwards upon the opening of her eyes. Driftwood appears beside her and becomes a magically distorting staircase similar to the central staircase of Meshes of the Afternoon. In this case, climbing the driftwood leads Maya to a long dining table full of leering, gossiping, and judging society faces. Crawling down a table and jungle simultaneously, Deren links these wildly different spaces through the movement of her own body. The dinner party ignores her, making her existence seem unreal in their mundane space, while the leaves bend before her reality. Finding a chess board at the end of her crawl, Deren moves the pieces telekinetically, using the movements of her eyeballs alone, a taken piece falling through a hole in the rocky seashore and being swept away by the tide as Deren chases it, in another circular return to the original space. A man joins her on her solitary walk down the countryside – the first living person to interact with her. As the camera switches back and forth between the figures, a different man is substituted for the first, slyly playing an identical role. A third substitution, and the figure is Alexander Hamid, familiar as the male figure in Meshes of the Afternoon. Following him into a wooden hut, she crawls underneath and rises in an empty space of covered furniture, which tents and reveals yet another man. Dropping a cat, Deren walks away through repetitive sequences of door frames that lead her back to the rocky coast (or a cliff of scaffolding?). On the shoreline, two women play chess while chatting – is it a comment on the competitive nature of society? Is Deren herself a lost piece, swept away on the waves and unable to join in? She bends back the heads of both women and strokes their hair while they smile ecstatically, all united on one side in a sensual break from the competitive edge of game logic. Abruptly Maya is doubled – one thief stealing a chess piece and running away with it, another still joined to the female players in smiling sisterhood, watching the runaway with puzzlement. Alternate selves from the stages of her journey turn to frowningly watch the rebel runaway. Her footsteps leave tracks in the sand as she vanishes into the distance, destination unknown.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQw9UX0gN7E”]

Ritual in Transfigured Time – 1946

“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?” –Maya Deren

With collaborators Rita Christiani, Frank Westbrook, and Hella Heyman, Ritual in Transfigured Time expands on the experiments in time and space of Deren’s earlier films. Rita Christiani plays a double for Deren as Maya performs ritual repetitions or is frozen in time. Christiani’s outstretched hand moves in slow trance to encounter Deren and complete her wool-gathering. Slow motion is intercut with speeded time to give a surreal edge to the domestic chore, under the stern gaze of a third, older woman – the monitoring mother figure? A party freezes as Christiani enters the doorway with her ball of yarn, and now she is a nun bearing lillies – do they speak to her dislocation from everyday frolics? A dancing partner ends her nun costume and sweeps her into the repetitive rhythms of the house party, where entranced guests bounce from partner to partner. She strikes a pose with a man’s lips intimately brushing her cheek, and instantly they are transported to a garden, where three women play like Botticelli’s three Graces. Christiani and Westbrook dance in the garden, showing Deren’s dance background very clearly in their sinuous movements. As Christiani leaves the dance, she becomes Deren again, watching in perplexity like a dreamer awoken. The three Graces are spun by Westbrook, each falling into their own dynamic freeze frame. Dancing figures become statues on pedestals as Christiani re-enters the garden. Westbrook’s jerky motions, achieved by intercutting with freeze frames, bring him to life and frighten Christiani, driving her away, pursued by Westbrook now in leaping slow motion. Finally, she is Deren again, fleeing through waist-high water and then falling in eerie negative exposure to reveal herself as Christiani once more. The film achieves a sense of dream logic while celebrating the human form in its full variety of poses and rhythms.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IG5K65gkTU”]

Maya Deren’s experiments with rhythm and form through editing draw on a long Slavic tradition. In particular, they draw on the groundbreaking film theory of Sergei Eisenstein and Kinoglaz. Kinoglaz was the partnership of Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova. Though Vertov is usually credited with its achievements, Svilova was a formidable documentary film director in her own right. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Elizaveta Svilova, Mastering Montage. Stay tuned!

Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and boring people with lists of forgotten female artists.