» Maya Deren, Dance, And Gestural Encounters in Ritual in Transfigured Time

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9/12/2014 Maya Deren, Dance, and Gestural Encounters in Ritual in Transfigured Time

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Maya Deren, Dance, and Gestural Encounters iRitual in Transfigured Time Erin Brannigan O ct ob er 2 00 2 Filmmaker Profiles Issue 22

Was there anything like Choreography for the Camera before Deren?

SNYDER: No. Well, I take that back, because we dont really know. There was another woman named Loi

Fuller, fifty years before Maya, who in her later years was doing experimental films in Europe (Clark,

Hodson & Neiman, 288)

This quote , taken from a 1977 interview with Maya Deren friend and dance scholar, Allegra Fuller Snyder,

locates the films of Deren within a specific genealogy: the history of film utilising choreographic content and

form. Snyder is referring to the work of turn-of-the-century American dancer, Loie Fuller, who pre-dates Isador

Duncan regarding the elevation of the female dance soloist, working outside the institution of ballet, to the status

of artist. Fuller began her performance career as an actress, received international acclaim for her serpentine

dances and was filmed by the Lumire brothers. She went on to direct her own screen work including the featur film, Le Lys de la Vie (1920), of which only an excerpt remains.

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Fuller is the logical precursor of Deren in relation to this particular history for several reasons. She was the first

artist, male or female, to claim credit as both director and choreographer for her films (1) (Sommer, 53). While

Deren never credits herself as choreographer, she shares a general credit with Talley Beatty for A Study in

Choreography for Camera (1945) and a choreographic collaboration credit is given to Frank Westbrook for

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945-46). Deren certainly compared her process to that of a choreographer, stating

for example that Ritual is a dance and talking about the choreography of the whole (Clark, Hodson &

Neiman, 629). Like Deren, Fuller embraced contemporary technologies making them part of the aesthetic fabric

of her work. Fullers stage performances utilised electric lighting, coloured gels, magic lanterns, shadow-play an

projections to create spectacular onstage effects, making her experiments with film a logical development of her

art. Deren also utilised the full technological scope of her medium in exploring what she saw as its distinguishin

elements: its condition as a space and time art form. Multiple exposures, jump cuts, slow-motion, negative film

sequences, superimposition, freeze-frame and angled cameras are just a few of the cinematic effects utilised by

Deren. Finally, both Fuller and Deren pioneered radical aesthetic roles for the human body in motion, placing it

the centre of their aesthetic and technological explorations (2) .

What is also of note regarding Snyders quote is the gap between the two artists: Fullers fame emerging out of

fin-de-sicle Paris and Deren at the beginning of a new, modern era of avant-garde filmmaking. This latter perio

would produce generations of directors working with dance and film including Charles Atlas, Shirley Clarke,

Yvonne Rainer, Amy Greenfield, Dawn Kramer, Norman McLaren and Hilary Harris, right up to today with

artists like David Hinton, Wendy Houstoun, Philippe Decoufl, Isaac Julian and Clara van Gool.

The question of dance and the influence it had on Derens radical film aesthetic is one that has been generally

avoided, perhaps due to the challenges presented by interdisciplinary work (3) (Franko in Nichols, 131). That

dance had a special significance and aesthetic function for Deren is clear. Having migrated to America from

Russia with her parents at age 5, Deren graduated from Smith College with an MA in literature in 1939 and in th

same year became secretary to Katherine Dunham. Dunham was a commercially successful African-American

female choreographer and anthropological researcher of Caribbean dance. Her fieldwork and writing on Haitian

dance obviously had a strong impact on Deren who went on to pursue her own research in Haiti. In the recent

documentary, In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Douglas Wolfsberger, 2001), Dunham describes Deren performing

at a company party, dancing wildly to drumming music, and there are other references to Derens aspirations as

dancer in accounts of her time with the Dunham company (4) .
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This history prior to her first completed film project in 1943, Meshes of the Afternoon , clearly informs Derens

work, not least of all her collaborations with Dunham dancers, Talley Beatty and Rita Christiani. Five of Deren

films contain explicit dance content: A Study in Choreography for Camera , Ritual in Transfigured Time ,

Meditation on Violence (1948), The Very Eye of Night (1952-55, released 1959) and Divine Horsemen (a

posthumously assembled montage of Haitian footage shot between 1947 and 1954). But a choreographic

sensibility regarding cinematic production, an attention to the articulations of the performing body and the use o

movements and gestures outside the familiar, are all elements that can be found across Derens oeuvre.

Deren and Cinematic PerformanceIn his introduction to the new book of collected essays on Deren, Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde ,

Bill Nichols sees the filmmakers preoccupation with dance, play, games and ritual as being connected to the

concept of depersonalization Deren describes in her essay, An Anagram of Ideas on Art , Form and Film:

The ritualistic form creates fear, for example, by creating an imaginative, often mythological experience

which, by containing its own logic within itself, has no reference to any specific time or place, and is foreve

valid for all time and place Above all, the ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of the

dramatic action, but as a somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole (Deren in Nichols, 20).

For Nichols, it is through the embodiment of the performers that the films move beyond the personal to the

collective (Nichols, 10). Equally significant, and related to the displacement of character and the role of thehuman figure in Derens films, is the condition of dance, play and ritual as modes of physical performance that

resist the literary filmic models that were so derided by Deren. She opposes the dominance of a literary

approach to filmmaking, suggesting that the art form would be better off had it pursued the silent film form

(Deren in Nichols, 39), a point given weight when one considers the absence of scores and dialogue in her films;

At Land , A Study in Choreography for Camera , and Ritual in Transfigured Time are all silent, and none of her

films feature spoken word (5) . The lack of production hierarchies and set shot-lists in early silent cinema, along

with the use of extreme close-up, suggested another cinematic alternative to Deren (Nichols, 50). The framing o

fragments of the performing body in close-up, such as Chao-li Chis skin sliding over his ribs in Meditation onViolence , reveal mini-choreographies at the bodys periphery and unravel the privileging of the face and spoken

word in narrative-based cinema. Such shots are sometimes enhanced by Derens use of temporal distortions such

as slow-motion, effecting a kind of motion study that also evokes early cinema practices. Her meandering and

often dream-like plot structures are the clearest proof of her rejection of cause and effect linearity, and her

disregard for traditional film credits and of her own role as a performer (6) are further evidence of Derens

resistance to the hierarchical structures that dominate film production.
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This brings us to Derens notion of verticality in film. In a 1953 symposium on Poetry and the Film (7) , Deren

describes a model of cinema that reveals her insight into contemporary conventions of filmic structure. She

describes horizontal film structure as affiliated with drama, one circumstance one action leading to

another, and how this develops and delineates characterisation in film. Alternatively, vertical film structure, o

poetic structure

probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have

poetry concerned, in a sense, not with what is occurring but with what it feels like or with what it means

(Deren in Sitney, 173-4).

Derens articulation here of an alternative to the narrative drive of classic fiction film anticipates Gilles Deleuze

definitive treatment of the issue in his cinema books (Deleuze 1986 & Deleuze 1989). His model of the

movement-image describes the basis of the linear progression of an action-reaction filmic structure while his

time-image was the result of a perceivable slackening of the sensory-motor connection of the central

protagonists in post-war fiction films (Deleuze 1989, 3). Instead of anticipated responses from the actors and

logical repercussions, the time-image is characterised by purely optical and sound situations that fill the space

where something is, for example, too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which

henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities (Deleuze 1989, 18) (8) .

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Given that the horizontal model is connected by Deren to character development in film, one can apply the

vertical to physical performance beyond characterisation. An application of verticality that has particular

resonances for dancefilm can be drawn out in relation to Talley Beattys edited leap in Maya Derens A Study in

Choreography for Camera . The inevitability of the subjects relation to the ground and the effects of gravity

undergo a transformation here as the figure is unbound or ungrounded. The cinematic play with gravitational

reality captures the dancers radical and moving destabilisations, the manipulation of verticality and balance

that constitute dance practice. Such moments in Derens films demonstrate a play along another axis that

interrupts the drive or logic of a linear thrust and in this particular film, that logic in the temporal continuity of th

choreography played out against spatial discontinuity. These sequences create a poetics of human motion that is

dancerly and, like dance, operate outside functionality. Here, play and flux around the gravitational centre is

combined with temporal discontinuity to create a window inside the film onto the spectacle of motion.

In her writing, Deren also suggests that the interiority inherent in the novel form, when applied to the screen, ledto the development of symptom-action gestural clichs or visual clichs that summarise, through a reductive

physical action, emotions or responses which would be developed over pages in a novel. According to Deren,

such clichs mask the effort of transcription for an audience familiar with this mode of screen performance by

standing-in for, or symbolising, the literary terms in which the film is actually conceived (Nichols, 40-1).

Deren also writes of the use of gesture in everyday life and the uneasy transition to the dance stage or screen:

In creating a new form, the elements must be selected according to their ability to function in the new,

unnatural context. A gesture which may have been very effective in the course of some natural,

spontaneous conversation, may fail to have impact in a dance or film (Deren in Nichols, 23).

That, in Derens opinion, dance and film share issues regarding physical performance is telling. Deren rejects

both over-coded or clich gestural performance and the everyday body as, in one way or another, inappropriate

for her ideal cinema. What Deren turns to are stylised gestures and dance.

Paul Valry, writing in 1936, provides a useful definition of dance in relation to more familiar bodily movement:

an action that derives from ordinary, useful action, but breaks away from it, and finally opposes it [so

that] all action which does not tend toward utility and which on the other hand can be trained, perfected,

developed, may be subsumed under this simplified notion of the dance (Valry in Copeland & Cohen, 62)

This definition of dancerly movement which distinguishes it from the clich and the everyday, can be used to

explore gestural operations in Derens Ritual in Transfigured Time . Rather than quoting familiar, signifying

actions or trying to represent everyday, utilitarian behaviour, the physical performances in this film trace

trajectories and loiter along gestural routes that escape into verticality.


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Ritual in Transfigured Timeas Staging Gestural PlayIn Maya Derens Ritual in Transfigured Time we have gestures that invite us to move into step with them,

abandoning the comfort of the known and giving ourselves over to so many strange partners. This silent short

begins in a domestic environment, moves to a party scene, and ends with modern dance performed in an outdoor

setting. The films continuity is established by an emphasis on gesture and/or dance throughout.

The party scene in this film is a climax of beckoning gestures that are repeated, stylised and transferred among

the close crush of the crowd. An extended arm comes into frame again and again, finds its mark, drawing

someone in, moving on. The welcoming, ingratiating, engaging movements are so familiar and so much what a

gesture is thought to be: sociable, functional, meaningful. They represent what we could call an invitation to a

call and response encounter. Like Gene Kellys typical open armed finishing pose, both sending out and haulin

us into his gestural world, an extended arm in any context is a gesture calling for a response.

In Ritual in Transfigured Time , we are lead into the party scene through a series of gestures in a domestic

environment that shift between conforming to and abandoning this definable context, thus initiating our passage

into the unexpected. A woman can be seen through a doorway; she is seated and feeding a hank of yarn to

someone out of sight. Another woman sees her and raises an arm as if to attract her attention, but then we see sh

is directing this gesture elsewhere. There is no response and she moves toward the seated woman through a

different doorway, arm still raised, the awkward gesture shot from several angles and slipping away, almost

between shots, from any determined function. There is a cut to the seated woman who is frozen in position and

who consequently proceeds with her gestures of labour, now in slow motion and under the pressure of a strong

wind that blows the last wool from her hands. She is then held for a long time in a gesture of release, her arms u

and eyes closed as if in surrender. So, we know we are not in Kansas now and are prepared, to a degree, for wha

is to come. These opening gestures both present themselves in and across the space-time of the film and call

attention to themselves in the way they inhabit the same. The duration given them, the different perspectives, the

temporal distortions applied to them and the way they are performed emphasize their non-functional nature and

establish the gestures place at the centre of the action.

If we really attend to these movements, our labour discovers in the repetition of these gestures a constant

productivity that sets up its own circuit of expression, operating outside any systems that would contain or

explicate them. And this is not produced through performance alone. The repetition of the shots that make up thi

scene and the constant fluidity within and between those shots, play their part in the attention drawn to the

gestures. It is through the filmic treatment that these familiar gestures of engagement move away from any

obvious meaning; the filmic treatment is an intrinsic part of the gestural work of the film.


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These are gestures that pursue their mark but never realise an impact the performers draw each other near as if

to speak or embrace, only to meet face to face and move on without resolution. The movement of the gestures

through space and time overwhelms the moments of proximity that defuse and transform into new trajectories.

spectators, we enter into the dance through a lack of resistance, foregoing an accumulation of results for an

indulgence in proximity or contact with the unknown.

Maya Deren is most commonly discussed in relation to the history of avant-garde filmmaking and the

significance of her role as a woman working in a male dominated industry (9) . Examining Derens work in light

of her connections with, and interest in, dance, foregrounds aspects thus far overlooked in critical approaches,

such as corporeal performance in her films, the privileged role given to the moving body, and the influence of

choreographed performance on the techniques, aesthetic and overall structure of her films. Beyond this, the

gestural operations at work in a film like Ritual can be read as a dancerly exchange between the on-screen

figures that open up the action to the spectator, drawing us into the dance.

Works CitedClark, A. VV, Hodson, Millicent and Neiman, Catrina, eds, The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary

Biography and Collected Works. Volume 1 Part Two: Chambers (1942-47) , Anthology Film Archives, New Yor

City, 1988: Interview with Allegra Fuller Snyder by Allegra Fuller Snyder

Copeland, Roger and Cohen, Marshall, eds, What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism , Oxford Univers

Press, 1983: Philosophy of the Dance by Paul Valry

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, University of

Minnesota Press, 1986

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, University of

Minnesota Press, 1989

Nichols, Bill, ed., Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde , University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001:

Introduction by Bill Nichols, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film by Maya Deren and Aesthetic

Agencies in Flux by Mark Franko.

Sitney, P. Adams, ed, The Film Culture Reader , Prager Publishers Inc., New York, 1970

Sommer, Sally, Loie Fuller, The Drama Review , Vol. 19, No.1, March 1975
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