MAYA DEREN'S LAST SCRIPT

1 4 Y M A Y A D E R E N ’ S L A S T S C R I P T M A Y A D E R E N Edited and Introduced by Jamie James Although she never made a film that ran longer than fifteen minutes , Maya Deren is a legend of the American cinema whose legacy appears likely to endure as long as those of Hollywood filmmakers who are household names. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), her first film, made in collaboration with her husband, the Czech director Alexander Hammid, is often described as the most widely viewed American experimental film. Shot in silent black-and-white 16mm at the couple’s bungalow in Los Angeles, this intensely poetic dream quest, set in the wandering mind of a woman played by Deren herself, established her as the country’s most prominent experimental filmmaker. When Deren and Hammid moved to New York, their studio apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village was a weekly salon where European surrealists and Dadaists in exile mingled with the American avant-garde. Deren’s circle at various times included John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Philip Lamantia, Roberto Matta, James Merrill, Anaïs Nin, Isamu Noguchi , and Dylan Thomas; many of them acted in her films. In February 1946, Deren hired the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street, where Eugene O’Neill had staged his earliest plays, to present a program of her films. It sold out night after night; 1 5 R befitting a legend, reports of her screening-cum-lecture attained the proportions of a Sacre du printemps. The films aroused excitement and controversy, but the main attraction was Deren herself, a passionate , eloquent advocate for film art. She argued that cinema could be a fine art like chamber music or poetry, and in order to achieve this potential it must escape the control of the commercial film industry. She repeated the program at college campuses and other venues across the country. The experimental filmmaker Harry Smith described the e√ect of Deren’s first appearance in San Francisco : ‘‘Her movies hit like thunderbolts and sent everybody to the nearest pawn shops to get a Bell & Howell.’’ Maya Deren not only inspired a generation of experimental filmmakers, she also laid the foundation for the contemporary indie film movement. Her exotic beauty and magnetic personality expanded awareness of avant-garde film for the first time beyond the confines of artists’ studios and galleries. Esquire published a feature about her, presenting her as a sort of beatnik babe, which concluded with her famous quip, ‘‘I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.’’ In 1947, Meshes of the Afternoon won the Grand Prix Internationale at Cannes, and Deren was awarded the first Guggenheim fellowship for creative filmmaking. Then, like many fine artists riding the crest of fame, she abruptly charted a radical change in course. She had applied for the Guggenheim to finance a trip to Haiti to film voodoo ritual dance, after she met Gregory Bateson at a lecture in which he screened short archival films that he and his wife, Margaret Mead, had shot of village life in Bali. Deren conceived an ambitious new project, a ‘‘cross-cultural fugue’’ that would integrate footage from Bateson and Mead’s Bali films with her own footage of American children playing hopscotch and other games and the new film from Haiti. Recently divorced from Hammid, she began a love a√air with Bateson, which brought an end to his marriage to Mead. She and Bateson planned to marry and go on a working honeymoon in Haiti, but Bateson got cold feet and Deren sailed to Haiti on her own. Within days of her arrival, she plunged into a loverlike relationship with the country and its magic religion that dominated the rest of her life. In four voyages to Haiti over the course of seven years, she shot hundreds of hours of possession rituals, which she also partici- 1 6 D E R E N Y pated in. The cross-cultural fugue long forgotten, she intended to edit the footage into a magnum opus uniting the two passions of her...