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Originally Published:20060301.
ESSENTIAL DEREN: COLLECTED WRITINGS ON FILM BY MAYA DEREN edited by Bruce R. McPherson. McPherson & Company/261 pp./$18.00(sb).
To place the words "essential" and "Deren" in the same title, much less the same sentence, is quite ironic. Capturing the essence of something was what most interested poet, dancer, and independent filmmaker Maya Deren. Editor Brucc R. McPherson has culled sonic of Deren's previously published writings for Essential Deren.
Deren, who was greatly concerned with "the distilled experimental emotion of an incident," felt that it was "more universal and timeless than the incident itself" (23) and 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 in the book was published in the 1940s), 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" (102). 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" (103).
To Deren, the camera was not meant to create a scries of disparate, unrelated images; the filmmaker was an artist and everything created by the camera needed to "serve the original intent and idea of the film-maker" (138).
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 filmmaking.
KATHRYN J. ATWOOD's writings have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including The Aurora Review, Wild Violet, Void Magazine, Monsters and Critics, Book Pleasures and War, Literature, and the Arts
(C) 2006 Afterimage. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
