14599: Lemieux: Documentary of lady with a Haitian tie--NYT (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>



January 24, 2003
Reflections of an Independent Artist
By DAVE KEHR


s the Sundance Film Festival continues to unwind in Utah,
"In the Mirror of Maya Deren" arrives as an especially
timely reminder that the phrase "independent film" used to
refer to something other than dysfunctional family dramas
featuring television stars on seasonal hiatus.

The phrase used to mean (and still does in the vicinity of
the venerable Anthology Film Archives in the East Village)
films made in active protest against the Hollywood
narrative tradition. These short, experimental films,
usually in black-and-white and much of the time presented
in pristine silence, were primarily made in the bohemian
enclaves of both coasts — in San Francisco and Greenwich
Village.

Maya Deren (1917-1961) was an archetypical Village bohemian
who lived and worked on Morton Street through most of her
career. Born in Ukraine and named Eleanora Derenkowsky, she
emigrated with her parents, a psychiatrist and an artist,
to the United States when she was 5.

A small, extraordinarily beautiful woman with cheekbones
that would have made Ava Gardner envious, she became a
dancer, performing with Katherine Dunham's company and
others. During a trip to Hollywood with the Dunham company
in 1943, she met the Czech émigré artist Alexander Hammid,
and together they made the highly influential "Meshes of
the Afternoon," a languorous study of a young woman (Deren,
always her own favorite subject) contemplating images of
death and sexuality.

"In the Mirror of Maya Deren," made for Austrian television
by the Czech documentarian Martina Kudlacek, tells Deren's
story with rigor, respect and great resourcefulness. The
portrait is a particularly vivid one, not least because so
many of Deren's friends and colleagues are still around to
tell their stories. Ms. Kudlacek's film opens with a
sequence set at Anthology (where, appropriately enough, her
film opens today), which finds the archives' genial
director, Jonas Mekas, rummaging through racks of film cans
to come up with half a dozen old coffee tins, each
containing unseen outtakes from Deren's work.

Mr. Mekas joins several other veterans of the New York
independent scene — including Amos Vogel, the founder of
the influential film society Cinema 16, and Judith Malina
of the Living Theater — in fleshing out the details of
Deren's life and work. But the film's most compelling voice
belongs to Deren herself, who is heard describing her work
through wire recordings (a technology that preceded tape,
in which sounds were recorded on magnetized steel wire) of
her lectures.

In 1947, Deren became the first filmmaker to win a
Guggenheim fellowship and used her grant money to travel to
Haiti, where she became deeply involved with the religion
of voudon (popularly known as voodoo). Ms. Kudlacek's film
becomes somewhat cloudy at this point, as does Deren's
work: although she shot 18,000 feet of 16-millimeter film
in Haiti, she never shaped it into a film, presenting her
researches instead as the book "Divine Horsemen: The Living
Gods of Haiti."

Though she continued to work through the 1950's, teaching,
lecturing and nurturing young filmmakers like Stan
Brakhage, she released only one more film, "The Very Eye of
Night" in 1958. Her death at 44 has been ascribed to a
voudon curse but seems to have been caused by the
amphetamines she came to rely on when she and her young
lover, Teiji Ito, were unable to afford regular meals.

Since then, Deren has become a feminist art icon, a symbol
of struggle and repression to set alongside Frida Kahlo in
the world of painting. But Ms. Kudlacek's film is
refreshingly free of postmodernist theorizing and
gender-study cant. Rather than a feminist martyr, her film
presents an artist with a rich body of work, one who still
fascinates and continues to cast a wide influence.

IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN

Written and directed by Martina Kudlacek; director of
photography, Wolfgang Lehner; edited by Henry Hills; music
by John Zorn; produced by Johannes Rosenberger and
Constantin Wulff for Navigator Film; released by Zeitgeist
Films. At the Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, at
Second Street, East Village. Running time: 103 minutes.
This film is not rated.

WITH: Miriam Arsham, Stan Brakhage, Chao-Li Chi, Rita
Christiani, Jean-Léon Destiné, Katherine Dunham, Graeme
Ferguson, Alexander Hammid, Judith Malina, Jonas Mekas,
Martha Gabriel, André Pierre, Amos Vogel and Marcia Vogel.




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