Lucidno
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One of the best things about In the Mirror of Maya Deren — a feature-length documentary in English by Austrian director Martina Kudlacek, playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center a dozen times this week — is that it does such a terrific job of showing us what Deren was like that it makes even the notion of a biopic about her seem unnecessary, if not ridiculous. For one thing, Deren so assiduously chronicled and recorded her filmmaking activities and lectures that Kudlacek had a lot to work with. She makes wonderful use of the material, though lamentably a private recording of Deren singing the standard tune "Mean to Me" has been cut since I first saw the film in early 2002. Deren's version doesn't threaten Sarah Vaughan's, but it's a collector's item to cherish. I suspect it had to go because the cost of paying the song's copyright holders was too high. The song is still mentioned in the final credits; maybe it was too expensive to redo them. Fortunately the film has a wonderful original score by John Zorn, which makes dramatic use of suspended chords, as well as other samples of Deren singing and several pieces of music she recorded during her four trips to Haiti between 1947 and 1955. Money was always something of a problem for Deren, at least as an adult, though she was the first filmmaker to ever win a Guggenheim Fellowship grant. She died of a brain hemorrhage at 44, and one of her friends suggests that malnutrition may have been a contributing factor — along with amphetamine shots and a legal dispute involving the inheritance of her 26-year-old Japanese lover that evidently exercised her fiery temper. Born EleanoraDerenkovskaya in Kiev the year of the Russian Revolution, she had a privileged upbringing as the daughter of Russian Jews, a psychiatrist father and a mother who studied music. When she was still a child the family moved to Syracuse, New York, and in her early teens she attended a Swiss boarding school. But by the time she finished her formal education, in 1939, she was a bohemian poet and working as a secretary. "I was a very poor poet," we hear her say in the film, "because I thought in terms of images...[and] poetry is an effort to put [visual experience] into verbal terms. When I got a camera in my hands, it was like coming home." Perhaps her most consequential secretarial job was for dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, one of the many fascinating talking heads here; it took her to Los Angeles, where she met the Czech experimental filmmaker Alexander Hammid (another talking head). Collaborating with Hammid, she made her first film, the groundbreakingMeshes of the Afternoon (1943) — a series of metaphorical and metaphysical self-portraits as rich in Freudian content as any of Plath's late poems, though made mainly in celebration and without any of Plath's self-loathing. |
(This film and most of Deren's others, which are all liberally sampled in Kudlacek's film, will be showing at the Film Center on Monday and Wednesday, making it possible to catch them just before or after the documentary.) Deren saw female self-portraiture as a process of perpetual metamorphosis — an explicitly feminist undertaking that's in some ways the opposite of Plath's petrified notions of identity. Clearly the world wasn't quite ready for that sensibility; neither of the best American film reviewers at the time, James Agee and Manny Farber, was any sort of fan, though the larger art community she was part of — including dancers, choreographers, musicians, composers, and other filmmakers — encouraged and supported her. This milieu is brought to life so vividly in the documentary one can almost smell the kitty litter in Deren's Greenwich Village flat. Better yet, the film performs the nearly miraculous feat of allowing us to know her as a person as well as understand her as an artist, and it does this better than any of the excellent books about her, including the two volumes to date of The Legend of Maya Deren – a massive, collectively authored biography and compilation that's been in the works since the 80s — and the recent collection Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. A high-strung narcissist and sensualist who anticipated hippie dress codes as well as New Age babble, Deren might seem to gather all the cliches of bohemian Manhattan in the 40s and 50s in one Jungian jumble. Yet the robust power of her charisma is conveyed so affectionately by her friends, even when they recall her with exasperation, that something all her own arises out of the overlapping archetypes she adopted. If Plath's myth is the creation of her writing — magnified by her suicide and the depths of depression her writing explored — Deren's myth is the product of a steady rush of evolving self-definitions. Those definitions can't be restricted to her films, though the films provide the ideal settings for them. The late Stan Brakhage, who knew her well and provides the most sensitive and provocative appreciation of her films in the documentary, offers a startling view of her as a kind of demiurge when he describes watching her lift and hurl a full-size refrigerator across a kitchen in a moment of rage. Even if we balk at believing him, we may conclude that the force of her personality was such that it could inspire this sort of belief. In Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde Jane BrakhageWodening, who recounts the same story, suggests as much when she writes about Deren, the words spilling out as if she were in a trance: "In Haiti, she was fulfilled. She learned about voodoo, a religion of shamanic power, and this religion was based on dance. And when she danced in Haiti, she was possessed of the voodoo gods and she had power over men. And so she became a priestess and her red hair stuck out all over her head like sparks and she wore her hair that way the rest of her life." This may sound like it belongs in a Cecil B. De Mille opus or in Fritz Lang'sMetropolis, but it does suggest the effect Deren had on others. It's sad that Plath could exert that kind of power only posthumously, which puts it beyond the reach of any biopic. Jonathan ROSENBAUM |
