In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2002)
ARTE

Description

Deemed "Fellini and Bergman wrapped in one gloriously possessed body," Maya Deren is arguably the most important and innovative avant-garde filmmaker in the history of American cinema. Using locations from the Hollywood hills to Haiti in the 1940s and ’50s, 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 seamlessly and effectively interweaves archival footage and observances from acolytes and contemporaries such as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas with an original score by experimental jazz legend John Zorn. Documentarian Martina Kudlácek 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. This Edition features the extremely Maya Deren "fragments" WITCH’S CRADLE (1943), starring Marcel Duchamp, and ENSEMBLE FOR SOMNAMBULISTS (1951).

Tags

1940s, Dance, 1950s, Filmmaking

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Amazon user reviews

"In the Mirror of Maya Deren" demonstrates how Deren's immersion into the principles of Voudoun deepened her understanding of dance in reverence to deity and broadened her artistic repertoire. It moreover provides a holistic insight into the many aspects of her work.
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8.8 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

Best of all, the documentary gives us an idea of the woman herself -- even more so than we can glean from her films.
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8.3 digitallyobsessed.com | Robert Edwards

Martina Kudlácek's In the Mirror of Maya Deren is a biographical study of one of the most important American avant-garde filmmakers, but it's overly long and unfocused.
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8.0 Variety | David Stratton

This well researched, detailed examination of the life and work of the legendary avant-garde filmmaker, writer and dancer, Maya Deren, should provoke renewed interest in her.
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8.0 New York Times | Dave Kehr

The portrait is a particularly vivid one, not least because so many of Deren's friends and colleagues are still around to tell their stories.
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8.0 Chicago Reader | Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of the best things about In the Mirror of Maya Deren is that it does such a terrific job of showing us what Deren was like that it makes even the notion of a biopic about her seem unnecessary, if not ridiculous.
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7.5 Time Out

Wide ranging, authoritative and often beautiful documentary about the avant garde movie-maker who virtually created the US independent film scene.
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7.0 PopMatters.com | Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

Kudlacek employs her own deliberate and loving eye to examine Deren's life, and to good effect. In the Mirror of Maya Deren is a subtle and reverent look at one of America's most important -- and often forgotten -- filmmakers.
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7.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Edward Guthmann

The material here is fascinating, and Kudlacek serves it best when she gets out of the way and lets the story tell itself, through Deren's film images and the testimony of friends and colleagues.
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5.0 The Onion A.V. Club | Scott Tobias

Though a solid and scrupulously researched primer on an avant-garde pioneer, Martina Kudlácek's In The Mirror Of Maya Deren fails to harness anything close to Deren's singular intensity and precision, nor does it always make sense of the highly intellectual concepts that characterize her work.
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