Bowerbird is pleased to present a special screening of In The Mirror of Maya Deren at The Rotunda.

“More than anything else, cinema consists of the eye for the magic—that which perceives and reveals the marvelous in whatsoever it looks upon.” –Maya Deren

With In The Mirror of Maya Deren, documentary filmmaker Martina Kudlacek has fashioned not only a fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking and influential artist, but a pitch-perfect introduction to her strikingly beautiful and poetic body of work. Crowned “Fellini and Bergman wrapped in one gloriously possessed body” by the L.A. Weekly, Maya Deren (née Eleanora Derenkovskaya) is arguably the most important and innovative avant-garde filmmaker in the history of American cinema. Using locations from the Hollywood hills to Haiti, Deren made such mesmerizing films as At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time, and her masterpiece, Meshes of the Afternoon, which won a prestigious international experimental filmmaking prize at the 1947 Cannes Film Festival. Starting with excerpts from these films, In The Mirror of Maya Deren seamlessly and effectively interweaves archival footage with observances from acolytes and contemporaries such as filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, dance pioneer Katherine Dunham, and Living Theater founder Judith Malina. With an original score by experimental composer John Zorn.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

One of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s, Maya Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer.

The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving. She combined her interests in dance, Haitian culture and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques, Deren created continued motion through discontinued space. She abandoned the established notions of physical space and time turning her vision into a stream of consciousness.

Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). She continued to make several more films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.

John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn’s recorded output is prolific with hundreds of album credits as a performer, composer, or producer. His work has touched on a wide range of musical genres, often within a single composition, but he is best-known for his avant-garde, jazz, improvised and contemporary classical music. Zorn has led the punk jazz band Naked City, the klezmer-influenced quartet Masada and composed the associated ‘Masada Songbooks’, written concert music for classical ensembles, and produced music for film and documentary. Zorn has stated that “I’ve got an incredibly short attention span. My music is jam-packed with information that is changing very fast… All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I’m an additive person – the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can’t see the connections, but they are there.”

After releasing albums on several independent US and European labels, Zorn signed with Elektra Nonesuch and attracted wide acclaim in 1985 when he released ”The Big Gundown” with his interpretations of music composed by Ennio Morricone. This was followed by the album ”Spillane” in 1987, and the first album by Naked City in 1989 which all attracted further worldwide attention. Zorn then recorded on the Japanese DIW label and curated the Avant subsidiary label before forming Tzadik in 1995, where he has been prolific, issuing several new recordings each year and releasing works by many other musicians.

Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the early 1980s but has since composed and performed with a wide range of musicians working in diverse musical areas. By the early 1990s Zorn was working extensively in Japan, attracted by that culture’s openness about borrowing and remixing ingredients from elsewhere, where he performed and recorded under the name Dekoboko Hajime, before returning to New York as a permanent base in the mid 1990’s. Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with varying ensembles to display his diverse output.

Co-presented with The Rotunda