Post by Lucky Dan on Mar 15, 2023 13:40:06 GMT
At Land was filmed in the summer of 1944 on Long Island, with at least one interior scene at Maya Deren's Morton Street apartment in New York City. It is Deren's second completed piece. (She started, then abandoned, a film called The Witch's Cradle, featuring Marcel Duchamp, in August 1943.) Like her first film, Meshes in the Afternoon, (posted here) At Land places the filmmaker herself in the action in what The British Film Institute describes as "an inimitable study of social rituals and the human body’s place in nature." It's imitable enough, I think, but only the most shameless of plagiarists would try.
I won't bother to synopsize it since any attempt at doing so would be just that - a bother - and unnecessary since it's a short piece already. Deren believed cinema should exist apart from words as wholly visual art. Attempts at transforming her works to narrative through literal scenic description read as nonsense, as do most attempts at trying to explain its meaning. I can't. The Museum of Modern Art showed At Land in 2011 and they didn't try it either:
According to Deren (American, born Ukraine; 1917-1961) this 15-minute work is a "mythological voyage of the twentieth century," in which "the problem of the individual, as the sole continuous element, is to relate herself to a fluid, apparently incoherent, universe."
I did not come away from my first viewing with anything like that impression, but like atonal music or blank verse, once you know the intent, you get it, and since Maya Deren was also a thoughtful though at times academically dense writer, guidance from the source is available. In an April 1955 letter to James Card, the film preservationist at George Eastman House (and earthly savior to Louise Brooks - look that up sometime) Deren wrote:
At Land has little to do with the inner world of the protagonist; it externalizes the hidden dynamic of the external world, and here the drama results from the activity of the external world. It is as if I had moved from a concern with the life of a fish, to a concern with the sea which accounts for the character of the fish and its life.
In the 2001 documentary In The Mirror of Maya Deren (available on You Tube but plagued by ad breaks so frequent as to make the experience a chore) audio of her voice, which had an almost girlish nasal quality a little like Peggy Cass or Thelma Ritter, is featured throughout, though when and to whom she was speaking is never revealed. Over a sequence from At Land, she is heard saying:
What I do in my films is very (pause) Oh I think very distinctively - I think they are the films of a woman and I think that their characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy. They are a now creature. And a woman has strength to wait. Because she's had to wait. She had to wait nine months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. And she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment but seeing always the person that it will become. Her whole life from her very beginning, it's a - built into her is the sense of becoming. Now in any time form this is a very important sense. I think that my films, putting as much stress as they do upon the constant metamorphosis, one image is always becoming another. That is, it is what is happening that is important in my films, not what is at any moment. This is a woman's time sense and I think it happens more in my films than in almost anyone else's.
Author Anaïs Nin met Deren by chance during the filming and soon after attended a screening of Meshes and At Land in June of 1944. She quoted in her journal from what reads like promotional literature, and though she did not record the source, I suspect the words were written by Deren:
At Land: "A film in the nature of an inverted Odyssey, where the Universe assumes the initiative of movement and confronts the individual with a continuous fluidity toward which, as a constant identity, he seeks to relate himself."
A few more things worth knowing if you're interested in modern art and music, things that I would have liked to know before my first viewing, and things that Deren's contemporary audience of New York artists and writers certainly knew, are the identities of some of those who appear. At the dinner table, playing chess, is designer Alvin Lustig. Later, as Deren walks in a tire rut on a dirt road, she is suddenly joined by a man walking the parallel rut, but look closely and you will see four different men switched places at her side. They are future beat poet Philip Lamantia, then age 16 and in New York pursuing his writing career before his return to San Fransisco; author and film critic Parker Tyler; American avant-garde composer and music theorist John Cage; and Deren's then-husband, collaborator and mentor Alexander Hammid, who also appeared in their first film, Meshes in the Afternoon.
The dark-haired female chess player on the beach is Hella Heyman (billed in the title card as Hamon) more significant here for her photography. After Deren and Hammid divorced in 1947, Hella became Hammid's second wife until her death in 1992.
I'm sure many of those seen at the table, and probably the man in the bed, were recognizable members of the Village culturati of the day, but I don't recognize any and I haven't yet found a "Who's Who in At Land."
This upload features a string quartet score by Los Angeles composer Feona Lee Jones in an appropriately wartime avant-garde style but you can always hit the mute button if you'd prefer to see it the way Deren presented it, silently.
Make of it what you will, or can. Some IMBd reviews read like Rorschach interpretations. (One reviewer described the man in bed as "too needy.") I find it worthwhile for it's visual appeal - Maya is easy to watch, after all, and she knew it - though I was mildly shocked at the appalling chess etiquette. Wiki says, without source, that the chess moves reenact "The Immortal Game," a match played in London in 1851 that featured a double rook sacrifice. That's probably true but I find no confirmation of it. I do see what appears to be an illegal bishop move in the animation sequence.
Anyway, It's quick and fun. Have a look. But whatever you say about it, don't call it surreal. She hated that.
I won't bother to synopsize it since any attempt at doing so would be just that - a bother - and unnecessary since it's a short piece already. Deren believed cinema should exist apart from words as wholly visual art. Attempts at transforming her works to narrative through literal scenic description read as nonsense, as do most attempts at trying to explain its meaning. I can't. The Museum of Modern Art showed At Land in 2011 and they didn't try it either:
According to Deren (American, born Ukraine; 1917-1961) this 15-minute work is a "mythological voyage of the twentieth century," in which "the problem of the individual, as the sole continuous element, is to relate herself to a fluid, apparently incoherent, universe."
I did not come away from my first viewing with anything like that impression, but like atonal music or blank verse, once you know the intent, you get it, and since Maya Deren was also a thoughtful though at times academically dense writer, guidance from the source is available. In an April 1955 letter to James Card, the film preservationist at George Eastman House (and earthly savior to Louise Brooks - look that up sometime) Deren wrote:
At Land has little to do with the inner world of the protagonist; it externalizes the hidden dynamic of the external world, and here the drama results from the activity of the external world. It is as if I had moved from a concern with the life of a fish, to a concern with the sea which accounts for the character of the fish and its life.
In the 2001 documentary In The Mirror of Maya Deren (available on You Tube but plagued by ad breaks so frequent as to make the experience a chore) audio of her voice, which had an almost girlish nasal quality a little like Peggy Cass or Thelma Ritter, is featured throughout, though when and to whom she was speaking is never revealed. Over a sequence from At Land, she is heard saying:
What I do in my films is very (pause) Oh I think very distinctively - I think they are the films of a woman and I think that their characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy. They are a now creature. And a woman has strength to wait. Because she's had to wait. She had to wait nine months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. And she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment but seeing always the person that it will become. Her whole life from her very beginning, it's a - built into her is the sense of becoming. Now in any time form this is a very important sense. I think that my films, putting as much stress as they do upon the constant metamorphosis, one image is always becoming another. That is, it is what is happening that is important in my films, not what is at any moment. This is a woman's time sense and I think it happens more in my films than in almost anyone else's.
Author Anaïs Nin met Deren by chance during the filming and soon after attended a screening of Meshes and At Land in June of 1944. She quoted in her journal from what reads like promotional literature, and though she did not record the source, I suspect the words were written by Deren:
At Land: "A film in the nature of an inverted Odyssey, where the Universe assumes the initiative of movement and confronts the individual with a continuous fluidity toward which, as a constant identity, he seeks to relate himself."
A few more things worth knowing if you're interested in modern art and music, things that I would have liked to know before my first viewing, and things that Deren's contemporary audience of New York artists and writers certainly knew, are the identities of some of those who appear. At the dinner table, playing chess, is designer Alvin Lustig. Later, as Deren walks in a tire rut on a dirt road, she is suddenly joined by a man walking the parallel rut, but look closely and you will see four different men switched places at her side. They are future beat poet Philip Lamantia, then age 16 and in New York pursuing his writing career before his return to San Fransisco; author and film critic Parker Tyler; American avant-garde composer and music theorist John Cage; and Deren's then-husband, collaborator and mentor Alexander Hammid, who also appeared in their first film, Meshes in the Afternoon.
The dark-haired female chess player on the beach is Hella Heyman (billed in the title card as Hamon) more significant here for her photography. After Deren and Hammid divorced in 1947, Hella became Hammid's second wife until her death in 1992.
I'm sure many of those seen at the table, and probably the man in the bed, were recognizable members of the Village culturati of the day, but I don't recognize any and I haven't yet found a "Who's Who in At Land."
This upload features a string quartet score by Los Angeles composer Feona Lee Jones in an appropriately wartime avant-garde style but you can always hit the mute button if you'd prefer to see it the way Deren presented it, silently.
Make of it what you will, or can. Some IMBd reviews read like Rorschach interpretations. (One reviewer described the man in bed as "too needy.") I find it worthwhile for it's visual appeal - Maya is easy to watch, after all, and she knew it - though I was mildly shocked at the appalling chess etiquette. Wiki says, without source, that the chess moves reenact "The Immortal Game," a match played in London in 1851 that featured a double rook sacrifice. That's probably true but I find no confirmation of it. I do see what appears to be an illegal bishop move in the animation sequence.
Anyway, It's quick and fun. Have a look. But whatever you say about it, don't call it surreal. She hated that.