Maya Deren on 16 mm

The program naturally begins with Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), the fourteen-minute film Deren made with her second husband, Alexander Hammid, and which Dave Kehr once neatly summed up in the New York Times as “a languorous study of a young woman (Deren, always her own favorite subject) contemplating images of death and sexuality.” Deren “certainly didn’t invent experimental cinema, nor introduce it in the U.S.,” wrote the New Yorker’s Richard Brody last fall, “but, with this short silent film, Deren became the genre’s Orson Welles.” She also became “its face: a still of her, at a window in Meshes, is, to this day, the prime iconic image of American experimental filmmaking, the single-frame synecdoche for the entire category.”

Brody was reviewing Maya Deren: Choreographed for Camera, the book Mark Alice Durant spent twenty years researching and writing. Durant will be in San Francisco on Sunday when the Cinematheque screens Meshes, At Land (1944), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)—also from 16 mm prints. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of 16 mm, and in April, Devika Girish noted in the NYT that, for cinematographer Ed Lachman, the gauge “transcends nostalgia. It comes down to cinema’s status as an art, meant to stylize rather than simply reproduce reality. He likened film to painting, and grain to brushstrokes. ‘The grain changes in each frame with exposure,’ he said. ‘It’s like breathing, almost like an anthropomorphic quality.’”

In San Francisco, Durant will read excerpts from his book, which Cinematheque programmer Steve Polta calls “an engrossingly impressionistic biography of the enigmatic artist, discussing at length her passions for filmmaking and dance and her deep personal experience with the spirituality and ritual of Haitian Vodou.” Earlier this year in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ella Kemp wrote that Durant conveys “the blistering image of a woman who tenderly administered the brutal passage between sleep and waking, poetry and cinema, life and the performance of it.”

Writing about Durant’s book for the Heavy Feather Review in March, Peter Valente pulled a quote from Anaïs Nin, one of the many writers and artists who first saw Deren’s work at the filmmaker’s Greenwich Village apartment, where she threw legendary parties. “Truly unconscious dream material, better in some ways than the early surrealist movies because there are no artificial effects,” wrote Nin. “I see the influence of Cocteau, except that she will not resort to any symbolism or artifice to present the dream. The dream resembles realism.”