Opens Fri Aug 15 at the Little Theatre.
Born in the year of the Russian revolution (1917) to an educated Jewish family, Maya Deren moved to New York when she was five; 21 years later, she was to make what many consider to be one of the most influential American experimental films, Meshes of the Afternoon. Maya Deren was a very beautiful woman, which is certainly why she starred in almost all of her experimental films. She was one of those rare instances where self-admiration (if not self-love) was entirely justified--anyone who looks as good as she did at the prime of her life has a right to worship his or her own film-projected or mirror-reflected image.
Deren died of a brain hemorrhage 42 years ago at the age of 44, and the documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren, by Czech documentarian Martina Kudlacek, offers interviews with Deren's surviving friends, colleagues, and a few of the many lovers she enjoyed during her short life. It also features footage from her major and minor experimental films (which were silent and shot on 16mm), recordings of her lectures on art and aesthetics, and recordings of the music she collected during her visits to Haiti, a country whose pagan practices fascinated her to no end.
The least interesting thing about Deren's life is her Haiti period, which dominated roughly the last quarter of her life--and so the least interesting part of the documentary is the last quarter, which shows way too much past and present footage of voodoo-addled villagers who were acquainted with or inspired by Deren. (She also learned how to cast voodoo spells, one of which almost killed a good friend of hers--so he claims.) The interesting part of Deren's life is her early years as a young dancer and recent grad-school graduate married to the then- very-handsome Czech émigré and experimental filmmaker Alexander Hammid--and so the best part of the documentary focuses on this area of her life.
By today's standards, the films made during Deren's peak may seem simple, as we have seen their kind of dream logic become the standard stuff of indie-rock music videos (a mysterious woman with the face of a mirror, sharp knives appearing in the empty hands, seawater rolling backwards, mutating montages), but in the '40s they were certainly groundbreaking and wonderful. In the Mirror of Maya Deren gives us a glimpse of this wonderfulness.
