Maya cinema interior pictures4/24/2023 ![]() Though she makes indelible contributions to her field, sustained mainstream recognition eludes her. Her conviction is ravenous her temperament volatile in the way that cool, clear liquid can ignite a lethal fire. ![]() The arc of the story is this: a woman seeks to inhabit the world of the living and the dead. Deren’s legendary status as one of the most daring filmmakers and elusive minds of the 20th-century avant-garde prevails - who wouldn’t want to crawl inside? Deren’s films contain so much slumbering anoesis that you wonder by what miracle a mortal biographer managed to straighten any of it out at all. At times, this obligatory inheritance is muddying, but for the most part, it isn’t a problem. A consequence of his version, however - a transgression of traditional biography - is that the author’s burden (accurate reportage) becomes the reader’s burden (assessment of veracity). The “imaginative” element in Maya Deren: Choreographed for Camera furnishes some of the book’s most compelling passages. In his afterword, Durant - who writes about photography for Art in America, Aperture, Foam, and Photograph, among others - outlines his repeated frustrations, loss of nerve, and eventual reclamation of the biographical project: “I freed myself from the burden of writing the definitive chronicle of Deren’s life, and instead composed my version, based on research and scholarship, but open to the imaginative.” Though there can be no quibbling about the finitude of this event, Durant manages, through his immersive, speculative prose, to introduce to his readers the notion of spatiotemporal dislocation that characterizes Deren’s mythical, noirish cinema. In the early hours of Friday, October 13, Deren experienced a second hemorrhage, fell into a coma, and never awoke. The light is bright but diffused, it seems to come from all directions. She walks with a cat over her shoulder, she recognizes that it is Ghede. She felt herself blinking in and out of the hospital room, the dim fluorescent light above her bed, the window black with night weakly reflected her mother’s figure, the warmth of her mother’s hand. Maya held onto her mother’s voice as long as she could. He writes from within Maya Deren’s unconscious as she lay motionless in Saint Albans Naval Hospital in Queens: But then, the author performs a near-miraculous feat. We assume that the dialogue is factual, substantiated in a record, a letter, a journal. Long minutes passed in silence, Deren called out, “Momchka, save me.” “On the Polish border, you were five years old, at night, lost in the snow, I called and called but I had to whisper because we were escaping.” ![]() “Elinka, do you remember being lost in the snow?” TOWARDS THE END of his new biography of Maya Deren, Mark Alice Durant reproduces an exchange between Deren and her mother that seemingly transpired hours before Deren’s death in New York from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44:
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