User:Jvarne/sandbox

Peer Review

Cayla Bamberger

Wow, you've found a lot of information already.

I think your additions to the Early Life and Early Career sections add a great touch to what was already on Deren's page. I also think that your inclusions of Director's Notes and Possible Influences add a lot to the discussion of her most famous film, Meshes in the Afternoon. All these edits seem very relevant to your topic.

If possible, you might want to consider including more information on her other films.

You also do a great job of approaching your topic from a neutral point of view, speaking with an encyclopedic voice that represents multiple viewpoints throughout your writing.

I don't currently see your sources on your Sandbox page, but I know there's been some mix-up throughout the weeks about where to post assignments, so as long as you have those elsewhere, your project looks great!

Early Life

Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine (then Russian Republic), 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 until his death in January, 1943

In 1928, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her mother moved to Paris, France to be with her daughter while she attended the League of Nations International School of Geneva in Switzerland from 1930 to 1933.

Deren began college at Syracuse University, where she studied journalism and political science, and also became a highly active socialist leader during the Trotskyist movement. Deren served as National Secretary in the National Student Office of the Young People's Socialist League and was a member of the Social Problems Club at Syracuse University through which she met Gregory Bardacke, whom she married at the age of 18 in June, 1935. After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City. She finished school at New York University with a bachelor's degree in literature in June, 1936 then returned to Syracuse in the fall. She and her husband became active in various socialist causes in New York City. In 1937, she was named regional organizer of YPSL and is best known for establishing an informal socialist training school at Lake Cazenovia, New York. By fall of that year their relationship was over. The divorce was finalized in December, 1938. She attended the New School for Social Research and received a master's degree in English literature at Smith College. Her master's thesis was titled The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry (1939).

Early Career

After graduation from Smith, Deren returned to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she joined the European émigré art scene. The following years from 1937-1939 were very formative of her career as Deren supported herself by free-lance writing for radio shows and foreign language newspapers. During that time she also worked as an editorial assistant to famous American Writers, Eda Lou Walton, Max Eastman, and then William Seabrook. She became known for her European-style handmade clothes, wild, curly hair, and fierce convictions. In 1940, Deren moved to Los Angeles to focus on her poetry and free-lance photography. In 1941, Deren wrote and suggested a children's book on dance to African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist of Caribbean culture and dance Katherine Dunham and later became her assistant and publicist. Dunham's fieldwork influenced Deren's studies of Haitian culture and Voudoun mythology. At the end of touring a new musical Cabin in the Sky, the Dunham dance company stopped in Los Angeles for several months to work in Hollywood. It was there that Deren met Alexandr Hackenschmied (later Hammid), a celebrated Czech-born photographer and cameraman who would become her second husband in 1942. Hackenschmied had fled from Czechoslovakia in 1938 after Hitler's advance. They lived together in Laurel Canyon where he helped her with her still photography which focused on local fruit pickers and the surrealism of Los Angeles.

Cinema

Meshes of the Afternoon

In 1943, Deren purchased a used 16 mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. This camera captured her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), made in their Los Angeles home on a budget of about $250, in collaboration with Hammid. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. It is the first example of a narrative work in avant-garde American film; critics have seen autobiographical elements in the film, as well as thoughts about women and the individual. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Itō in 1952. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film," full of dramatic angles and innovative editing. It seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. A woman, played by Maya Deren, walks to her friend's house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and has a dream. The sequence of walking up to the gate on the partially shaded road restarts numerous times, resisting conventional narrative expectations, and ends in various situations inside the house. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. Certain symbols recur on the screen, including a cloaked, mirror-faced figure, and a key, which becomes twinned with a knife.

The loose repetition and rhythm cut short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. The camera initially avoids her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman. Multiple selves appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting that the super-ego is at play, which is in line with the psychoanalytic Freudian staircase and flower motifs. Very aware of the "personal film," her first piece explores a woman's subjectivity and her relation to the external world. Georges Sadoul said Deren may have been "the most important figure in the post-war development of the personal, independent film in the U.S.A." In featuring the filmmaker as the woman whose subjectivity in the domestic space is explored, the feminist dictum "the personal is political" is foregrounded. As with her other films on self-representation, Deren navigates conflicting tendencies of the self and the "other," through doubling, multiplication and merging of the woman in the film. Following a dreamlike quest with allegorical complexity, Meshes of the Afternoon has an enigmatic structure and a loose affinity with both film noir and domestic melodrama.The film is famous for how it resonated with Deren's own life and anxieties. According to a review in The Moving Image, "this film emerges from a set of concerns and passionate commitments that are native to Deren's life and her trajectory. The first of these trajectories is Deren's interest in socialism during her youth and university years".

Director's Notes

There is no concrete information about the conception of the Meshes Of The Afternoon, just that Deren offered the poetic ideas and Hammid was abel to turn them into visuals. Deren's initial concept began on the terms of a subjective camera, one that would show the point of view of Deren without the aid of mirrors and would move as her eyes through spaces. According to the earliest program note, she described Meshes as:

"This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience."

Possible Influences

Jean Cocteau

Meshes resembles a French film called Blood of a Poet (1930) by Jean Cocteau. The film is a representation of the subjective point of view of the Cocteau's mind in which he grapples with the concepts of inner and outer reality. Meshes and Cocteau's film share the same imagery in many instances, however, Deren repeatedly claimed to have never seen the film and denied any influence by Cocteau. After seeing Blood of a Poet for the first time, she was actually became fond of Cocteau.

In the fall of 1945, Deren wrote to Victor Animatograph Corp. that she had seen the film multiple times now and expressed interest in publishing a commentary on it. The article was never written.

Dali and Buñuel

The surrealist background of Dali and Bunuel is a question of influence becuase of the surreal nature of Meshes. Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928) is on the premier examples of film representing the structure of the subconscious.

Deren detested this comparison because of the surrealist movement's interest in the entertainment value of it's subject more than its meaning. The form of Meshes does not compare to Un Chien Andalou either.

Freud and Jung

Psychoanalysis of Meshes from a Freudian viewer or Jungian viewer attempted to decode the symbolism in the film to uncover what Deren was saying about identity and sexuality. Deren adamantly objected her film undergoing analysis for it's symbolism because for Deren, the objects in the film were just that, objects "whose value and meaning ids defined and confirmed by their actual function in the context of the film as a whole". Deren wanted her audiences to appreciate the art for it's conscious value and spent a lot of her later career delivering lectures and writing essays on her film theory.

Alexandr Hammid

Hammid role in the creation of Meshes is downplayed, yet, the onyl influence Deren has ever acknowledged. The fluid camera movements and camera effects that make Meshes visually ambitious are fully credited to Hammid as well as some of the writing. The ideas and execution of the film are in equal part attributable to Deren and Hammid.