Maya Deren (1917-1961) is most famous for the experimental films she made during World War II. She was also a theorist and promoter of experimental cinema and a participant in the now legendary 1940s-50s American avant-garde centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village. By the 1950s Deren’s ideas on art and film were often dismissed for several reasons: she was a woman interested in abstract ideas and objectivity, she was an active initiate in Haitian Voudoun, and she was intense, outspoken, and unconventional. In spite of this dismissal, her films, though few in number, helped establish experimental film as a vital and valid art form in the U.S. and continue to hold an influential place in our cultural imagination.

Deren’s concept of art includes a complex and multidisciplinary notion of nature, which in her films is represented through landscape. By examining this aspect of her work and thought, we can better consider the “cinematic landscape,” an under-recognized twentieth-century reworking of landscape traditions.[1]

In "Anagram" (1946), Deren expresses her most complete statement on art in order to posit experimental film as a fine art and distinguish it from commercial narrative and documentary film. Deren reiterates throughout her essay the implications of the split in human consciousness caused by scientific rationality.[2] Deren notes that science made nature secular and separate from human beings, which led to nature being seen as amoral, ambiguous, and irrational. Yet science also allowed people to transform nature through applications of rational consciousness. Some, especially the romantic artists, tried to reunite with nature to absolve moral responsibility, but Deren sees these artists as narcissistic and self-exalting.[3] Deren believes that artists must be conscious in their creative acts, morally engaged, free of ego-based individualism. Thus she rejects expressionism and its subjectivity and sees the surrealist goal of the unconscious artist using automatism as unachievable and irresponsible.

The basis of art for Deren is consciousness. For her, consciousness replaces God in secular modern cultural aesthetics. But this consciousness has nothing to do with mimetic or realist art, which for Deren is too familiar and uncreative since it substitutes description for art.[4] Instead art requires a “horizontal” process of memory through which one can access all experience and knowledge simultaneously.[5] Through Deren’s horizontal process, one may think abstractly about one’s experience, which leads not to subjectivity, but to depersonalization and detachment. Memory facilitates imagination, which “accelerates” natural processes so that they become unreal and abstract. The artist tries to create forms that are as dynamic as those in nature without copying them. Thus, nature is a model for art, but a parallel one that does not lead to surrealist revelation, or realist or documentary mimesis.

In Deren’s concept of art, memory and consciousness lead artists to use abstracted forms to relate to whatever they deify or most value.[6] This relationship makes art a form of ritual that refers to origin, function, and preservation, and origin, or what we might call identity and use. Deren, who studied Haitian Voudoun and Balinese dance, sees this ritualistic aspect of art as cross-cultural. To Deren artistic ritual is related to scientific investigation in that both art and science depend on conscious and objective exploration. Deren’s art is synthetic and generalized, a life force unto itself that is of social consequence because it raises consciousness in both the artist and the viewer.

Unlike most modernists who used cross-cultural interests as a form of primitivism, Deren rejects the “primitive” as a construct of western individualism through which artists escape into subjectivity.[7] Instead of appropriating the forms of other cultures, Deren engaged the community she found there. She believed that western culture had lost its sense of community partly through its loss of ritual. What drew her strongly to Voudoun in the late 1940s, after her most influential films were made, was its possibilities as a social ritual experienced through community and the totality of one’s consciousness.

To Deren, ritual involves the mind and the body. The more aspects involved, the more effective the ritual. Deren’s attraction to dance, poetry, film and music was her conviction that these were what remained of ritual in our society. She wanted art to create new forms of ritual that would lead to new social community, and we are reminded that in the 1930s, like many intellectuals from Eastern Europe, Deren was a socialist activist. This may be why the theme of social transformation plays such a major role in her work.

Deren’s writing in "Anagram" is done in non-linear and generalized sections so that topics are not developed conventionally, but through overlapping themes. One of these themes is our relationship to nature and landscape. Deren did not think of landscape in symbolic terms. Symbols were for her meanings whose original cultural contexts were lost to our memory and thus had to be learned or studied, and therefore were less vital in the ritual context defined above.[8] It is noteworthy that Deren frames then-current debates about art in terms of landscape. There is the familiar landscape of the realist and the interior landscape of the surrealist, both of which she rejected. Instead she sees herself working more on the utopian landscape that she associates with the romantic tradition, and which she calls “inner or outer geography.”[9] She celebrates the romantics for their quest for originality and skill, but not for their subjectivity and escapism. We will return to the romantic threads of Deren’s landscape when we analyze At Land.

The term “inner and outer geography” situates the human being in Deren’s concept of landscape. Her concept is much closer to what Malcolm Andrews and Holmes Rolston call an environment, or a landscape defined by a living being existing in nature and experiencing it as a complex of sensations.[10] Inner and outer geography relates to an environment in which people experience interior and exterior states. This concept of geography relates to how Deren defines an image and its formal qualities.

From the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, which Deren studied for her masters thesis, she took the idea that an image synthesizes form and content in an intellectual and emotional complex revealed through the logic of its formal structure.[11] Another English poet, whom Deren might have studied or absorbed indirectly through her studies of the Imagists, is Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89, published in 1918), who theorized the concept of an “inscape.” To Hopkins an inscape is a landscape that is penetrated intellectually and emotionally, manifests laws of energy, and whose natural patterns are abstracted forms.[12] As we shall see this is an apt description of how Deren realizes “inner and outer geography” and landscape in At Land.

Part of this logic of form for Deren was how art creates it own gestalt context of an “emergent whole.” She thought this formal context of art was artificial and that art’s wholeness of form subsumes and transcends an art work’s parts.[13] How this wholeness unifies the multiple images of shots and sequences defines film as a medium. Deren, influenced by her psychiatrist father who had studied physiological perception with the same teacher as did the Russian filmmaker Vertov, believed that perception is a complex and synthetic physical process involving multiple senses.[14] Such an analysis, coupled with her experience in modern dance, led Deren to define an aesthetic of objective physiological effect related as much to the body as to mental and visual processes. Deren thought that the content of a work depended on context, but saw context as the gestalt form of the work. Such ideas prefigure the minimalist aesthetic of the 1960s, which also related to ideas of dance and gestalt psychology.

Although Deren was critical of the split caused by science and its ability to create atomic weapons of mass destruction, she thinks that art, like science, must be objective and based on rational planning and skills. As in scientific research, Deren saw the creative process as a logical extension of a known reality.[15] Countering the Beat aesthetics of Jonas Mekas, Deren was against film as improvisation. Improvisation was too ego-based and subjective for Deren.[16] To her film was a formal effect, based not on the narrative realism and drama of Hollywood, which Andre Bazin influentially theorized, but on space/time/motion manipulation.

Deren’s focus on form categorizes her as a formalist or classicist, but this did not lead her to abstract film. She saw abstract film based on animation as too much like painting. Hollywood film may have formal sense, but Deren thought it formulaic, commercial, and without sustained creativity or transforming responsibility. To her Hollywood produced empty dreams.[17] Deren believed that film form was a result of its material technology. In many ways her ideas about media specificity parallel ideas developed by the critic Clement Greenberg, but make more sense because of the photographic and mechanical nature of film processes.

Deren, in an effort to complicate meaning, layers the memory/narrative development (the linear horizontal) with “verticality” or poetic and associative meanings.[18] To understand what Deren means by horizontal and vertical landscape more fully, one must turn to her films and examine them more closely. Though Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) refer to landscape, it is At Land (1944) in which landscape is featured. Considered by many to be the first complete expression by Deren without the collaborating influence of her husband, Alexander Hammid, the “verticality” of the fifteen-minute At Land was later described by Deren as a reversal of Homer’s Odyssey in which she plays the lead. Deren relates how her version differs because instead of searching, the protagonist finds the universe has taken dynamic action away from human will by replacing stability of place with an impersonal, relativistic flux that leaves identity as the only constant.[19]

Inspired partly by the mythic grandeur of Martha Graham’s archetypes and by her own cross-cultural studies of Hinduism (she changed her name in 1943 to Maya, the Hindu Goddess of illusion and cosmic motion), Deren often speaks in terms that are mythic and cosmological in scope. This doesn’t mean that her ideas are outmoded, but that we need to translate them through our own ideological and theoretical prejudices. Mark Franco writes that the milieu of modern dance that Deren experienced in New York contributed to her use of the human body as a depersonalized and abstract form rather than as a carrier of character. He also says that Graham’s concept of “inner landscape,” which was about feminine introspection and denied to male dancers, was very influential.[20] This may have influenced Deren, who often featured dance in her films, to think of the female figure moving in a landscape of “inner and outer geography.” She also argued that filmmaking was similar to choreography because in both one works with space, time, and motion.

The narrative part of At Land’s “horizontal” synopsis can be described as follows. Ocean waves break against the shore. There is a woman (Deren) on the shore and the waves wash over her. She seems semi-conscious, but we cut to her point-of-view. She sees waves go out in reverse. She sees gulls in the sky. After a dislocating jump shot, the woman reaches for roots that are embedded in the cliff-like edge where the land goes from beach to vegetation. She pulls herself upwards through exposed tree roots. We see close-ups of her face framed by gnarled wood. She reaches a plateau, but as she climbs over its edge, it is a long dining table in a room.

Inside she sees seated men and women in suits and dresses, smoking and talking. We see her feet rise from the driftwood to the table and she begins crawling. As she crawls, the front of her body returns to nature as she pushes through plants. In other shots, visually continuous through her forward motion, she is on the table being ignored by the party guests. These shots alternate between wild plant life and the table until she reaches the end of the table, where a game of chess is being played by a man. The people leave the table and the chess pieces move by themselves until one piece drops through rock formations on the beach into a small waterfall. The protagonist follows the piece, but it is carried away by water.

We cut to a new scene. On a dirt road of two parallel paths formed by tire tracks in the grassy sand, the woman walks towards the camera. A man walks parallel to her and they talk, but as the camera cuts back and forth between the walkers, the man changes (film critic Parker Tyler, musician John Cage, filmmaker Alexander Hammid). The walkers go through branches and the man walks ahead. The woman tries to catch up to him but he goes into a ramshackle wood cabin and closes the door before she can reach it. She crawls in through an opening underneath the cabin.

Inside there is a room that does not fit the outside of the building. It is filled with furniture draped in white sheets. The woman sees a different man in a chair wrapped to his chin in drapery. He watches her, but seems immobile. She drops a cat and walks through doors that seem to meet in a corner-like maze. Going through the last of the doors leads her to the rocky, vertical edge of the beach. She jumps up to climb, but then crawls down backwards in slow-motion and seems to slide and fall between crevices. Overhead she sees a wooden scaffold-like lookout tower.

The woman is on the sandy beach and walks over dunes to the left. She diminishes in scale becoming an abstract vertical line. The camera pans overhead looking down on her vertically from a bird’s-eye-view. From there cut to a pan parallel to her as she walks and bends over picking up rocks and dropping them. She looks backwards and sees two women with long hair, a blonde and a brunette, playing chess at the edge of the water. She moves near them and watches them, but they don’t seem to see her. They chat and smile.

Suddenly the chess opponents are on the same side of the board and the protagonist is behind them. She strokes their hair and they bend their heads back, smiling as they continue to play. The watcher grabs a chess piece and then runs as her double watches her and another double is still trying to gather rocks. The woman with the captured chess piece runs over the dunes with her arms bent at the elbows and forearms up in the air. As she runs, it cuts to her moving through trees. The film cuts to the room where she crawls on the table, then to her footprints along the beach, then to her running. She becomes small again and disappears in the distance to the right.

Now that we have a linear “horizontal” framework on which to overlay meaning, we can proceed with some “vertical” associations, mindful that the horizontal effect of memory can interject plot connections simultaneously. As in all interpretation, this cannot be a “closed” reading, especially since Deren consciously leaves room for ambiguity and interpretative play. But as an interpretation, it can point to how Deren wanted her films to be seen.
According to Andrews, since the Enlightenment landscape has had strong cultural meanings.[21] Deren uses these meanings and often contradicts our expectations of them to create an effect. The woman on the beach is washed to shore like the classical goddess Venus. The sensuality of these shots support such an allusion. With such classical associations, we assume that there might be other pastoral allusions to love and nature—the beach as a secure, open space freed from the tyranny of the ocean, the landscape as primal and creative space, as spiritually and morally regenerative. There does seem to be an intimacy with nature in the first scene in which the body and its physicality seem free from modern urban alienation. Nature seems simple, direct and unmediated by culture. The landscape is generalized and might be imaginary though it was actually shot at Port Jefferson, Long Island.[22] These first shots suggest what Andrews calls the essentialist view of landscape—nature as transcendental and common experience, where both natural and female beauty are absolute.

Deren, however, then challenges these landscape traditions. The waves reverse as if something is not right with the laws of nature. There is disorientation. A look of intensity on the woman’s face counters the collapsed sensuality of her body and suddenly she is dislocated through a jump-cut into a physical task, which though still makes her look beautiful, begins to seem threatening to her. Most of these images suggest that outer and inner geography are being juxtaposed in some strange balance. In some ways the camera work in At Land explores the female body as abstracted form as in the work of Edward Weston’s still photography (but without the nudity).

Another dislocation is that the intensity of the ocean shots is thwarted by another filmic choice, the silence of the film. The waves crash, but we hear nothing; allowing for exclusive focus on visual patterns. Sound is formal element that is a difficult to control, and one that tends to subliminally dominate visual form, something Deren would not have favored. One is reminded of the importance of silence, dissonance and intervals in the music of John Cage, who appears briefly in the film and would later work on musical “landscapes.”[23] That people in music, art, literature, dance and film all refer to concepts of landscape in their work in the 1940s and 1950s suggests the prevalence of landscape as a conceptual artistic paradigm.

This landscape sequence in At Land suggests both inner (interior to the body) and outer (exterior to the body) geography, but this is further complicated by introducing the table and interior in which the party is taking place. The landscape is contrasted with the social scene; an interior which confuses inside and outside. While the woman’s unacknowledged presence suggests an inner state of social alienation, she also inhabits her body more fully than anyone in the room (as evidenced by her crawling—a sort of primal movement before walking).

Deren later wrote that she wanted the crawling to look as if she were underwater and that she was trying to swim through air.[24] Deren also loved cats, identified with them, and observed them enough to help Hammid make a documentary on their pets, The Private Life of a Cat (1945). As someone interested in bodily motion, Deren used the mobility of cats as a model, and this can be seen in how she moves in At Land, especially when her movements are accentuated by slow-motion.

The crawling in At Land is also similar to the dislocated motion that Jean Cocteau’s artist/poet experiences in Blood of the Poet (1930) when the artist crawls along a corridor of rooms. We know that Deren liked this film and its imaginative treatment of the artist’s journey and sacrifice.[25] Deren’s crawl is different from that of Cocteau’s character in that we do not identify the woman as an artist and she alternates back and forth between landscape/nature and the room interior. While both of these protagonists observe others, Deren’s is more interactive because of her dislocations. Throughout the protagonist’s crawl in At Land, she remains the most conscious of anyone in the film. Almost everyone else seems oblivious to the environment and to her. Landscape and the room both seem to signify inner/outer states, and perhaps another state that is both inner and outer, that of the voyeur. Only the protagonist in At Land adjusts her actions accordingly.

At the end of the table, after crawling through societal ritual of the dinner party, we come to another ritual—the game of chess. Deren saw games as a type of ritual in which people play and form social bonds. She probably also knew that chess is an old game that originated in India. She knew Marcel Duchamp and his love of the game.[26] She admired his Anemic Cinema (1925-26) and had worked on a film which she never finished, Witch’s Cradle (1943) about Duchamp’s installation of string at the 1942 “Art of This Century” Surrealist exhibition.

The chess game/piece in At Land perhaps refers to the protagonist’s longing to be included, to play along and to be a part of social rituals that slip from her grasp. When she finally does obtain the piece by stealing, the act forces her away from others. The mobility of Deren’s protagonist is opposite that of the piece representing the king whose mobility is limited and is the prize of the game. In the film the woman pursues and obtains a queen with lesser status and more mobility than the king. Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon see mobility as an element of identity in the play of power and meaning within social and cultural networks of meaning, and this fits the context of At Land.[27]

The journey of Deren’s protagonist, partly in pursuit of the chess piece, takes place through another landscape tradition—the walk through nature. German romantics considered walking in landscape an experience of the relationship between the social and nature, exactly what the protagonist seems to be experiencing in Deren’s walk alongside a man (or men).[28] Think how walks continue to be rituals of experiencing nature, whether in parks or on hiking trips. Walks also remain rituals of courtship, suggesting privacy and freedom from social constraints and act as public declarations of commitment and mutual attraction. In Deren’s film, the walking woman on the path is equal to the man, but as she pursues him, he lures her to an interior where she finds a more paternal-looking and immobile man. Her other walks on the beach are more solitary, and equally frustrating, as when she picks up rocks, or exhilarating, as when she walks/runs over the dunes.

When the protagonist is in the draped room, she leaves through a maze-like corner set of doors. This walk through a door that steps out onto a beach recalls the ending of the Dalí/Buñuel film, Un Chien Andalou (1928-29) where the female lead also steps out on to a beach. In that film, filled with Freudian symbols that Deren would have disliked—she believed psychoanalysis was a system alien to art that demystified it—the beach scene symbolizes the “little death” of orgasm destroying desire.[29] As we have already seen, the beach in At Land is much more open-ended in meaning and attempts to represent conscious states.

Once back to the beach, the protagonist is threatened by a backward fall in slow motion much as Cocteau’s poet retraces his gravity-free crawl from his imagination back to the reality of his studio. The woman in At Land loses control of her mobility and is given over to gravity, which drops her back to the beach where she again walks, but this time over the dunes. In At Land the woman becomes a sort of female flaneur, transported from an urban context to that of a landscape. She tries to pick up stones, as one often collects pebbles or shells on the beach—again a sort of ritual. But in the film the task has an elemental, almost Sisyphusean quality because the stones are too large and she cannot hold them all, though she keeps trying until the very end.

When the protagonist sees the chess game again, two women are playing—whereas at the table there was a single man—and the protagonist is more comfortable and in control. She even makes contact with them by stroking their hair, although they don’t speak. The sensuousness seems to take them off guard and the observing woman captures the white queen, which by this time possesses a talisman-like quality. The protagonist is victorious and runs away like a child taking candy, but an insecurity remains because she watches herself in the form of a double and she sees another double picking up stones.

If we do not interpret the doubles as the Freudian uncanny, as is typical now, we are left to think of them as simultaneous and as relating to memory and the motion of time. This triple appearance of the self is a prime example of Deren’s horizontal and vertical motion combining with each other. Lauren Rabinowitz sees the multiple selves here as occupying contiguous spaces rather than the same space as in Meshes, implying that the protagonist represents a woman in relation to her self.[30]

As the woman runs away, and we recall her running away earlier in the film in a different direction, she rises her arms like a dancing figure on an ancient Greek vase. As we relive her past and present, we are left to wonder whether she is running away from the realities of her experience or towards an integrated self, perhaps both impossibilities in this film’s context. Identity formation in At Land is more entropic and fluid. As something is added, something else falls away, like the stones the protagonist tries to gather, like the natural processes of geology.

Throughout At Land Deren reconfigures ideas of landscape, giving us a new vision of what a cinematic landscape might be. Situating the woman in a natural environment impacts on nature. She makes footprints, gathers stones, and moves through the environment, sometimes as a free agent and sometimes as a reactionary one. She is conscious of the place and of nature changing around her and she acts accordingly. It is difficult to tell if she is conscious of the effect of her actions on her self or on others.

For Deren the traditional landscape representing a natural order is subverted and made creative by breaking through formal contexts such as dislocations in time, space and expectations. Landscape transforms as a place of energy and change much as in the romantic landscapes of Turner.[31] Deren’s geography triggers daydreams and lost of self, but identity keeps interpenetrating these realities. By avoiding character and plot motivation, sensuality is depersonalized and somewhat de-eroticized. Culture and nature seem to reinforce, rather than oppose, each other. The masculine sublime is so mixed with the feminine picturesque that the representation of nature becomes androgynous.
Nature is not threatening, but it is sometimes wild and uncontrollable. The protagonist is not punished for her sensuality or her social transgressions. Men are present, but are not very powerful or controlling, often due to their lack of mobility. Men do not visit the beach; they are only on the parallel road and usually inside or going inside rooms filled with furniture. There are no words spoken on the beach, and even if people speak on the road or at the party, we cannot hear them. It is as if nature has made speech impotent. No music romanticizes the forms and patterns of nature.

The deep space of the landscape offers the protagonist the ineffable power of running away, of escape towards change. Landscape offers a spatial alternative to the claustrophobic rooms of social relationships and conventions, but the landscape is not without social contact and not without the environmental reality of the self. Landscape functions as a spatial labyrinth or maze through which the self wanders, reminding us of Theseus, and Picasso’s obsession with the minotaur as self.

At Land was made during World War II, a war fought through the natural boundaries of air, land and sea. Landings and battles on beaches were common, especially in the Pacific, but also on D-Day.[32] In the film Deren is washed ashore and crawls like someone invading a space, even though she seems somewhat lost. The title and context of the film suggests that one can be as bewildered on land as “at sea.”[33] In the film, the beach is an edge or place of transition, a site where nature and the social interact, where transitions may not be merely personal but larger in scope. Countries are often delimited by their natural coastlines. The ocean and the sky there also imply infinity and a cosmological significance.
The experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who knew Deren, complimented her on how she could manipulate film and meaning in a way that seems fresh and natural.32 Her manipulations never seem like tricks or special effects, even after repeated viewing. I think that her theory of art and nature and her distinctions in defining art and science allowed her to integrate nature as a model into her work in a way that withstands critical thinking. Representations of landscape are not something outmoded and sentimental. Nor are they limited to earth works and environmental works. The cinematic landscape is a rich system of meaning that continues to inform who we are and how we see our place in the world in both experimental film and popular cinema. As we have seen in Deren’s “mythological voyage of the twentieth century,” the representation of landscape is a subject of innovation, tradition and fascination.[34]

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