Eleanora Deren: Incomplete Control By Eleanora Deren

Eleanora Derenkowskaia, better known as Maya Deren, was a Russian-American filmmaker and is considered one the most influential and prominent experimental filmmakers during the 1940’s and 1950’s. Although Deren completed only six films and two monographs in her lifetime, her relatively limited body of work has made a enormous impact on the history of cinema and specifically the American avant-garde. Her aesthetic approach to film, combined with her unique themes, has propelled her body of work into the artistic classification of surrealism. Deren herself resisted the surrealist label attached to her work and would defend her position in a series of lectures and demonstrations. When one looks at a piece of Deren’s work, especially under the
In Sarah Keller’s book, Maya Deren: Incomplete Control, elaborates on some of Deren’s approaches to filmmaking especially with repetition and rhythm being pillars to Deren’s aesthetic. Keller states that, “Deren’s films especially Meshes of the Afternoon, also impacts significantly on spectatorship. The rhythm of the sound, movement and editing conspire to produce the effect of a trance film” (Keller). This sort of artistic expression within her film could have been the creative vision and influence from cubism, conceptual art and dadaism. Deren openly admired Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, with the latter being casted in one of her unfinished films titled Witch’s Cradle (1943). This collaboration with Marcel Duchamp was to produce a film that exhibited the choreographed set of movements between the figure (played by Duchamp) and the camera. The film was intended to be an exploration of the magical qualities of objects in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery. Even her unfinished projects have been admired and critiqued much like her completed work. It would seem that Deren’s overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Deren’s body of work in cinema share and find themselves in the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film. Her
Though she chose many names for her work: avant-garde, ritualistic, and chamber films, she never used surrealistic. Still, many film scholars and theorist view her affiliation with the surrealist movement as undeniable. This can be due to her associations with Duchamp and her admiration for Cocteau, but overwhelmingly is critics and scholars dissection into her films themselves. Deren’s argument to this can be found in her 1946 essay, “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film”, where she examine and explains her approach to filmmaking. Her argument emphasizes filmmaking as a matrix where elements exist outside of the constraints of hierarchy, order or value. It is a utopian approach, comparable to the logic developed by the Russian Formalists, which stresses the influence of individual elements within the anagram (Turim). 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