Drinking from the Priestess, Maya Deren.

I still remember the unsettling feeling in my stomach when first watching Ashes of the Afternoon. There was something so strangely familiar, so distantly friendly, so seductively frightening about that woman, those encounters, that fear, that split, the cacophony of dis-conciliation between her, the woman, the lover, the wife, the saint, the ephemeral and the real.

Maya, the dancer, the poet, the thinker, the fighter, the priestess, the filmmaker, the woman. In her work there is no distinction from what she lives and experiences to what she represents. She is, and lives her work. Ashes of the Afternoon is filmed upon the breezes of a sunny afternoon in Mullholland Drive, Hollywood (yes, the David Lynch film is an homage, a tribute to the latter). The film is staged inside her home with the help of her husband Alexander Hammid (who some claim is responsible for the visual finesse of the film, which is absolutely irrelevant in the case of Maya).

Herein, Maya Deren is a fountain. From her work and her life, I drink the liquid of that which is silent, symbolic, present, ritualistic and intrinsically feminine. Further, Deren wrote on and of her practice, the practice of cinema and other ideas of art, form and film. Herein, the method of using your practice as a mirror to your ideas and vice-versa is exactly what I am interested in for this research project. Some may call it phenomenological research, some essayist research, some writing as a mode of research, whatever the vernacular entails, it is this kinds of research practices that will inform, shape and sculpture my project.

Maya Deren Bibliography: (to find, buy and intoxicate)

Maya Deren, “Notes, Essays, Letters”, Film Culture, 39, 1965

The Making of Movies Burglers and Trigger, Village Voice / Jun 6 / Film Culture 39 (Winter 65)

Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality

Poetry and the Film

Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti

An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film

* Deren’s major theoretical essay that introduced the basic structure of her ideas

An analysis of her six completed films and work in progress are approached through a ‘genetic tracing’ of shooting scripts, releases and historical contexualizations. Her Work with choreocinema and ritual are examined as an epistemological break in film form within the avant garde. “

Meshes of the Afternoon Maya Deren (1943).

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