Maya Deren

"Top and tailing" the set of essays on American filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961) in Maya Deren and the American avant-garde are Bill Nichols' introduction and Deren's own essay on film form, "An anagram of ideas on art, form and film" published in 1946. Nichols explains that the anagram structure of Deren's essay has informed the shape of his own volume and the contents page is laid out as Deren's is, encouraging readers to map overarching themes and ideas across discrete sections by following any number of suggested reading sequences. In her essay, Deren puts the concept of the anagram another way when describing a "simultaneity" of operations in life and "great art":

But man's great dream is to achieve a whole whose character is far more mysterious and miraculous - that dynamic, living whole in which the inter-action of the parts produces more than their sum total in any sense. (13)

Whether or not this idea can be applied to Nichols' book is debatable, but the connections across and between individual essays are multifarious and do, in fact, tie the discrete works together.

Having Deren's own writing included in Maya Deren and the American avant-garde is appropriate to any discursive exercise surrounding this filmmaker whose legacy is firmly grounded in the relation between her films and written exegesis. "An Anagram... is an essay of its time, both surveying and critiquing the film practices in currency in the mid-'40s; documentaries (she gives particular attention to the documentation of WWII), mainstream Hollywood features, the films of the surrealists (particularly Marcel Duchamp) and Jean Cocteau (whom she admires), the post-war influx of progressive foreign films, and abstract animations. While she reserves plenty of analysis and a certain respect for the documentary form (her quotation of Alexander Hammid pre-empts the position of Jean Rouch regarding documentary film as "an illusion of reality"), her critique of the other genres and movements is based on their digression from the specificities of the film as a medium. Deren's criticisms thus fall "within the tradition of modernist film theory" (47) as pointed out by Renata Jackson in her essay, "The Modernist Poetics of Maya Deren" (47-76). Deren is most strongly opposed to realism as a mode linked to photographic reproduction, accusing the realist of denying "the value of the original, artificial reality created by the rigours and disciplines of the art instrument' and aiming at an effacement of the conditions of production" (12)..

More importantly, what Deren does promote in "An anagram of ideas on art, form and film" - and illustrate through examples from the silent film era and her own films - is art that responds to the culture from which it emerges in terms of its form, content and morals. It is also a film form independent of the literary model dominating the contemporary mainstream with its reductive gestural cliches, demonstrating a unique approach to characterisation. Her interest in what she terms "ritualistic form" (20) led her to create "depersonalized" figures who do not function as protagonists, but as one element of a larger dramatic whole. Nichols points to Deren's uncredited performances in her films as evidence of her resistance to cinematic star-structures and her tendency toward a cinema akin to the 'unsigned, collectively performed acts of magic, myth and ritual in other cultures' (6).

In the final instance, the work Deren advocates explores "the manipulations made possible by the fact that [film] is both a space art and a time art" (42), and she lists the possibilities for truly "filmic film" as depth-of-field shots, the use of microscopic lenses, fast-forward, slow-motion, retrograded sequences as well as sound manipulation and an exploration of negative film. In her discussion of editing she uses as an example what she calls her "film dance", Study in choreography for the camera (USA 1945), to illustrate the manipulation of spatial relations across a unified temporal trajectory marked by the choreographed performance, while At land (USA 1944) demonstrates a continuity of space across a disjunctive representation of time.

Nichols' introduction provides the backdrop of Deren's personal history and the history of academic attention to her work which is of particular importance to the contextualisation of his book. Affirming her position as one of the key figures in the development of "the terms and conditions" of an enduring model for independent cinema (5), Nichols explains the relative scarcity of academic writing on Deren by pointing to the yet to-be-published second volume of The legend of Maya Deren. The first volume (which is in two parts) has provided, as Nichols points out, the backbone for research on Deren since its publication by Anthology Film Archives in New York in 1984 and 1988. Holding off for the second volume has created a vacuum in analytical work on Deren's films which ended with the 1996 San Francisco State University conference from which many of the essays were drawn.

In Annette Michelson's essay, "Poetics and savage thought: about anagram", she actually begins by discussing Deren's contributions to "Poetry and the film: a symposium" which was organised for Cinema 16, an early New York film society, by Amos Vogel. Michelson contextualises this symposium as a significant event in the history of film theory, occurring as it did outside academia. She states that Deren's presentation can be compared to Eisenstein's contributions to film theory as another instance of "the determination to ground innovative practice in theory" (22-27). She compares Deren's model of verticality in avant-garde film as a tendency working against the horizontal thrust of mainstream cinema, to Roman Jakobson's dual linguistic structure of the metonymic and the metaphoric. Michelson's comparison, along with her connection of Deren's films to her university studies in Literary Symbolism, is ironic given Deren's aversion to the application of literary models to film articulated by the filmmaker in "An anagram". She ends with Deren's interest in dance, ritual and play as offering the filmmaker access to the ahistorical, stating that Deren ultimately failed to apply her "onto-esthetic" to her research in Haiti due to the "complex dialectic of power relations among white men, Indians and blacks that subtends the rituals of Voudoun" (40).

As mentioned earlier, Renata Jackson begins "The modernist poetic of Maya Deren"