Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film
by Maya Deren
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Book Summary Information
Author: Maya DerenEditor: Bruce R. McPherson
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-01-03
ISBN: 0929701658
Number of pages: 261
Publisher: Documentext
Book Reviews of Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film
Book Review: Essential Film Art
Summary: 5 Stars
To place the words "essential" and "Deren" in the same title, much less the same sentence, is quite ironic, for the essence of a thing was what most interested poet, dancer, and independent film-maker, Maya Deren. Editor Bruce McPherson has culled some of her previously published writings for Essential Deren.
Deren, who was greatly concerned with "the distilled experimental emotion of an incident," and who felt that it was "more universal and timeless than the incident itself," was convinced that the film camera was the perfect medium to capture such a distillation. Her writings spend a good deal of time criticizing the general cinema of her day (most of the material here was published in the 1940's) because mass-market films, in her opinion, did not fully utilize the camera; she felt that cinema as an art form had scarcely been touched. She describes the camera as if it were alive, fraught with possibilities: "The complexity of the camera creates, at times, the illusion of being almost itself a living intelligence which can inspire its manipulation on the explorative and creative level simultaneously." Recording fiction (general cinema) and reality (documentary) did not employ the camera's almost infinite possibilities and to ignore this potential, according to Deren, "constitute[d] a gross, if not criminal aesthetic negligence . . ."
The camera, however, was not to create a series of disparate, unrelated images; the film-maker was an artist and everything created by the camera needed to "serve the original intent and idea of the film-maker: "
Extending from theory to mechanics (including very practical chapters on lenses, tripods and frames), Essential Deren is an inspiring read for anyone interested in independent film-making.
Summary of Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film
Until now, Maya Deren's essays on the art and craft of filmmaking have not been available in a comprehensive volume equally handy for students, film enthusiasts, and scholars. Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film contains all of Deren's essays on her own films as well as more general essays on film theory, the relation of film to dance, various technical aspects of film production, the distinction between amateur and professional filmmaking, and the famous 1946 chapbook titled "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film," which has been reset here for the first time. There are hard-to-find articles written for magazines and art journals, as well as lectures, Q&A sessions, program notes, and manifestoes. This book will be particularly welcomed by the large audience that saw Martina Kudlacek's documentary, "In the Mirror of Maya Deren," during its theatrical release in the U.S. and Europe in 2002. The importance of Maya Deren's films and writings is further evidenced by the American Film Institute having named its highest award for independent filmmaking the "Maya Deren."Movies Books
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