Maya Deren and Germaine Dulac: Activists of the Avant-Garde
In "The Woman as Film-Director," Harry Alan Potamkin writes:
I have been asked a number of times, "Can a woman become a film-director?" My answer takes two forms. First, I make the obvious retort that women are in demand as players, as scenario writers, and as film editors. Then I go on to say how few women have ever created films themselves. (American Cinematographer, XII, January, 1932, p. 10)
After a brief enumeration of women directors, Potamkin concentrates on Germaine Dulac, identified with both the commercial and the avant-garde film. If there have been few women directors in commercial cinema, proportionately there have been and still are fewer women working within the avant-garde. Along with Germaine Dulac, one can cite Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Shirley Clarke, Storm de Hirsch, Joyce Wieland and Gunvor Nelson. Dulac and Deren can be singled out for they are important in the history of film not solely for their directing but also and perhaps equally for their roles as film activists—propagandists for the film as a serious art form.
Deren, whose name is familiar, is identified with the American avant-garde of the '40's. She is acclaimed as important; yet, seldom is the real significance of her role as an activist in this avant-garde explained. Her film career began in 1943 at the age of 26 when she made her first work in conjunction with her husband, filmmaker, Alexander Hammid. From 1943 until her sudden death in 1961 at the age of forty-four, Deren completed six films: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1944), At Land (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), Meditation on Violence (1948), and The Very Eye of Night (1955). If Deren was influential through her filmmaking it was only so because she began the process of establishing, almost single-handedly, a milieu for the avant-garde film in this country—ways and means by which her work could be seen, ways and means taken up in turn by other artists.
In 1943, 16mm was still considered a substandard or inferior film gauge suitable only for educational, documentary and amateur work. But Deren seized upon the notion of "amateur" and happily applied it in its original meaning to herself and her work. She wrote later in 1959, in an article entitled "Amateur Versus Professional": "The very classification 'amateur' has an apologetic ring. But that very word—from the Latin 'amateur'—'lover' means one who does something for the love of the thing rather than for economic reasons or necessity." (Reprinted in Film Culture, No. 39, Winter, 1965, p. 45) The avant-garde in Europe and America in the '20's had, of course, worked in 35mm. There may have been in this country in the '30's, a few filmmakers who at one time or another worked in 16mm; but, Deren served to legitimatize it as a film gauge in which one could work artistically, analogous to the way in which Stan Brakhage, who started working with 8mm in 1964, has begun to legitimatize its artistic use. Others in the '40s, such as Sidney Peterson, Willard Maas, James Broughton and Kenneth Anger, then followed her example; and, today the American avant-garde is principally identified with 16mm.
At the time that Deren began there were no channels of distribution, let alone exhibition, for new avant-garde work. In 1945, having completed three films, she sent out leaflets to colleges, universities, art schools and museums around the country, advertising her work. She began renting her films, using her home as a distribution base. Often she would accompany her showings with a lecture. The following year Deren set up what is credited as the first showings in a public theatre in the U.S. of privately made 16mm film. These two Provincetown Playhouse screenings of her work even prompted reviews in major publications, including one by James Agee in The Nation. Thus she paved the way for Frank Stauffacher's avant-garde "Art in Cinema" series which began in 1947 at the San Francisco Museum of Art and for Amos Vogel's "Cinema 16" begun the same year, followed up three years later by his distribution center of the same name which finally provided a professional rental outlet for avant-garde work.
But Deren did not stop with showing and promoting her work. She had, in 1946, shared the distinction with the Whitney brothers of receiving the first Guggenheim Fellowships ever awarded for creative filmmaking; she had attempted a renewal of her grant the following year but was unsuccessful. In 1954, based on her years of experience with the difficulties of obtaining grants and raising money in order to pursue independent filmmaking, she established the Creative Film Foundation which continued until two years after her death. Among those awarded grants that first year were Shirley Clarke and Stan Brakhage. As a writer, Deren spoke frequently and at length of her own work, but also about the art of the independent film in general. Very much of a dogmatist and polemicist, Deren rigidly maintained her ideas about the art of the personal film, persuading many to her camp.
She had begun her career at a time when there was negligible interest in film as an art form in this country and she provided through her active dedication an example, a hope to others for the possibilities of independent filmmaking. To call Maya Deren "Mother of the Underground Film," as Sheldon Renan does in An Introduction to the American Underground Film, characterizes the debt which American avant-garde filmmakers since the forties continue to owe to her.
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