*** Welcome to piglix ***

Maya Deren

Maya Deren
Maya Deren.jpg
Born Eleanora Derenkowskaia
(1917-04-29)April 29, 1917
Kiev, USSR (present-day Ukraine)
Died October 13, 1961(1961-10-13) (aged 44)
New York, New York, United States
Nationality American
Education New York University, New School of Social Research, Smith College
Known for Choreography, Film, Dancing, Ethnography, Ethnomusicology
Notable work Films: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), A Study for Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945-1946), Meditation on Violence (1947), The Very Eye of Night (1959)
Books: Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953)
An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946)
Spouse(s) Gregory Bardacke (1935–1939)
Alexandr Hackenschmied (1942–1947)
Teiji Ito (1960–1961; her death)
Awards Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Work in Motion Pictures, (1947)
Grand Prix Internationale for Amateur Film, Cannes Film Festival (1947)

Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia (Russian: Элеоно́ра Деренко́вская), was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer.

The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving. She combined her interests in dance, Haitian Vodou and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness.

Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). She continued to make several more films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)  – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.

Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine, into a Jewish family, to psychologist Solomon Derenkowsky and Marie Fiedler, who supposedly named her after Italian actress Eleonora Duse.

In 1922, the family fled the USSR because of anti-Semitic pogroms and moved to Syracuse, New York. Her father shortened the family name to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York. He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse.


...
Wikipedia

...