 |
|
MAP LINKS CONTACT BOOKS GLOSSARY ECO SEARCH TOOLS FAQ NEWS GUEST BOOK
HOME CLUBS BANNERS 
BLOG VIRTUAL MUSEUM ARTICLES CAISSA FORUM STATS ABOUT
 | |||
 |
|
 Chess Practice - MenuChess Pract. PresentationGreat TournamentsInternational NewsGame over the boardPlay by CorrespondenceChess HistoryReflections and debatesChess Practice - Forums |
|
|
New Page
«Maya Deren (Eleanora Derenkowsky) Russian-born Maya Deren was a very outspoken and highly influential filmmaker, writer and dancer who spent much of her adult life in New York. "I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick."! - Deren “Hollywood has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion picture as a creative fine-art form.”! – Deren
«Maya Deren Child (Kiev circa 1921) Maya’s parents had fled the Russian Revolution to America. Her jewish father was a psychiatrist, but the Derenkowskis had no idea their little Eleanora would grow up to be a socialist, part of the Greenwich Village scene in New York City and a voodoo priestess! Maya’s early studies focused on journalism and politics and in 1939 she received her Masters Degree in English and Symbolist Literature at Smith College and became a journalist. In 1941, working as an assistant to the innovative dancer and choreographer, Katherine Dunham, she learned dance, choreography and also got interested in a later passion - anthropology. 1943 is cited as the year she streamlined her name to Maya Deren. Maya is the name of Buddha’s mother as well as being the dharmic concept of reality “being but an illusion”. In Greek mythology, Maia is also a mother - of Hermes - and a goddess of mountains and fields. She became a key figure in the post-war avant-garde, and many of her contemporaries like Anaïs Nin, John Cage and Gore Vidal, Duchamp too, appeared in her films. She also pioneered dance performance in film through ground-breaking experimental short features in the 1940s, which one New York Times dance critic chose to tag ‘choreocinema’:
"Ritual in transfigured
time", Maya Deren, 1946
YouTube Broadcast Yourself
«Maya Deren Filmmaker (www.pitt.edu/)» In 1943(44) Deren worked on the unfinished film The Witch’s Cradle with Marcel Duchamp which it can be seen in two parts on U-tube @
«Marcel Duchand and Maya Deren First Part»
«Marcel Duchand and Maya Deren Second Part» Her first husband, Alexandr Hackenschmied (born in Linz, Austria) was a successful cameraman and photographer who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to USA. Persuaded by Maya, whom he had met in Hollywood, he also got a surname shortening - to Alexander Hammid - or the even shorter, Hamid, as seen in some film credits.
«Alexandr Hackenschmied Maya Deren's first Alexander trained his wife in camerawork and collaborated on her earliest films. Their first and best-known is Meshes of the Afternoon which was shot in 1943 with the 16mm Rolex Maya bought with some of the money inherited from her father. In 1944 he directed a documentary featuring conductor Arturo Toscanini, Hymn of the Nations, for the Office of War Information. His documentary Library of Congress (1945) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary.
«Maya Deren and her Cat» - Image Hammid also made the 22-minute short The Private Life of a Cat (1947) while married to Deren. Shot entirely in their Morton Street apartment in Manhattan this short film was on the subject of cats and their daily lives. The film starts off with two cats, a male and a female. The female is eventually impregnated by the male cat, and begins to search for a shelter to give birth to her kittens. The birth of the five kittens in shown in great detail. To view the film:
«The Private Life of a Cat (1947)» Through the 50's and 60's Hammid made documentaries. In 1951 he directed Men and Music which included Heifitz and Rubinstein and there was a co-directed film version of Menotti’s opera The Medium. Hammid directed his final film, To Be Alive, in 1964. In 1947 Deren won the Grand Prix International for 16 mm experimental film at the Cannes Film Festival for Meshes of the Afternoon, recognised as a seminal American avant-garde film and demonstrating her interest in dreams, ritual, psychological states, and the manipulation of space and time. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for Meshes of the Afternoon was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Ito much later in 1959. Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. Half way through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop. She produced Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) featuring the brilliant English dancer Antony Tudor in its second half, it incorporated everyday movements into dance-like arrangements using slow-motion effects.
«Ritual in Transfigured Time, Maya Deren (1946)» In 1958 she collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, reuniting with Antony Tudor in The Very Eye of Night. Deren talking about her own films: “…I think they are the films of a woman, and I think that their characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy: they are a "now" creature. But a woman has strength to wait because she has had to wait: she has to wait 9 months to give birth to a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness, and she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment but seeing always the person that it will become. Her whole life from her very beginning has built into her a sense of becoming. Now in any time form, this is a very important sense. […]” More of Deren’s recorded words are to be heard on:
«You Tube - Maya Deren’s recorded words»
«Maya Deren Filmmaker A Guggenheim grant enabled Deren to finance travel to Haiti to pursue her interest in voodoo. Dunham had written her master’s thesis on Haitian dances in 1936, which may have triggered Deren’s interest. In Haiti, Deren not only filmed many hours voodoo ritual, but also participated in them, and adopted the religion. Her book, Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (1953), is considered a definitive source on the subject. However, the accompanying documentary remained incomplete in her lifetime and was edited and produced by Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito in 1981, twenty years after Deren's death. All of the original film, wire recordings, and notes are held in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University. Deren set up the Creative Film Foundation with Amos Vogel and in 1953 she was part of the short-lived Film-makers Association for American Experimental Cinema. She met her last husband, the Japanese Teiji Ito, when he was a fifteen year old runaway. He stayed with her until her death in 1961 from a brain haemorrhage, said to be due to extreme malnutrition and a generally weakened condition from all the amphetamines she had been taking since her time with Dunham in 1941. Maya Deren’s ashes were scattered at Mount Fuji in Japan.
************
|
|||||
|
[This page has been conceived by John E Hawkes - All data is copyrighted by: © John E Hawkes & Chess-Theory] ************ If you like music, you may choose now a fine background Music:
************
*** FOR PLEASANT SURFING AROUND THIS SITE:
*** FOR DISCOVERING WHO WE ARE:
******** ©-«Chess-Theory.com»-2004-2009 ******** |
 |
