Maya Deren

Influenced by the Sentences on Conceptual Art and Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, I started to question the distinction between perception and conception. Perception is defined as the act of apprehending material objects or qualities through the senses, or the process of acquiring sensory information on wikipedia. This process materializes itself at the moment when the viewer encounters a work of art that is actually the product of the artist’s conception. The relationship between the product and the moment of encounter gives an ex-ante condition to conception and an ex-post condition to perception, as Sol LeWitt puts it more simple " The work of art can be perceived only after it is completed." This claim usually holds for both the viewer and the artist because the creation process does not allow the artist to have the full knowledge of the outcome as well. On the other hand, conception does not seem to have a two-party understanding, it is the initial concern of the artist, that is why it will be more appropriate for me to explain how I perceive Maya Deren's work.

The first thing that arouses my admiration in Deren’s works is that she is the first widely known woman auteur director in the United States meaning that she is also the writer, cinematographer, performer, editor of her eight films and pioneer in avant-garde film-making as Haslem also writes in her article Senses of Cinema: Maya Deren (2002). It is also as important for me that her most active years coincide with the period of 1940’s, which is known to be the most conservative time of America with strict limitations on the cinema sector. It is strange enough that she was able to survive with her irritating and extra-ordinary surrealist films and hard to recall such talented women in the field of cinema else than actresses for that period.  Before going into detail with Deren’s work, it is important to note that she had a big influence on conceptual art in means of experimental cinema. Her first trial in film-making, Witch’s Cradle (1943) was with Marcel Duchamp, who paved the way for conceptualists, but the film remained incomplete. Additionally, her short films anticipated the works of conceptual artists like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas in experimental cinema and later on directors like David Lynch in means of surrealism.

Her first and the most famous film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is also the forerunner in surrealist film with all the new techniques in camera usage and its dreamlike atmosphere. The film opens with the scene in which Deren is picking up a flower that she dropped on the ground. From the first scene the viewer gets the impression that it is not an ordinary movie in the sense that it will take the viewer to an inner journey. She then follows a stranger who she cannot reach. She goes back to her house, opens the door and gets in. It is possible to say that all her movements are full of emotions, most notably fear and paranoia. She goes upstairs to the bedroom and comes back downstairs and falls asleep. After that the film replicates those sequences. There are objects like the flower, the knife and the key, used repeatedly to express some kind of an obsession with fear, death, trust and loneliness. The woman is obviously not feeling secure, we see that later when her lover comes to wake her up. She kills her lover in her dream, my reading of that scene is that she kills herself again and again because she sees herself in every person she looks at. There is alienation in the movie to some extent in every scene. This alienation finds its form in the character with the mirror face.  At the end of the film we realize that she killed herself with the same knife that we see repetitiously in her dream, but again we cannot be sure if this is her dream or the reality. This loss of the sense of reality is present in all her films so as to say her characters are driven by an internal force to their ends without having a conscious control over their actions. I used the term auteur for her cinema because what she does in her films is that she expresses her own alienation from the reality. For her, the artist behind the camera and the story that has been told cannot be perceived separately. Deren writes in her article “Some Metaphors for the Creative Process” quoted from Neiman’s An Introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren:

“There is another metaphor for this process of creating a structure which conveys, perhaps, something of the situation of the artist. He is very much like that classic figure of animated cartoons who… is running along and, in complete concentration on his purpose – carried along, as it were, by the momentum of the act- runs right off the edge of a cliff without noticing it and continues running in mid-air until, looking down, he becomes aware of his unnatural situation, and in that moment, and because he perceives it as extraordinary and unnatural, is unable to sustain and falls.

So the artist, beginning in reality - in that which already exists- starts moving toward a vision, an Idea, and with the cumulative momentum of that dedicated concentration, crosses the threshold from that which already exists into the void where, still moving forward, he creates a plane of earth where his foot has been, as the spider, spinning from his own guts, threads his ladders or highways through once empty space.”

            The medium she chose to interpret her ideas is coherent with how she describes her creative process. The camera is always moving in her movies even the character is motionless, and it is used to express that there is always a flow, especially in The Meshes of the Afternoon. To emphasize the importance of the subjectivity, she uses close-ups and jump-cuts. The camera is the eye to observe this inner journey and it is inevitable for the viewer to witness her subjective experience carried on the two levels of reality that are in collision. In Neiman’s words; “The camera was for Deren the modern instrument which could most naturally reflect its own conditions of observation: ‘local’ time and place and their changes, ‘the inalienability of subjective position.’ For her it was through personal, subjective experience that we gain access to the universal. Though among the most personal ever made, her films were addressed “to the poet in every man.”

It would be proper to analyze her second film At Land (1944), which introduces a critique of social rituals, in order to follow her conception in the understanding of the universal through her subjectivity, but since the film is not accessible for me now I will briefly touch upon how she uses the means of surrealism. In this film she was quite successful in harmonizing the irrational ideas followed by one and other leading to a final product which is a sheer logical combination of illogical shots. At this point I again refer to Sol LeWitt “Conceptual art is not necessarily logical. The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times, only to be ruined. Logic may be used to camouflage the real intent of the artist, to lull the viewer into the belief that he understands the work, or to infer a paradoxical situation (such as logic vs. İllogic). Some ideas are logical in conception and illogical perceptually...” His sentences correspond to what Deren puts out with At Land as a conceptual artist, although the inception of the term conceptual art corresponds to 1960’s, two decades after her production period.

      In her following films A Study in Choreography for the Camera and Ritual in Transfigured Time, she expresses the different aspects of her identity, as a dancer, choreographer and poet, enabling the usage of the term “poetic psychodrama” to describe her films. Thomas Schatz in his book Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, writes that the poetic psychodrama “emphasized a dreamlike quality, tackled questions of sexual identity, featured taboo or shocking images, and used editing to liberate spatio-temporal logic from the conventions of Hollywood realism.” This explanation for poetic psychodrama separates Deren from the realist film-makers, which is also crucial in the standpoint of conceptual art against formalism.

      To conclude, Maya Deren could be regarded as a conceptual artist according to the writings of Sol LeWitt, but it is sometimes difficult for me to have an understanding of the concept of the artist if the outcome is extremely minimalistic in a materialistic sense to express the idea behind. Cinema as a medium is important for me in the sense that it is visually rich. To some extent I can agree with what Sol LeWitt writes on perception, “It doesn’t really matter if the viewer understands the concepts of the artist by seeing the art. Once it is out of his hand the artist has no control over the way viewer will perceive the work. Different people will understand the same thing in a different way.” It is obvious that perception is subjective, but it is important for me to have a connection with the artist’s concepts, that is why Maya Deren’s words are favourable for me in this sense, “And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Haslem, Wendy. 2002. Senses of Cinema: Maya Deren

LeWitt, Sol. June 1967. "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", Artforum

LeWitt, Sol. May 1969. "Sentences on Conceptual Art", Art-Language

Neiman, Catrina. 1947. An Introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren

Schatz, Thomas. 1997. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. New York: Scribner