Maya Deren: Incomplete Control

ISBN-13: 9780231162210 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 296 str.

Sarah Keller

Opis

Maya Deren (1917-1961) was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a dream-like experiment with time and symbol, looped narrative and provocative imagery, setting the stage for the twentieth-century's groundbreaking aesthetic movements and films.

Maya Deren assesses both the filmmaker's completed work and her numerous unfinished projects, arguing Deren's overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Combining the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film, Deren created a wholly original experience for film audiences that disrupted the subjectivity of cinema, its standards of continuity, and its dubious facility with promoting categories of realism. This critical retrospective reflects on the development of Deren's career and the productive tensions she initiated that continue to energize film.

Recenzje

"This book is a thorough review of Derens total oeuvre, offering a study of one of our most important filmmakers who has been more overlooked than one might expect. Further study of Deren from a distinct point of view, as Keller offers, is a vital contribution." - Bill Nichols, film critic and editor of Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde

O autorze

Sarah Keller is assistant professor of English and cinema studies at Colby College. She is coeditor, with Jason Paul, of Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations.