Maya Deren Experimental Films

Director: Maya Deren

April 17, 2008
Little Theatre, National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai

Maya Deren was a brilliant filmmaker and theorist whose films and writings have nevertheless paled beside the even larger legend surrounding her life and death. From the early 1940’s until her sudden (and some would say supernaturally-caused) death in 1961, Maya Deren both evoked and exemplified the American avant-garde film movement virtually by herself – as filmmaker, distributor, lecturer, theorist and promoter — all in one fiery personality. She worked completely outside the commercial film industry and made her own inner experience the center of her films. All the arts lacked subsidies in the forties, but film was one of the poorest. Charismatic and determined, Deren worked effectively for herself and her peers and established facilities and funding for the independent film movement which subsequently grew up in America.

Six collected shorts of Maya Deren made between 1943 and 1959, that are intensely personal, symbolic and surreal, forms this screening.