It was the Scribe who first introduced me to the avant garde filmaker Maya Deren. Maya is a bit of a legend and when I was at art school I was totally smitten by her surreal, trancelike film Meshes of the Afternoon.
Like Jean Cocteau, who I've previously written about as an enormous inspiration and influence, Maya managed to make brilliantly innovative, challenging dreamlike short films on a shoe-string budget. She is quoted as attacking Hollywood by saying, "I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick." She also said Hollywood "was a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form."
Her Meshes of the Afternoon is hailed as one of the most influential avant-garde films in America. Other works of Maya's include At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time and The Very Eye of Night. Maya was a tireless self-promoter and distributor of her own work and toured America doing lectures.
Later in her life, Maya became interested in Voodoun and travelled to Haiti where she filmed and participated in many rituals. Joseph Campbell edited her work for Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti.
Sadly, Maya died very young at 44 from a brain haemorrhage. The following is a plot summary from Meshes of the Afternoon. It will give you an idea of the dreamy, surreal rhythm to Maya's work. The source of this plot summary is to be found HERE
A solitary flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a phone off the hook: discordant images a woman sees as she comes home. She naps and, perhaps, dreams. She sees a hooded figure going down the driveway. The knife is on the stair, then in her bed. The hooded figure puts the flower on her bed then disappears. The woman sees it all happen again. Downstairs, she naps, this time in a chair. She awakes to see a man going upstairs with the flower. He puts it on the bed. The knife is handy. Can these dream-like sequences end happily? A mirror breaks, the man enters the house again. Will he find her? Written by mailto:%7Bjhailey@hotmail.com%7D
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
portrait of Maya image source:
Like Jean Cocteau, who I've previously written about as an enormous inspiration and influence, Maya managed to make brilliantly innovative, challenging dreamlike short films on a shoe-string budget. She is quoted as attacking Hollywood by saying, "I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick." She also said Hollywood "was a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form."
Her Meshes of the Afternoon is hailed as one of the most influential avant-garde films in America. Other works of Maya's include At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time and The Very Eye of Night. Maya was a tireless self-promoter and distributor of her own work and toured America doing lectures.
Later in her life, Maya became interested in Voodoun and travelled to Haiti where she filmed and participated in many rituals. Joseph Campbell edited her work for Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti.
Sadly, Maya died very young at 44 from a brain haemorrhage. The following is a plot summary from Meshes of the Afternoon. It will give you an idea of the dreamy, surreal rhythm to Maya's work. The source of this plot summary is to be found HERE
A solitary flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a phone off the hook: discordant images a woman sees as she comes home. She naps and, perhaps, dreams. She sees a hooded figure going down the driveway. The knife is on the stair, then in her bed. The hooded figure puts the flower on her bed then disappears. The woman sees it all happen again. Downstairs, she naps, this time in a chair. She awakes to see a man going upstairs with the flower. He puts it on the bed. The knife is handy. Can these dream-like sequences end happily? A mirror breaks, the man enters the house again. Will he find her? Written by mailto:%7Bjhailey@hotmail.com%7D
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
portrait of Maya image source:
