Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska, Ukrainian: Елеоно́ра Деренко́вська; April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961) was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important supporter of the liberal in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was then a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.
The put it on of film, Deren believed, was to Make an experience. She amass her finishing in dance and choreography, ethnography, the African sparkle religion of Haitian Vodou, symbolist poetry and gestalt psychology (student of Kurt Koffka) in a series of perceptual, black-and-white terse films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump-cutting, superimposition, slow-motion, and new camera techniques to her advantage, Deren abandoned customary notions of physical proclaim and time, in deliberately planned films later specific conceptual aims.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), her collaboration past Alexander Hammid, has been one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema history. She went upon to make several films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with support from lonely one other person, Hella Heyman, her camerawoman.
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