American Season

The warmer, longer days of summer are cradling.




































































all images via the Amazing flickr of superbomba, a found photo heaven

Maya Deren

Avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren lead an amazing and fascinating life. A true genius and renaissance woman, she paved an important path for all women in the arts and for the future use of film as a means of artistic expression. Her silent black & white experimental shorts of the early 1940s and 1950s are dreamily choreographed with layers of surreal undertones, mysterious movements and hallucinatory sequences; strange little snapshots that are dark and beautiful.

Maya herself appears as the main role in most of her films (which she also wrote, directed, and edited), and she floats through all of them with the poise of the skilled dancer she was - before turning her main focus on filmmaking, she had been a member in a troupe that traveled and performed from New York City on west to Los Angeles. In the midst of her work, Maya received a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Creative Work in Motion Pictures," a grant which enabled her to finance travel to Haiti and pursue her interest in voodoo and Haitian dance. She became completely engulfed in Haitian culture and not only filmed hours of rituals, but adopted the religion for herself, and in 1953 published a book on the subject, titled Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti. Interestingly, how ever non-scientific it may be, there are still many who feel it was her relationship to the dark sides of voodoo that caused her sudden death at the age of 44.

Major themes of identity, reflection and vision were extremely significant for Maya throughout her life and appear in all her work, and in relationship to them, a perfectly titled documentary about her, In the Mirror of Maya Deren, provides some interesting insights into her passions and personality: a fiery, extremely intellectual and self-assured free-spirit, bent on exploring and expressing exactly what she wanted.






















Maya with second husband Sasha Hammid, with whom she collaborated on her 1943 film Meshes in the Afternoon










Maya with her third husband Teiji Ito, a Japanese drummer 18 years her junior. Teiji composed the haunting music that would later provide a soundtrack to Meshes, and was married to Maya at the time of her death. He scattered her ashes from atop Mount Fuji, and many years later would help edit footage from her voodoo documentation.