Happy birthday, Maya Deren! Here are some quotes from the filmmaker:
“Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.”
“Each film was built as a chamber and became a corridor, like a chain reaction.”
“The labor to achieve inspired, intelligent form is a single continuity, a work in progress which is eventually interrupted when the dynamic consciousness which it reflects ceases. From time to time one may pause to give integrated shape to a stage of one’s progress, in order to best pursue it further. And so these films have each been brought to an end, in order to be better abandoned.”
“And, looking back, it is clear that the direction was away from a concern with the way things feel and towards a concern with the way things are; away from personal psychology towards nerveless metaphysics. I mean metaphysics in the large sense […] not as mysticism but beyond the physical in the way that a principle is an abstraction, beyond any particulars in which it is manifest.”
“The universe was once conceived as the passive stage upon which the dramatic conflict of human wills was enacted and resolved. Today man has discovered that that which seemed simple and stable is, instead, complex and volatile; his own inventions have put into motion new forces, toward which he has yet to invent a new relationship. Unlike Ulysses, he can no longer travel over a universe stable in space and time to find adventures; nor can he solve intimate antagonisms with an adversary sportingly suitable in stature. Rather, each individual is the center of a personal vortex; and the aggressive variety and enormity of the adventures which swirl about and confront him are unified only by his personal identity. […] The integrity of the individual identity is counterpointed to the volatile character of a relativistic universe.”
“When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it. Because you think that somewhere between sentences and words, the secret will slip out. I am trying to give you that secret; it isn’t a secret at all, but it is building solidly, not using secrets. I had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension; that film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite; the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than a single life. My films were built on an incline, an increase in intensity. I hoped to make a form which was infinite, the changingness of things. I thought I would want to find a total form which conveyed that sense [….].
“Meshes of the Afternoon is my point of departure. I am not ashamed of it, for I think that, as a film, it stands up very well. From the point of view of my own development, I cannot help but be gently proud that that first film—that point of departure—had such relatively solid footing. This is due to two major facts: first, to the fact that I had been a poet up until then, and the reason that I had not been a very good poet was because actually my mind worked in images which I had been trying to translate or describe in words; therefore, when I undertook cinema, I was relieved of the false step of translating image into words, and could work directly so that it was not like discovering a new medium so much as finally coming home into a world whose vocabulary, syntax, grammar, was my mother tongue; which I understood and thought it, but, like a mute, had never spoken.”
“This principle—that the dynamic of movement in film is stronger than anything else—than any changes of matter […] that movement, or energy is more important, or powerful, than space or matter—that, in fact, it creates matter—seemed to me to be marvelous, like an illumination, that I wanted to just stop and celebrate that wonder, just by itself […].”
“This most primitive, this most instinctive of all gestures: to make it move to make it live. So I had always been doing with my camera… nudging an ever-increasing area of the world, making it move, animating it, making it live […]. The love of life itself […] seems to me larger than the loving attention to a life. But, of course, each contains the other, and, perhaps, I have not so much traveled off in a direction as moved in a slow spiral around some central essence, seeing it first from below, and now, finally, from above.”
Maya Deren’s “A Statement of Principles”:
My films are for everyone.
I include myself, for I believe that I am a part of, not apart from humanity; that nothing I may feel, think, perceive, experience, despise, desire, or despair of is really unknowable to any other human.
I speak of human as a principle, not in the singular nor in the plural.
I reject the accountant mentality which could dismember such a complete miracle in order to apply to it the simple arithmetic of statistics—which would reduce this principle to parts, to power pluralities and status singularities, as if human were an animal or a machine whose meaning was either a function of human’s size and number—or as if human were a collector’s item prized for its singular rarity—I reject also that inversion of democracy which is detachment, that detachment which is expressed in the formula of equal but separate opinions—the vicious snobbery which tolerates and even welcomes the distinctions and divisions of differences, the superficial equality which stalemates and arrests the discovery and development of unity.
I believe that, in every person, there is an area which speaks and hears in the poetic idiom…something in every person which can still sing in the desert when the throat is almost too dry for speaking.
To insist on this capacity in all people, to address my films to this—that, to me, is the true democracy…
I feel that no one has the right to deny this within themselves, nor does anyone have the right to accept such self-debasement in another under the guise of democratic privilege.
My films might be called metaphysical, referring to their thematic content. It has required millenniums of torturous evolution for nature to produce the intricate miracle which is human’s mind. It is this which distinguishes human from all other living creatures, for human not only reacts to matter but can mediate upon its meaning. This metaphysical action of the mind has as much reality and importance as the material and physical activities of human body. My films are concerned with meanings—ideas and concepts—not with matter.
My films might be called poetic, referring to the attitude towards these meanings. If philosophy is concerned with understanding the meaning of reality, then poetry—and art in general—is a celebration, a singing of values and meanings. I refer also to the structure of the films—a logic of ideas and qualities, rather than causes and events.
My films might be called choreographic, referring to the design and stylization of movement which confers ritual dimension upon functional motion—just as simple speech is made into song when affirmation of intensification on a higher level is intended.
My films might be called experimental, referring to the use of the medium itself. In these films, the camera is not an observant, recording eye in the customary fashion. The full dynamics and expressive potentials of the total medium are ardently dedicated to creating the most accurate metaphor for the meaning.
In setting out to communicate principles, rather than to relay particulars, and in creating a metaphor that is true to the idea rather than to the history of experience of any one of several individuals, I am addressing myself not to any particular group but to a special area and definite faculty in every person—to that part of us which creates myths, invents divinities, and ponders, for no practical purpose whatsoever, on the nature of things.
But humans have many aspects—people are many-faceted beings—not monotonous, one-dimensional creatures. They have many possibilities, many truths. The question is not, or should not be, whether a person is tough or tender, but which truth is important at any given time.
This afternoon, in the supermarket, the important truth was the practical one; in the subway the important truth was, perhaps, toughness; while later, with the children, it was tenderness.
Tonight the important truth is the poetic one.
This is an area where few people spend much time, and in which no one can spend all of their time. But it is this, which is the area of art, which makes us human, and without which, we are, at best, intelligent beasts.
I am not greedy. I do not seek to possess the major portion of your days.
I am content if, on those rare occasions whose truth can be stated only by poetry, you will, perhaps, recall an image, even only the aura of my films.
And what more could I possibly ask, as an artist, than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume, sometimes, the forms of my images.
