Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (Film and Culture Series) - Softcover

Keller, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231162219 ISBN 13: 9780231162210

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a dream-like experiment with time and symbol, looped narrative and provocative imagery, setting the stage for the twentieth-century's groundbreaking aesthetic movements and films.

Maya Deren assesses both the filmmaker's completed work and her numerous unfinished projects, arguing Deren's overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Combining the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film, Deren created a wholly original experience for film audiences that disrupted the subjectivity of cinema, its standards of continuity, and its dubious facility with promoting categories of realism. This critical retrospective reflects on the development of Deren's career and the productive tensions she initiated that continue to energize film.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Keller is assistant professor of Art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. She is coeditor, with Jason Paul, of Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations.

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231162219
• ISBN 13: 9780231162210
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296