Despite the simple narrative and editing elements, all repurposed from classical cinema, the combination that Deren and Hammid offer us is still familiar in an extremely disturbing way, not unlike the movie’s signature doppelgänger figures. And while the film has had its share of imitations, nothing else looks quite like it. (Initially produced without a soundtrack, Deren’s third husband, Teiji Ito, would later compose a highly percussive musical accompaniment, a haunting track that heightens the anxious, dreamlike mood of the film.) At the time, many treated Meshes of the Afternoon as a psychoanalytical drama, others seeing a surrealist synthesis of film noir. The silent piece shows Deren in a disorienting and oneiric course in which she finds different versions of herself, as well as a dark figure that looks a bit like Death itself (with a mirror for a face). With a modest budget of about $275, Meshes of the Afternoon is by far her most famous work, an almost mandatory presence in most lists of best American short films. It was not until 1943, at the age of 26, that she made her first film, in collaboration with her second husband, Alexander Hammid. The couple separated before the end of the decade, and Deren went on to get a master’s degree in literature in 1939, studying symbolism in French and English poetry. Together, they moved to New York, where she finished her degree at New York University in 1935 and became an active socialist agitator, working for the Young People’s Socialist League. After her family fled to the United States in 1922 to escape antisemitism, she studied journalism and political science at Syracuse University, where she met her first husband, the activist Gregory Bardacke. In particular, the critical comments in her notebooks on the cybernetic anthropology of Gregory Bateson (first published in the magazine October, in 1980), I believe, deserve much more attention than they have received from researchers on culture and cybernetics (the notable exception being Ute Holl’s remarkable 2002 book Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, originally written in German and published in English in 2017).ĭeren was born in Kyiv, in 1917, as Eleonora Derenkowska.
But Deren’s work was not only wild but wildly interdisciplinary, drinking from, as well as collaborating with, radically disparate sources and traditions. But her original contributions to the study of rhythm and dance, and their connection to spirituality and trance, have been overlooked by specialists in those fields, as she remains a figure read almost exclusively by film scholars. Sally Berger has shown how important her work was to later artists, such as Carole Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and numerous others. ACCORDING TO MAYA DEREN, the Ukrainian-born experimental filmmaker, writer, photographer, and choreographer, “a truly creative work of art creates its own reality.” When a friend once suggested to Deren that she become an anthropologist, given her interest in the field, she insisted that she would never be satisfied in analyzing the nature of an established reality but would always want to make her own.ĭespite the brevity of her career, Deren’s influence as an avant-garde director and film theorist in the 1940s and ’50s is more than safely established.
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