The collected shorts of Maya Deren the "Mother of the trance film" who worked completely outside the commercial film industry and made her own inner experience the center of her films.

“From the early 1940’s until her death in 1961, Maya Deren evoked and exemplified the American avant-garde movement virtually by herself. Her first film, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, set the tone for the decade and linked the movement to the older European avant-garde films of Cocteau and Buñuel.”
- Cecile Starr, The New York Times

"The cinema of Maya Deren delivers us from the studios: it presents our eyes with physical facts which contain profound psychological meaning; it beats out within our hearts a time which alternates, continues, revolves, pounds, or flies away… Poetry, after all, is the feast which life offers those who know how to receive with their eyes and hearts, and understand."
- Le Corbusier

"Intensely personal, symbolic and surreal films that reveal her deepest, darkest fantasies. She's Fellini and Bergman wrapped in one gloriously possessed body. Watching these films can change forever your concept of what cinema can be."
- L. A. Weekly

All films in a printable format

This DVD has never been screened

Reviews and Other Info:

Includes:
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943-59, in collaboration with Alexander Hammid, music by Teiji Ito, 14 min.)

AT LAND (1944, silent, 15 min.)

A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR CAMERA (1945, silent, 4 min.)

RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME (1945-6, silent, 15 min.)

MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE (1948, music arranged by Maya Deren, 12 min.)

THE VERY EYE OF NIGHT (1952-59, choreographic collaboration by Anthony Tudor, music by Teiji Ito, 15 min.)

Special Features:

Excerpt from
DIVINE HORSEMAN: THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI

PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT
Previously unreleased short by Alexander Hammid

PICTURE GALLERY

NOTES AND QUOTES

BIOGRAPHY

2007-07-24  Ozus' World Movie Reviews By Dennis Schwartz Maya Deren from 1943 until her death in 1961 led the avant-garde movement in cinema. She disregards traditional linear narrative structure, instead employs powerful dreamlike images that manipulate time and space to achieve a twilight zone between fiction and reality. This Mystic Fire video features six of her noted short experimental films. They include Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945), Meditation on Violence (1948), and The Very Eye of Night (1959). Maya's masterpiece is the 14 minute "Meshes of The Afternoon," made in collaboration with Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid (her second husband) and the score is by Teiji Ito (her third husband). It's a narratively complex, psychological study of a distraught housewife and how she looks at things when returning to her home and goes into a nervous breakdown; the woman is played by Maya. The director has said "The mind begins with the matter at hand--the incidental curve of a road or the accidental movement of a passing figure. As it perceives these it possesses them as images, as the stuff of which it composes its night and day dreams in the forms of its desires and despairs." Meditation on Violence used her interest in mysticism and dance, and left a deep impression on me. It's 12 minutes and the music is arranged by Maya. "The Wu-tang school of boxing derives from philosophical concepts in the Book of Changes. The emphasis is upon life as an on-going metamorphosis, a continuous alternation between negative and positive." Maya was born in 1917 in Kiev, Russia; as a child she immigrated with her Jewish family to America and settled in Syracuse. After her B.A. degree in journalism from NYU and an M.A. degree in literature from Smith, her interest in dance led her to film. Her groundbreaking lyrical experimental movies all had the similar striking theme of dream versus reality. These six short films give you an idea of the rich legacy she left behind. Her work influenced such great filmmakers as Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau, and many others today.

2006-12-07   By Thomas J. Kovacich a must see--the modernist cinematography is well beyond it's time and credit

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