In the mirror of maya deren biography
In the mirror of maya deren biography summary...
In the mirror of maya deren biography
A Life Choreographed for Camera
Maya Deren in a scene from Meshes of the Afternoon
Drama and myth framed the life and death of Maya Deren. She was born Eleanora Derenkowski in Kiev in 1917 – during the early days of the Russian Revolution – and died forty-four years later in New York City, with whispers of a Vodou curse veiling the circumstances of her death.
During her brief life she established herself as a pioneering experimental filmmaker and crusader for independent film, received the first Guggenheim grant ever awarded for creative filmmaking (1946), and in 1953 published the book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.
The aura that suffuses Deren’s biography emanates partly from the enigmatic power of her films, but it has been magnified by her bohemian glamour and visionary intelligence, edged with a hint of tyranny.
Escaping anti-Semitic pogroms and the general chaos of the nascent USSR, the Derenkowski family immigrated to the United States in 1