In film, I can make the world dance.
– Maya Deren
“I was a very poor poet,” because I thought in terms of images…[and] poetry is an effort to put [visual experience] into verbal terms. When I got a camera in my hands, it was like coming home.”
Born Eleanora Derenkovskaya in Kiev the year of the Russian Revolution, she had a privileged upbringing as the daughter of Russian Jews, a psychiatrist father and a mother who studied music. When she was still a child the family moved to Syracuse, New York, and in her early teens she attended a Swiss boarding school. But by the time she finished her formal education, in 1939, she was a bohemian poet and working as a secretary.
Born Eleanora Derenkovskaya in Kiev the year of the Russian Revolution, she had a privileged upbringing as the daughter of Russian Jews, a psychiatrist father and a mother who studied music. When she was still a child the family moved to Syracuse, New York, and in her early teens she attended a Swiss boarding school. But by the time she finished her formal education, in 1939, she was a bohemian poet and working as a secretary.
Her most consequential secretarial job was for dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, one of the many fascinating talking heads here; it took her to Los Angeles, where she met the Czech experimental filmmaker Alexander Hammid . Collaborating with Hammid, she made her first film, the groundbreaking Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) — a series of metaphorical and metaphysical self-portraits
