| |
|
They showed it here in Amsterdam yesterday. I was impressed. I'd managed to rent a tape with three of her films--Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land and Ritual In Transfigured Time. All three are dreamlike and use various camera tricks like slow motion and brief freezing of the action. The documentary also features excerpts of her other three: Meditation on Violence (featuring a sword-dancing martial artist), the unfinished Divine Horsemen and The Very Eye of Night. She had met and married a Czech exile, a pioneer in surrealist film. Her early films feature a lot of doubling and repeated sequences, as if she was working out some time and motion theories. She had also traveled with a dance troupe, and she wanted her films to show the human body doing things it couldn't do in real life. Later, she became interested in Voudou partly in the course of an affair with anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In Haiti she underwent initiated and was ridden by Erzulie Freda, explained in the documentary as not only the loa of love, but also the loa of luxuries, which is why her "horses" dance with bottles of good liquor and cigarettes. At least she was able to publish a book that included stills from the footage. Deren was born in Kiev in 1917 and emigrated to the US with her parents in 1922. She was well-educated and bcame interested in photography and dnace at an early age. She died in 1961, at the age of 44, of a brain hemorrhage after essentially running herself down. She and her husband had been poor, but she had a friendly Doctor Nick to give her amphetamine shots.
The Very Eye of Night was her last completed film, and seems to have been attempt to translate some voudou-based theories into a visual medium. A houngan who remembers Maya explains that we are shadows cast by God. Maya's film shows dancers in negative against a starry backdrop. She'd workedon this film about the last 5 years of her life, completing it in 1959. It didn't get good reviews from the avant-garde journals because, basically, nobody understood it. Actually, the U.S. science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein had written his first short story, "Life-Line," in 1939, about a machine that shows humanity as pink worms converging as you look back in time and budding as you look forward. The machine could therefore see where your "lifeline" ended. This isn't very different from GM's visualizations of humanity or the major characters of The Invisibles or, come to think of it the late Bill Hicks' beautiful Good Drug Trips In The News routine, in which he says we are just the inagination of our selves (It's only a ride).
Maya was a contemporary of the Mexican surrealist painter Remedios Varo (d. 1963), and even looked a bit like her. Varo's paintings are also dreamlike, per surrealist doctrine, but are visualizations of a personal mythology and her life experiences (convent school, early marriage, fleeing the Nazis with her French husband, etc.). Varo's well worth checking out. Most of her work is in Mexico City.
It's too bad Maya Deren didn't live. Suppose she lives and manages to finish "Divine Horsemen" in, say, 1962. It's a minor classic and secures her a teaching position at NYU or someplace. Or maybe she goes on a lecture tour but collapses from the amphetamine abuse and drops out for awhile to recover. However, in 1964 she films a credible version of "The Doors of Perception," beating "Altered States" by 15 years. Timothy Leary is impressed enough to talk her up wherever he goes. Maya goes to ground again and, after further studies of voudou and conversations with some of the crazier physicists (this is about the time of Bell's Non-Locality Theorem but a few years before Everett-Wheeler-Graham), she publishes a book in 1966 that nobody understands, really, but the closest thing would be Grandma Death's explanation of the Tangent Universe in "Donnie Darko." The hippies glom onto it as well, and the 1960s turn out really weird. For instance, the Black Power movement takes on a voodoo flavor. J. Edgar Hoover dies in 1971, thinking he's been cursed. Despite a public campaign of assassinations, Nation of Islam are unable to suppress the Divine Horsemen, who have temples in every major city (Ishmael Reed, thou art avenged!). In 1989, Deren is rediscovered by San Francisco "cyber" magazine Mondo2000 as a sort of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper of the cyberpagan set. In 1992, she simply disappears.
(And in the basement of Warehouse 23 (http://www.warehouse23.com/basement/ is a print of a COMPLETED Divine Horsemen and an uncompleted sequel to The Very Eye of Night. Every now and then someone watches it and simply disappears...) |
|
|
