Stabat Mater (1990),  in Maya Deren in Context: British Women Filmmakers,Maya Deren 50 Years,  BFI Southbank, October 2011.



A programme of films by artists working at the London Filmmakers' Co-op, Circles, the distribution organisation focused on women's practices formed in the late 1970s. Circles played an important role researching and re-examining the contributions of pioneering filmmakers such as Maya Deren, and sought to locate their work within, in the words of Lis Rhodes, 'the context of their own concerns'. Seminal works featuring dance, performance and rituals of play accompany poetic articulations and calls to the materiality of film. Programmed and introduced by Elinor Cleghorn.



CLAPPING SONGS dir Tina Keane 1979 6mins SLIDES dir Annabel Nicolson 1971 16mins FOCCII dir Jeanette Iljon 1974 12mins NIGHT DANCES dir Sandra Lahire 1995 15mins DELILAH dir Tanya Syed 1995 12mins STABAT MATER dir Nina Danino 1990 8mins LIGHT READING dir Lis Rhodes 1979 20min

Danino, Nina

English

Goldsmiths Research Online

GOLDSMITHS Research OnlineShow/Exhibition Danino, NinaMaya Deren in Context: British Women FilmmakersThe publisher's version is available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/about/media/releases/20110825_maya_deren.pdfYou may cite this version as: Danino, Nina. 2011. Maya Deren in Context: British Women Filmmakers. In: "Maya Deren in Context: British Women's Filmmaking", BFI Southbank, London, United Kingdom, 9 October 2011. [Show/Exhibition]: Goldsmiths Research Online.Available at: http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/6805/This document is the author’s final manuscript version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during peer review. Some differences between this version and the publisher’s version remain. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners.http://eprints-gro.goldsmiths.ac.ukContact Goldsmiths Research Online at: lib-eprints@gold.ac.uk PRESS RELEASE: July 2011              11/60   BFI Southbank presents: Maya Deren: 50 Years On     October 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of visionary filmmaker, choreographer and theorist Maya Deren. Her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), endures as one of the most widely exhibited films of experimental cinema. She famously announced that she ‘made her pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick’, and through her films she challenged the rigid structures of studio films, playing with form and exploring poetry, dance, visual art and a fascination for Haitian voodoo. To celebrate the life and work of Deren, BFI Southbank will present a season of her films, including rare uncut footage, and events, opening with Séance for Maya Deren on 4 October. A BFI Classic of Meshes… will be published, accompanied by a launch event and lecture at BFI Southbank, while Renewing Deren’s Legacy: Daria Martin, Jayne Parker, Sarah Pucill will bring together three London-based filmmakers who have been inspired by Deren.     Maya Deren was born Eleonora Derenkovskaya in Kiev in 1917, and moved with her parents to the US in 1921. Meshes of the Afternoon was made in collaboration with her then husband, Alexander Hammid, and may be seen alongside four more titles, all made between 1943 and 1955, including Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945-46) in the first part of the Maya Deren Programme: Chamber Films. She considered film making, with its unique facility to manipulate time, conjoin unrelated spaces and choreograph movement, could blend elements into a transcendent, ritualised form. In 1946, Deren was awarded the first ever Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Work in the Motion Pictures with an application to film ritual activity in Haiti. Her observations of, and fascination with, the dance ceremony of Haitian Voudoun expanded her intense imagination. Deren wrote a seminal text on Voudoun, published a wealth of essays, articles and statements, and was a tireless advocate for the exhibition and valorisation of experimental cinema. She died in hospital in New York after a series of cerebral haemorrhages on October 13 1961, at the age of just 44. In this dedicated season a varied programme of events pays tribute to the art of Maya Deren. Highlights will include Invocation: Maya Deren (1987), introduced by the film’s director Jo Ann Kaplan, and a symposium entitled New Reflections – an exploration of her career. Deren’s vision influenced a generation of filmmakers of the North American avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s, and her inspiration continues to resonate. With a focus on her contemporary legacy, and the relation of her work to women’s filmmaking in Britain, the significance of Deren’s legacy will be discussed, illustrated and explored, 50 years on.   - end –  Programme:  Opening Event: Séance for Maya Deren Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) opens this programme, to be followed by work from Daria Martin, Jayne Parker and Sarah Pucill, three highly acclaimed experimental film artists inspired by Deren’s vision and practice, each of whom have programmes included in this season. Martin’s Harpstrings and Lava (2007), Parker’s I Dish (1982) and Pucill’s Cast (2000) accompany Ritual in Transfigured Time in something of a cinematic séance, invoking the living resonance of Deren’s film art on screen and around the table. where there will be a post-screening discussion with Daria Martin, Jayne Parker and Sarah Pucill. Tue 4 Oct 18:10 NFT3  Symposium: Maya Deren: New Reflections A one-day symposium exploring the legacy of Maya Deren through the lenses of visual art, choreography, anthropology and film theory. Bringing together distinguished artists, writers and academics in the discussion of the contemporary resonance of her filmmaking and film writing, Maya Deren: New Reflections will reinvigora dialogues around the work of one of experimental cinema’s most intriguing and significant artists. Deren was fascinated with, and absorbed by, dance, poetry and ritual activity, and these forms structured and inspired her beguiling filmic optic. Focusing on the themes, forms and modes of expression Deren prioritised in her practice, this unique symposium will celebrate her life and work while offering up renewed perceptions of her extraordinary visual and intellectual legacy. Organised by Elinor Cleghorn (The London Consortium). A collaboration between BFI and The London Consortium Tickets £13, concs £9.75 (Members pay £1.50 less) Sat 8 Oct 10:30-17:30 NFT3  Invocation: Maya Deren + Introduction by Jo Ann Kaplan USA 1987. Dir Jo Ann Kaplan. 53min An authoritative and beautifully composed biography of Maya Deren by acclaimed fi lmmaker Jo Ann Kaplan. Featuring interviews with those who knew Deren, reconstructions of her personal spaces, archived photographs and audio recordings, and extracts of each of Deren’s completed films Invocation is a fascinating homage to a short but remarkable life. Narrated by Helen Mirren. Introduction and Q&A with Jo Ann Kaplan. This event launches Body of Work: Five Films by Jo Ann Kaplan. Signed copies will be available at the Filmstore Thu 6 Oct 18:30 NFT2  Maya Deren Programme 1: Chamber Films ‘Chamber music is more than a form…it is lyric in character; it is abstract, rather than narrative… and it is dependent upon a meticulous exploitation of the virtuosity of the selected instrument.’ (Maya Deren) In 1960, Deren introduced her works as ‘chamber films’, drawing upon a musical analogy to collectively describe their conceptual formation. This programme features five of Deren’s seminal body of ‘chamber films’: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, 14min), At Land (1944, 15min), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945, 3min), Ritual in Transfi gured Time (1945-46, 15min) and The Very Eye of Night (1955, released 1959, 15min). Tue 4 Oct 20:30 NFT2, Sun 9 Oct 16:20 NFT3   Maya Deren Programme 2: Movement and Ritual Deren’s exploration of the parabolic quality of martial arts movement, Meditation on Violence (1948, 13min), accompanies the documentary Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1977, 52min, co-dir Cheryl & Teiji Ito), the posthumously compiled and edited selection of footage shot by Deren on trips to Haiti between 1947 and 1955 during which time she committed the dance-based ceremony of Voudoun ritual to approximately 20,000 feet of 16mm film. Wed 5 Oct 18:30 NFT2, Tue 11 Oct 20:45 NFT3  Maya Deren Programme 3: Fragments and Outtakes Maya Deren’s completed body of work totals only around 76 minutes, yet she left behind hours of uncut, unrealised and unedited fi lm footage. This selection of fragments of Deren’s ‘abandoned’ films – including Witch’s Cradle (1943) featuring Marcel Duchamp, and the Toronto film society workshop project Ensemble for Somnambulists (1951) – are accompanied by outtakes from her cinematic dance A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945). The programme also includes the documentary Invocation: Maya Deren (1987, Dir Jo Ann Kaplan, 53min) Wed 5 Oct 20:45 NFT2  Book Launch & Lecture by John David Rhodes: Meshes of the Afternoon Tonight we launch the latest in the series of BFI Film Classics – Meshes of the Afternoon, John David Rhodes’ illuminating study of Maya Deren’s mesmerising short of 1943, which places the fi lm in the context of European modernism and as a pivotal text for the pre- and post-war history of the cinematic avant-garde. Rhodes’ book also explores the film’s use of point of view, repetition and visual symbolism, and the author will give an illustrated lecture. Tickets £5 Fri 7 Oct 18:30 NFT3  Renewing Deren’s Legacy: Daria Martin, Jayne Parker, Sarah Pucill In celebration of Deren’s contemporary legacy, we are delighted to feature the work of Daria Martin, Jayne Parker and Sarah Pucill, three London-based, film artists each inspired by Deren in intriguing ways. Daria Martin (b.1973), for whom Deren’s ability to connect disparate spaces and embrace embodied dream has been an inspiration, makes films composed of performed, hand-constructed scenarios with visual reference to mythology, and literature. Martin often works with dancers and performers, staging projections of desire and fantasy which tantalisingly reveal the artifice of their making. Jayne Parker (b.1957), who shares with Deren a fascination with the filmic potential of non-verbal arts, finds Deren’s perceptually transcendent articulations of time and space enduringly striking. Parker’s works explore the physical body, objects and acts of performance through the unique possibilities of the medium. For Sarah Pucill (b.1961), the female centeredness of Deren’s work has been an important influence. The sensibility of Deren’s poetics, and her vision of making speak elements that are typically perceived as passive, relates to Pucill’s exploration of transformation and selfhood through sensuous movement and the attributing of agency to the inanimate.  Jayne Parker I Dish (1982, 15min), The Pool (1991, 10min), The Reunion (1997, 9min), Stationary Music (2005, 15min), Arc (2006, 7min), K (1989, 13min)  Followed by the artist in conversation with William Fowler, curator, BFI National Archive Fri 7 Oct 20:30 NFT3  Sarah Pucill Mirrored Measure (1996, 10min), Cast (2000, 17min), Swollen Stigma (1997, 20min), Phantom Rhapsody (2010, 19min), Backcomb (1995, 6min)  Followed by a Q&A with Sarah Pucill Tue 11 Oct 18:00 NFT3  Daria Martin In the Palace (2000, 10min), Birds (2001, 7min), Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon (2004/2005, 18min), Harpstrings and Lava (2007, 13min), Minotaur (2008, 10min) Followed by a Q&A with Daria Martin Wed 12 Oct 18:10 NFT3 Maya Deren in Context: British Women’s Filmmaking A programme of films by artists working at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, and involved with Circles, the distribution organisation focused on women’s practice formed in the late 1970s. Circles played an important role researching and re-examining the contributions of pioneering filmmakers such as Maya Deren, and sought to locate their work within, in the words of Lis Rhodes, ‘the context of their own concerns’. Seminal works featuring dance, performance and rituals of play accompany poetic articulations and calls to the materiality of film. Introduced by Elinor Cleghorn Sun 9 Oct 18:30 NFT3  - End -  PRESS CONTACT:    BFI Southbank: Ilona Cheshire Tel: 020 7957 8986 email: ilona.cheshire@bfi.org.uk    About the BFI The BFI is the lead body for film in the UK with the ambition to create a flourishing film environment in which innovation, opportunity and creativity can thrive by: ? Connecting audiences to the widest choice of British and World cinema  ? Preserving and restoring the most significant film collection in the world for today and future generations  ? Investing in creative, distinctive and entertaining work  ? Promoting British film and talent to the world   ? Growing the next generation of film makers and audiences  Booking information  The BFI Southbank is open to all. BFI members are entitled to a discount on all tickets.  BFI Southbank Box Office tel: 020 7928 3232. Unless otherwise stated tickets are £9.00, concs £6.65 Members pay £1.40 less on any ticket. Website www.bfi.org.uk/southbank Tickets for FREE screenings and events must be booked in advance by calling the Box Office to avoid disappointment BFI Filmstore The BFI Filmstore is stocked and staffed by BFI experts with over 1,200 book titles and 1,000 DVDs to choose from, including hundreds of acclaimed books and DVDs produced by the BFI.  The benugo bar & kitchen Eat, drink and be merry in panoramic daylight. benugo’s décor is contemporary, brightly lit and playful with a lounge space, bar and dining area. The place to network, hang out, unpack a film, savour the best of Modern British or sip on a cocktail.  There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archival collections, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you.  *** PICTURE DESK *** A selection of images for journalistic use in promoting BFI Southbank screenings can be found at www.image.net under BFI / BFI Southbank /September October 2011  

Maya Deren in Context: British Women Filmmakers

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