In The Mirror Of Maya Deren

I am in a constant search for experimental and avant-garde films and music, I'm looking for the talented creators, the pioneers of the unconventional art.
One considerable talent for doing this things was Maya Deren, who is one of the earliest and most important practitioners of independent filmmaking. She is a legend, one of the pioneering figures of avant-garde cinema.

Maya Deren was born Eleonora Derenkowsky in Kiev in 1917, the family emigrated to America when she was only 5 years old. She was a brilliant filmmaker, poet, writer, dancer, lecturer, theorist - all in one fiery personality.

Her first film;Meshes of the Afternoon ranks among the most widely viewed of all avant-garde films. According to Deren, the film ia about “a dream that becomes reality”. For Maya, actuality included experience of all kinds, both conscious and unconscious, dream and reality. She emerged from an aesthetic heavily influenced by a contemporary excitement with Surrealism, and she was attracted, inexorably, by the power of psychoanalysis and voudou.

The movies are haunting, lyrical, and breathtaking fusions of human and cinematic movement. She worked completely outside the commercial film industry and made her own inner experience the center of her films.Her efforts to promote an independent cinema have inspired filmmakers all over the world. She became a key figure in the post-war avant-garde, and many of her contemporaries like Anaïs Nin, John Cage and Gore Vidal, Duchamp too, appeared in her films. She also pioneered dance performance in film through ground-breaking experimental short features.
Fluidly combining mysterious surrealist elements with decidedly female psychological overtones to evoke an image of consciousness, its influence ranks with that of Bunuel's "Un Chien Andalou." Her subsequent films continued to explore space, time, the nature of form, the psyche, the possibilities of cinematic manipulation and the magic of dance.

She is, in fact, quite legendary and has a large group of friends and admirers of all ages who have been moved deeply by her work. One of her more recent devotees is Martina Kudláček, about whom I knew nothing until I saw her film In the Mirror of Maya Deren.
I recommend this to you, dear reader.



Videos:
Meshes of the Afternoon; Pt.1
At Land; Pt.1