Reviews & News: 'In the Mirror of Maya Deren'
LandonEx
In A Nutshell:
Rated 5 out of 5. "A truly superb documentary on the life of pioneering
avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren." -- Film Threat, Phil Hall.
Rated 4 out of 4. "A smart and moving documentary." -- Christian Science
Monitor, David Sterritt.
Rated 3 out of 5. "Kudlacek's film includes interviews with a fascinating
cross-section of Deren's contemporaries, as well as generous excerpts from her
films." -- TV Guide's Movie Guide, Maitland McDonagh.
-- Online Film Critics Society (O.F.C.S.)
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Reflections Of An Independent Artist
By DAVE KEHR / New York Times
As the Sundance Film Festival continues to unwind in Utah, "In the Mirror of
Maya Deren" arrives as an especially timely reminder that the phrase
"independent film" used to refer to something other than dysfunctional family
dramas featuring television stars on seasonal hiatus.
The phrase used to mean (and still does in the vicinity of the venerable
Anthology Film Archives in the East Village) films made in active protest
against the Hollywood narrative tradition. These short, experimental films,
usually in black-and-white and much of the time presented in pristine silence,
were primarily made in the bohemian enclaves of both coasts -- in San Francisco
and Greenwich Village.
Maya Deren (1917-1961) was an archetypical Village bohemian who lived and
worked on Morton Street through most of her career. Born in Ukraine and named
Eleanora Derenkowsky, she emigrated with her parents, a psychiatrist and an
artist, to the United States when she was 5.
A small, extraordinarily beautiful woman with cheekbones that would have made
Ava Gardner envious, she became a dancer, performing with Katherine Dunham's
company and others. During a trip to Hollywood with the Dunham company in
1943, she met the Czech émigré artist Alexander Hammid, and together they made
the highly influential "Meshes of the Afternoon," a languorous study of a young
woman (Deren, always her own favorite subject) contemplating images of death
and sexuality.
"In the Mirror of Maya Deren," made for Austrian television by the Czech
documentarian Martina Kudlacek, tells Deren's story with rigor, respect and
great resourcefulness. The portrait is a particularly vivid one, not least
because so many of Deren's friends and colleagues are still around to tell
their stories. Ms. Kudlacek's film opens with a sequence set at Anthology
(where, appropriately enough, her film opens today), which finds the archives'
genial director, Jonas Mekas, rummaging through racks of film cans to come up
with half a dozen old coffee tins, each containing unseen outtakes from Deren's
work.
Mr. Mekas joins several other veterans of the New York independent scene --
including Amos Vogel, the founder of the influential film society Cinema 16,
and Judith Malina of the Living Theater -- in fleshing out the details of
Deren's life and work. But the film's most compelling voice belongs to Deren
herself, who is heard describing her work through wire recordings (a technology
that preceded tape, in which sounds were recorded on magnetized steel wire) of
her lectures.
In 1947, Deren became the first filmmaker to win a Guggenheim fellowship and
used her grant money to travel to Haiti, where she became deeply involved with
the religion of voudon (popularly known as voodoo). Ms. Kudlacek's film
becomes somewhat cloudy at this point, as does Deren's work: although she shot
18,000 feet of 16-millimeter film in Haiti, she never shaped it into a film,
presenting her researches instead as the book "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods
of Haiti."
Though she continued to work through the 1950's, teaching, lecturing and
nurturing young filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, she released only one more film,
"The Very Eye of Night" in 1958. Her death at 44 has been ascribed to a voudon
curse but seems to have been caused by the amphetamines she came to rely on
when she and her young lover, Teiji Ito, were unable to afford regular meals.
Since then, Deren has become a feminist art icon, a symbol of struggle and
repression to set alongside Frida Kahlo in the world of painting. But Ms.
Kudlacek's film is refreshingly free of postmodernist theorizing and
gender-study cant. Rather than a feminist martyr, her film presents an artist
with a rich body of work, one who still fascinates and continues to cast a wide
influence.
"IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN": Written and directed by Martina Kudlacek;
director of photography, Wolfgang Lehner; edited by Henry Hills; music by John
Zorn; produced by Johannes Rosenberger and Constantin Wulff for Navigator Film;
released by Zeitgeist Films. Running time: 103 minutes. This film is not
rated. WITH: Miriam Arsham, Stan Brakhage, Chao-Li Chi, Rita Christiani,
Jean-Léon Destiné, Katherine Dunham, Graeme Ferguson, Alexander Hammid, Judith
Malina, Jonas Mekas, Martha Gabriel, André Pierre, Amos Vogel and Marcia Vogel.
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