Abstract
Maya Deren was one of a handful of female filmmakers in the modern era who transformed cinematography through the lens of dance. Motion from shot to shot in her films had a clear choreographic impulse that redefined the camera’s relation to moving bodies on film. She declared herself an Imagist, divorcing her work from more symbolic precedents. Space and time are disordered in her films to disturb the very basis of meaning. This juxtaposition of incongruent images multiplies meaning in a dreamscape fashion. Deren’s camerawork caresses the bodies and landscapes it touches on, allowing her camera lens to serve as a mechanism for the unconscious. Her films were truly cinedances or choreocinematic endeavors in which the dance and the camera collaborated as equal partners.
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Arendell, T.D. (2016). Maya Deren: Leaping Across Frames and Framing Leaps. In: Arendell, T., Barnes, R. (eds) Dance’s Duet with the Camera. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59610-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59610-9_11
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59609-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59610-9
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