American Avant Garde Films of the 1940s-50s: Maya Deren

Thu 17 Dec, 6.30 pm
Goethe

After Man with a Movie Camera (Soviet Union, 1929) and a series of Western European Avant Garde films of the 1920s and 30s (Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Fernand Ledger), DOCLAB is introducing Maya Deren (1917-1961), an important American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s.

Deren – also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer – was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema, highlighting personal, experimental, underground film. Her first film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) – among films to be screened – is considered to be one of the first important American experimental films. It provided a model for self-financed 16 mm production and distribution, as well as established an aesthetic model of what experimental cinema could do.

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