Maya Deren is a post-mortem biographer’s dream subject. Not only did the bohemian dancer, poet, photographer and filmmaker cross paths with an international who’s who of avant-garde artists, musicians and filmmakers before and after World War II, but she was also an inveterate letter writer. , a self-documenter, and pack rat, whose archive features abundant and personal material. A new biography of Mark Alice Durant, Maya Deren: choreographed for the camera (Saint Lucy Books, 2022) not only captures the details of Deren’s tragically brief and deeply influential life, but does so with a kind of first-person familiarity and detail that brings to life a figure captured in the age of black and white movie. focus.
Born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1917, Deren emigrated to the United States with her family, escaping the encroaching politics that challenged both her Jewish ancestry and her family’s academic pedigree. Although she was only 44 in 1961, when she suddenly suffered a brain hemorrhage, Deren found herself more in the course of her life than most people with twice her number of years. – three marriages, a series of salon hostesses in mid-mid-century art and culture, and a legacy as a leading figure in promoting avant-garde American cinema.
She was also, as Durant’s biography makes clear, a very human subject, prone to emotionality, financial hardship and the challenges faced by all of those with an artistic and ambitious temperament – but above all a woman who made her way a path in a scene dominated by great men. Her relationships and collaborations with Katherine Dunham, John Cage, Anaïs Nin, Marcel Duchamp, and influential Czech filmmaker Alexandr “Sasha” Hackenschmied (her second husband), earned her a place at the table of burgeoning American art culture. – but her talent, her unwavering photographic eye and her unfettered appetite for life and ideas have cemented her place as a champion and influencer of culture.
Written in short chronological entries, but also appearing as a kind of index for the network of influential figures in Deren’s circles, Durant resists getting bogged down in analyzing Deren’s work, preferring instead to present a picture of his life. and human struggles.
“There’s so much scholarship on Deren’s films and images,” Durant said. Hyperallergic. “But there was no biography of Maya Deren [for a general audience.]“It took Durant two decades of non-contiguous research and an abiding love of Deren’s work and character to bring his ideas for such a biography to fruition. Between direct quotes from interviews, diaries and letters, and textured scenes of near-unbelievable encounters with some of the era’s most celebrated designers, Durant weaves in scenes from Deren’s life with an inner voice that never seems no less real to make small leaps of imagination. .
“[I had] this kind of vertical versus horizontal strategy, which is a concept or an approach that [Deren] had about storytelling – exposition versus poetics, and how she wrote a bit about that in her graduation thesis, but also applied it to her approach to filmmaking,” Durant said. “And so I decided to use that approach for storytelling.”
Maya Deren: choreographed for the camera by Mark Alice Durant (2022) is published by Saint Lucy Books and is available from the publisher and online retailers.
