top Movie Channel

Showing posts with label Maya Deren. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Martina Kudlácek - Im Spiegel der Maya Deren AKA In the mirror of Maya Deren (2002)

http://img323.imageshack.us/img323/5826/mayaposterlarge8wq.jpg

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5333/imdbimage.jpg

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).

http://rapidshare.com/files/147801287/In_the_mirror_of_Maya_Deren__Martina_Kudlacek__2003_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/147926686/In_the_mirror_of_Maya_Deren__Martina_Kudlacek__2003_.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/147931364/In_the_mirror_of_Maya_Deren__Martina_Kudlacek__2003_.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/147936250/In_the_mirror_of_Maya_Deren__Martina_Kudlacek__2003_.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/147946298/In_the_mirror_of_Maya_Deren__Martina_Kudlacek__2003_.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/147941194/In_the_mirror_of_Maya_Deren__Martina_Kudlacek__2003_.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/147951137/In_the_mirror_of_Maya_Deren__Martina_Kudlacek__2003_.part7.rar

Language: English
no pass

Maya Deren - Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

http://i.imagehost.org/0545/Meshes_of_the_Afternoon_1943.jpg

Description: A solitary flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a phone off the hook: discordant images a woman sees as she comes home. She naps and, perhaps, dreams. She sees a hooded figure going down the driveway. The knife is on the stair, then in her bed. The hooded figure puts the flower on her bed then disappears. The woman sees it all happen again. Downstairs, she naps, this time in a chair. She awakes to see a man going upstairs with the flower. He puts it on the bed. The knife is handy. Can these dream-like sequences end happily? A mirror breaks, the man enters the house again. Will he find her?

http://rapidshare.com/files/27970743/Maya_Deren_-_Meshes_Of_The_Afternoon__1943_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27970214/Maya_Deren_-_Meshes_Of_The_Afternoon__1943_.part2.rar

no pass

Maya Deren - Witch's Cradle (1944)

http://j.imagehost.org/0679/vlcsnap-825537.png

"In 1944 Maya made a film at the Peggy Guggenheim Art of this Century Gallery with Marcel Duchamp called Witches Cradle. Deren used the camera, as she envisioned medieval witches and magicians did, to 'defy' time and space through the disappearance and reappearance of objects. Based on an article written by the Frenchman Charles Duits, colleague of Andre Breton and an extra in Ritual in Transfigured Time, Deren compared these medieval witches and magicians to the surrealists, and had a brief association with the movement. She resisted the label attached to her work and defended her position in scholarship and on tour for lecture/demonstrations." (algonet.se)

http://rapidshare.com/files/35107917/Maya_Deren_-_Witchs_Cradle.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/35107880/Maya_Deren_-_Witchs_Cradle.part2.rar

no pass

Maya Deren - At Land (1944)

Description: This is a remarkable short experimental film by the great Maya Deren. Deren is best remembered for the powerful short "Meshes in the Afternoon" and her dance and films about Haiti. This film is perhaps her most rigorous and complex. It is entirely silent and has a remarkable fractured narrative connected by story fragments that have a perfect dreamlike logic. Few filmmakers have come closer to creating images and actions that have such emotional intensity and intellectual suggestiveness.

http://rapidshare.com/files/30256294/Maya_Deren_-_At_Land__1944_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/30256997/Maya_Deren_-_At_Land__1944_.part2.rar

no pass

Maya Deren - A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)

http://i.imagehost.org/0818/Witch_s_Cradle_1944.jpg

Description: Maya Deren's shortest, five-minute A Study in Choreography for Camera seems like an exercise piece to capture a dancer's movement on celluloid, which later on developed into her masterpieces such as Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence.

http://rapidshare.com/files/27969921/Maya.Deren.-.A.Study.In.Choreography.For.Camera._1945_.rar

no pass

Maya Deren - Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

Description: Ritual in Transfigured Time is like a dream, meaning that the various sequences don't seem to have any connection to each other unless you try to approach this film in a different way and not as a conventional hollywood movie.

The main character in the film is Rita Christiani who after a strange scene with Maya Deren herself who disappears startling Rita, appears in this ball with ladies and gentlemen dancing. This film has one of the most beautiful scenes in a Maya Deren's film when Rita Christiani while she's dancing she appears to float in the air.

http://rapidshare.com/files/27970647/Maya_Deren_-_Ritual_in_Transfigured_Time__1946_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27970007/Maya_Deren_-_Ritual_in_Transfigured_Time__1946_.part2.rar

no pass

Maya Deren - Meditation on Violence (1948)

http://i.imagehost.org/0483/Witch_s_Cradle_1944.jpg

Description: A young Oriental man with a headscarf and bare torso shadowboxes indoors in front of a series of unadorned walls, light, dark, both shades. He is then shown exercising outside with a sword in an area surrounded by a low stone wall and overlooking a river, before there is a return to the first sequence.

http://rapidshare.com/files/30321217/Maya.Deren.-.Meditation_on_Violence__1948_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/30321024/Maya.Deren.-.Meditation_on_Violence__1948_.part2.rar

no pass

Maya Deren - The Very Eye of Night (1958)

Description: Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.

http://rapidshare.com/files/27970447/Maya_Deren_Experimental_Films_-_The_Very_Eye_Of_Night__1958_.rar

no pass

Alexander Hammid & Maya Deren - The Private Life of a Cat (1944)

http://img3.imagebanana.com/img/4lzej40/bcduzy.jpg

Description: A male cat courts a female cat and they raise a family together. We see the kittens being born and nurtured by mother, while an interested and proud dad lends his support. Beautifully photographed and executed. With subtitles, no dialog, and a refreshing absence of human beings onscreen. Very touchingly realized by Alexander Hammid, whose collaborations with Maya Deren I had prior acquaintance with, and also highly recommend.

Amply demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt that animals are more authentic and interesting onscreen than people. I recall W.C Fields' comment to the effect that you should never try to act with children or animals because they will invariably upstage you. You don't have to be a fervent cat lover to find yourself utterly charmed and captivated by this sweet and simple gem of a short film. (imdb comment)

http://rapidshare.com/files/183077248/PriLioCat-1944-a77-bj7.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/183077604/PriLioCat-1944-a77-bj7.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/183077986/PriLioCat-1944-a77-bj7.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/183078324/PriLioCat-1944-a77-bj7.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/183078656/PriLioCat-1944-a77-bj7.part5.rar

no pass

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Maya Deren - Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985)

From http://www.mysticfire.com/index.html?cart=1200389063594:

Quote:

Maya Deren takes us on a journey into the fascinating world of the Voudoun religion, whose devotees commune with the cosmic powers through invocation, offerings, song and dance. The Voudoun pantheon of deities, or loa, are witnessed as living gods and goddesses, actually taking possession of their devotees. The soundtrack conveys the incantatory power of the ritual drumming and singing.

"Maya Deren first went to Haiti as an artist . . . but the manifestations of rapture that seized her, transported her beyond the bounds of any art she had ever known."
— Joseph Campbell

From http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/deren.html:

Quote:

In 1947 Deren won the Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix Internationale. The same year she was also awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (10) to begin research on the Voudoun (voodoo) ritual in Haitian culture. A book, recordings of the sounds of the rituals, and the beginnings of a film were the results of her extraordinary research. Deren recorded two albums of Voudoun music “Divine Horsemen” and “Meringues and Folk Ballads of Haiti”. In 1953 she published the definitive study of the Voudoun ritual: Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti. Deren consulted with luminaries like Joseph Campbell and Gregory Bateson in her research and she shot more than 18,000 feet of footage during her three visits between 1947 and 1954. During her research Deren's position became ambiguous. On one hand she was distanced from the project, a medium for the transmission of ideas, but she was also closely involved in the ritual. Her insights on the Voudoun ritual emerge from her participation in the ceremonies. On one of her trips to Haiti, Deren was initiated as a Voudoun priestess.

In 1985 Deren's third husband Teiji Ito and his new wife Cherel assembled and edited the Haitian footage that had remained incomplete since Deren's death. The footage was spliced together to form an anthropological structure and a voice-over narration was added to clarify the details of the ceremonies. Upon its release, critics expressed reservations that the film was at odds with Deren's style and contrasted with her original conception of the film.