Maya Deren Collection

Maya Deren is one of the most important American experimental filmmakers of
all time and Kino Classics and Re:Voir are proud to present new 2K restorations
of her essential work. Along with being a filmmaker, Deren was a choreographer,
dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer and photographer, and she brings all of
these disciplines together in her dreamlike and ecstatic films. Her most famous
and influential is Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), co-directed with Alexander
Hammid, which depicts a surrealist slippage in reality as a woman’s home
becomes a shifting landscape of beauty and menace. At Land (1944) is another
psychogeographical journey where Deren washes up on a beach and encounters
a multiplicity of selves.
Also included are four 1940s dance films (A Study in Choreography for Camera,
Ritual in Transfigured Time, Meditation on Violence, and The Very Eye of Night)
in which, as Deren wrote, “I have attempted to place a dancer in limitless,
cinemato-graphic space.” She and Hammid put felines through a similarly
intimate process in The Private Life of a Cat (1947), which foresaw the future
of cat videos. A different exploration of movement occurs in Divine Horsemen
(1947-1951, 1979), a remarkable hour-long montage of footage that Deren shot
of Haitian Voodoo ceremonies. Stan Brakhage called Maya Deren “the mother of
us all.” The history of avant-garde film is unthinkable without her.