Research Paper
Maya Deren – At Land

Maya Deren was an experimental filmmaker who was engaged in many additional artistic spheres, including music, dance and poetry, and which helped her to create six films that are well-known in the world of Avant-Garde cinema. She produced her first work, Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943 together with her husband Alexander Hammid, and a year later she completed her second work At Land. These two films placed the beginning of her career as a filmmaker and classified her as a pioneer of the modern and aesthetic American film. As a graduate student in English literature and Symbolist poetry from Smith College, she was able to transform her verbal knowledge about the emblematic value of objects and rituals to a visual format. Therefore, many of her ideas were influenced by studying T.S. Eliot’s poetry and his intention for objective mutual relationship. However, after the release of her first film, she began to work more precisely and be very careful in her choice of images and places in order for her works, starting with At Land to look original and abstract. She wanted to isolate her work from the idea of obvious symbolism and therefore, make the spectator more deeply involved in the process of decoding the scenes. As Millsapps states, “Deren knew the difference between images and symbols, and discusses this in her thesis: ‘…For the Symbolist, the image is a point of departure for mysterious distances, whereas the Imagist departure is limited to the vision behind the word or image” (25). Maya Deren’s second film - At Land, is an example of art work which is concerned with the exposure of the interior experiences of an individual and the idea of his continuous identities. The loose narrative structure of the film emphasizes the aesthetic relationship between time, moving body and space, and also, underlines the abstract character of Greenberg’s vision of Avant-Garde, high level of art and its abstraction. Deren’s modernist and experimental techniques allow the viewers to use their imagination and look beneath the reality surface, so they can shift themselves into a dream-like atmosphere in which two worlds – natural and social, are harmonically emerging. The fifteen minute running time of the film in which Maya Deren plays the featured role represents the actual desire of the character to maintain her personal identity by starting a new dream-like life. The heroine is washed out from the sea, which is used by Daren as a symbol of new beginning and opportunities. She starts crawling and finds herself on a banquet table, surrounded with men and women, for whom Deren stays invisible. The protagonist, who is the main figure in the traditional trance film, uses this given power to move through the people and chase her ideals. Therefore, the heroine drags herself to the end of the table and finds a chess board which figures move by themselves. Deren uses the banquet hall and game as representation of the social world which she just has entered. This is a space in which, powerful and wealthy men have an ultimate power over the ordinary person and they control every happening event. She tries to take one of the figures, but accidently drops it and starts chasing it. Suddenly, Daren situates herself outside, surrounded by rocks, sand and trees. She starts walking on a path and meets a man who is constantly being replaced by another one. The heroine keeps going and enters a small house in which she goes from one room to another and suddenly notices another man, who is staring at her, but doesn’t say anything. Finally, Deren finds herself again on the beach and sees another chess game in progress between two women. She steals another chess figure and keeps running, giving the viewer the idea that she is going back to the sea, which was her departure point at the beginning of the film. The camera transfers the character slowly and continuously from one world to another, by showing Deren’s childish curiosity and concentrating viewers’ attention either on her eyes and hands, as the parts of the body that absorb new information, or her feet, to emphasize her separation from the previous scene. Deren highlights the power of moving body within time and space, and as Sitney states, “At Land has little to do with the inner world of the protagonist, it externalizes the hidden dynamics of the external world, and here the drama results from the activity of the external world. It is as if I had moved from a concern with the life of fish, to a concern with the sea which accounts for the character of the fish and its life” (26). The transition between the scenes of the film is driven by the discoveries of the heroine, not initially by her inner thoughts.
At land is a reflection of Deren’s interest of creation of new images of time and the energy, movement and dynamics between them. Similarly to Benjamin’s ideas, she understood the importance of mechanical reproduction of art and how sounds and videos make the work more enjoyable for the viewer. Therefore, as Butler believes, “In common with many modernist artists and art critics, she took the view that the task of the artist was to fulfill the unique potential of his or her medium. Since film as a medium was both modern and mechanical, she envisaged its vocation as the exploration of the phenomenological and philosophical consequences of technological modernity” (1). Deren illustrates the importance of the “camera eye” which can discover new horizons and bring together past, present and future, and therefore she shows why a person’s memories are so important for his creativity and imagination, likewise Benjamin, for whom, “… behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely, and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage” (13).
It seems that Deren’s film theory, emphasizing the importance of time and space, has been influenced by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who identifies cinema as a time-image, which he locates historically in the postwar period, and for whom, “The subordination of time to movement by montage is a precarious operation. On the one hand, time depends on movement, but through the intermediary of montage; it flows from montage, but as if subordinate to movement; but on the other hand, movement and montage are constantly in danger of breaking down to release a direct image of time” ( Butler 5,6). Deren wanted to keep the loose narrative scenes in At Land, so the viewer can appreciate the dream reality, and read the images as a hidden text. She was concerned with keeping the “artificial” form of art, and like Greenberg for whom a high level poet or artist should create “Art for art’s sake” and “pure poetry”, she claimed that her film is a deep-structured human experience within which, every “cultivated” spectator can identify himself. Deren preciously and originally shows the natural process of a person’s birth and his transition into the human, social word. She displays a whole lifetime in fifteen minutes, by emerging the image of the sea as a symbol of one world, with the land which she explorers with curiosity and passion, accomplish her mission of stealing the chess piece, leaves her foot prints on the sand and disappears in space and time.
Deren didn't miss the opportunity to incorporate her feminist ideology in the making of the film, and show the superiority of women over men. The idea of women’s power is highlighted in the film and represented by the multiplication of male figures and Deren’s moving body chasing the chess figure. By showing few male characters that might look different but act in similar way, Deren emphasizes on the weakness of the ever-changing men and stresses on women’s persistence and continuity in pursuing their goals and desires (Pramaggiore). In the scenario of the film, Deren chooses the queen chess piece, which she chases during her lifetime as a symbol of women’s power and status. After capturing the white queen, Daren looks happy and free, like she has just freed herself from the oppressive and unfair society. As Pramaggiore reasons, “The chess game may be a metaphor for the social positionality of males and females, of pawns and their superiors…chess pieces obey a rigid hierarchy that determines their relative mobility, power, and importance”(31). The queen which Deren identifies herself with, is a unique figure that can have great influence over the king, not only in the chess game, but also in the real world. By running down the shore, Deren shows her independence and triumph over the social game and her ability to go into the future and resolve new challenges. Maya Deren was a very influential and inspiring figure in the world of American Avant-Garde cinema. The aesthetic and deeply hinted images and scenes in her films create harmonically relationship between the reality and dream-life of her characters. Her second work, At Land captures this idea of unrelated worlds and the lifetime transition of a young, still childish girl into mature, powerful and smart women. Deren uses the concept of time, space and body movement to emphasize the evolution in female authority, continuity and success over the constantly changing and unreliable man.

Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, 1998. Web

Butler, Alison. “‘Motor-driven metaphysics’: movement, time and action in the films of Maya Deren” Oxford University Press, 2007. Print

Millsapps, Jan L. “Maya Deren, Imagist” Literature Film Quarterly. 1986, Vol. 14 Issue 1 p22, 10p, 2 Black and White Photographs. Print

Pramaggiore, Maria. “Performance and Persona in the U.S. Avant-Garde: The Case of Maya Deren” Cinema Journal 36, No.2, Winter 1997. Print

Sitney, P.Adams. Visionary Film; The American Avant-garde, 1943-2000. Oxford University Press, 2002. Print