Silently, a woman wakes on a beach as the tides go in reverse. Her dreamscape unfolds as she tries to locate a chess piece traveling from the beach to a party to a country road and then back.

At Land is first and foremost a dream projection. Meaning that, while if it’s either surreal or not, what we see is a not the narration of a dream or even the interpretation of a dream; it’s the shared experience of a dream. Like, in dreams, you change from one location to another, or the person you are talking to suddenly become somebody else, or a Walt Disney look alike in a bed may be creepy, without any logical reaction to the strange nature of it because while you are dreaming you are just experiencing it, not trying to understand it. I strongly suggest that with this film, in fact, most of Deren’s films, to let got to the rational function of “understanding” and just flow with it.

I don’t think that most of Lynch or Buñuel’s films are really onirical, maybe they are surrealistic on an absourdist level or rich on Jungian symbolism, but in the end, they have a basic narrative structure and usually bring a closure to whatever the film is about. Maya Deren’s At Land is not based on rethorical figures or a discernible point; I don’t even think there is no explicit symbolism to it (maybe Deren has explained it in some essay, but I haven’t read her yet). It’s experiencing the whole thing as if we are in Deren’s head while she is dreaming. Of course, this implies the alienation of most viewers who may be in need of closure. Few films are successful as shared dreams, Malle’s Black Moon or Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet come to mind.

Comercially, Kubrick tried and achieved to some extend the share dream with Wide Eyes Shut, but it’s only last year’s blockbuster Inception the one which has nailed it. Of all the references that are to be found about the excellent Inception, At Land it’s the most clear influence, from the beach opening to the dream experience to the search of the totem and getting back to the first “dream layer”.

So, even 60 years and something later, Deren is still a truly influential filmmaker.

	
At.Land.1944.1080p.BluRay.FLAC.2.0.x264-KoMI.mkv

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Runtime: 	15 min 29 s
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#1:  	zxx 2.0ch FLAC @ 134 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 43.6 kb/s (Commentary by film curator Thomas Beard)

https://nitro.download/view/5B948AA1F609E18/At.Land.1944.1080p.BluRay.FLAC.2.0.x264-KoMI.mkv

Language(s):Silent, English (commentary)
Subtitles:None

The post Maya Deren – At Land (1944) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A black and white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian vodou that was shot by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren between 1947 and 1952 and edited and completed by Deren’s third husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren’s death. Most of the film consists of images of dancing and bodies in motion during rituals in Rada and Petro services. Deren had studied dance as well as photography and filmmaking. She originally went to Haiti with the funding from a Guggenheim fellowship and the stated intention of filming the dancing that forms a crucial part of the vodou ceremony. The film that resulted, however, reflected Deren’s increasing personal engagement with vodou and its practitioners (Wilcken, 1986). While this ultimately resulted in Deren disregarding the guidelines of the fellowship, Deren was able to record scenes that probably would have been inaccessible to other filmmakers. Deren’s original notes, film footage, and wire recordings are in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archive Research Center.

Divine.Horsemen.The.Living.Gods.of.Haiti.1985.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	50 min 36 s
Size: 	1.39 GiB
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#1:  	English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 123 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 103 kb/s (Commentary by film scholar Moira Jean Sullivan)

https://nitro.download/view/226E67930E9A1C2/Divine.Horsemen.The.Living.Gods.of.Haiti.1985.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Maya Deren – Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Created by Maya Deren as part of a Toronto Film Society workshop, this unpublished film ‘poem’ is a luminous work of nighttime choreography. It was also a trial run for her later film, The Very Eye of Night” — from the dvd

ensemble.avi

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Runtime: 	6 min 18 s
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https://nitro.download/view/C1866C7E232D300/ensemble.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Maya Deren – Ensemble for Somnambulists (1951) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

meditation.on.violence.1949.1080p.bluray.x264-bipolar.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/D5D02B6EDBBDDE7/meditation.on.violence.1949.1080p.bluray.x264-bipolar.mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:None (not needed)

The post Maya Deren – Meditation on Violence (1949) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“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)

486MB | 12m 16s | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4CE332DAEFD7609/The_Witch’s_Cradle_(Maya_Deren,_1943).mkv

Language(s):Silent
Subtitles:None

The post Maya Deren – Witch’s Cradle (1944) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
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.

+Commentary by film scholar Moira Sullivan

747MB | 14m 33s | 960×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/39B5085A4B4EA7C/Ritual_in_Transfigured_Time_(1946)_720p_BluRay_x264-trand.mkv>

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Maya Deren – Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A man dances in several locations, edited to have a fluent effect.

52MB | 2m 24s | 810×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/9DFE59612BC88CB/A_Study_in_Choreography_for_Camera_(1945)_576p_BluRay_x264-trand.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Maya Deren – A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) first appeared on Cinema of the World.