Bodies in Trouble: Maya Deren
by Jackson
This profile of Maya Deren is the first of a series of artist mini-biographies in the lead up to Bodies in Trouble, the summer 2010 photography exhibition at Galerie SAW Gallery.
Maya Deren was an American avant-garde film maker. The Museum of Modern Art describes Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) as “one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. Indeed, ripples of Deren’s influence can be seen throughout Western visual culture, such as the mirror-face specters in Janelle Monae’s Tightrope (which I wrote about here). I watched Deren’s films in first year cinema studies, as I am sure many have. It’s worth revisiting.
“A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the “trance film,” in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.”
from the MoMA entry for Meshes of the Afternoon.
Bodies in Trouble includes a never-before-seen restored photographic panel (circa 1954) by Maya Deren. Bodies in Trouble opens Thursday July 22nd, 2010 at SAW Gallery in Ottawa.