Maya Deren: Incomplete Control
Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Ukrainian-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.
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Maya Deren: Incomplete Control
Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Ukrainian-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.
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Maya Deren: Incomplete Control

Maya Deren: Incomplete Control

by Sarah Keller
Maya Deren: Incomplete Control

Maya Deren: Incomplete Control

by Sarah Keller

Hardcover

$105.00 
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Overview

Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Ukrainian-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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231162203
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 12/09/2014
Series: Film and Culture Series
Pages: 296
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Unfinished Business
1. Done and Undone: Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch's Cradle
2. Toward Completion and Control: At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time
3. Haiti
4. Full Circle
Conclusion: In Completing a Thought
Notes
Index
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