Maya Deren (1917--1961) wore many hats in her brief lifetime: avant-garde filmmaker, documentarian, author, and Voudoun priestess, to name a few. Her influence, especially in independent film, has not...
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Critical Essay by Manny Farber
[Miss Deren's] movies, which she once called "Abandoned Films" and now calls "Films in the Classicist Tradition," are Freudian-toned,...
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Critical Essay by Maya Deren
It is the privilege of an individual to say, privately, of a work of art: "I don't like it"; but it is the public responsibility of a professional cr...
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Critical Essay by Mephisto
[Image in the Snow] is a combination of poetry, music and cinematography which envisions the march through life, through the city streets, and finally through a cemetery, o...
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Critical Essay by Maya Deren
My films might be called metaphysical, referring to their thematic content. It has required milleniums of torturous evolution for nature to produce the intricate miracle ...
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Critical Essay by Rudolf Arnheim
[Maya Deren] insisted that the true magic of the photograph in motion is more than a reshuffling of raw material, more than a masquerade. And she, who could be energe...
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Critical Essay by Tony Rayns
The Chinese martial arts clearly offered [Maya Deren] exactly what she was looking for, not just in their balletic grace but also in their implicit union of philosophical...
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In the following review, O'Pray asserts that editing was so important to Maya Deren's work that a film of hers that is put together by someone else, in this case Witch's Cradle, i...
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In the following review, Dusinberre discusses the place of individual and collective identity in Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time.
Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time merits s...
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In the following review, Kuhn asserts that Deren's The Very Eye of Night has "a more formal, abstract—even a more modernist—quality than any of Deren's other films.&...
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In the following review, O'Pray asserts that the out-takes from Deren's A Study in Choreography for the Camera should be shown with the completed film to show how the film was edited and...
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In the following review, O'Pray praises Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera as being an innovative and unsurpassed film on movement.
With the exception of perhaps the early sin...
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In the following review, Rees discusses how the changes in film style in Deren's Meditation on Violence match the changes in the film's action.
Against a blank studio wall, a half-nak...
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In the following review, Wees asserts that The Legend of Maya Deren "is not only for fans of Maya Deren, but for everyone interested in the development of the avant-garde film movement in North...
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In the following essay, Cornwell asserts that Deren is important to filmmaking for both her work as a female director and for her role as a film activist.
In "The Woman as Film-Director,�...
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In the following essay, Starr discusses how Deren's films influenced a generation of avant-garde filmmakers.
The gospel of the low-budget, personal, experimental film was first preached in t...
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In the following essay, Hoberman explains how Deren was an innovator in filmmaking for her generation.
Seventeen years after her death, Maya Deren's films (at the Film Forum, May 11 through ...
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In the following review, Rabinovitz discusses The Legend of Maya Deren as a biography which presents the relationship of a female artist to a male-dominated system.
The Legend of Maya Deren is the ...
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In the following excerpt, Renov discusses Deren's film and writing as "most clearly evok[ing as well as theoriz[ing] the heterotopic effects that have been attributed to the film noir, p...
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In the following essay, O'Pray presents an overview of Deren's life and career and discusses the legacy of Deren's work.
1. Maya Deren had a rich, eventful life, cut tragically...
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Maya Deren
Critical Essay by Manny Farber
