https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTcPuXn-eEF9NCX0dOctf208l4BWbKBlLiyFVw8FqfLqR-zezo2Ys3yd2q2pw4aY0p8n1lVB58WDHKW/pub
Mythic Philosophy and Maya Deren
Exploring the ideas of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung in Maya Deren’s three films
Jenny Chernansky
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
December 2017
“facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter,' Maya Deren.”
― Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
Maya Deren’s work in film, specifically Meshes in the Afternoon, At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time, and later in her book Divine Horsemen, share concepts intertwined with Joseph Campbell and subsequently Carl Jung. Deren’s work reflects the myths and environment of her time, in keeping with her knowledge and interest of psychology and anthropology. I will also begin with some mention of Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy on Photography which bears some light on a philosophical context of ideas which can relate to Deren’s work and complements some of her own theories.
Some of my sources and arguments represent interpretations of Deren’s work. Deren herself cautioned against “a one-to-one deciphering that can account neither for the transformative energies nor for structure” (Turim 85) in Meshes in the Aftenoon and her other films in response to critics who viewed them in mainly psychoanalytic terms. Many of my references argue for interpretations, should be viewed as such, and not as definitive explanations of Maya Deren’s work. I would simply argue that Deren’s work could benefit by being viewed in the light of some of contemporary philosophical, anthropological, and psychological ideas, specifically her contemporary and friend Joseph Campbell. Carl Jung had a profound influence on Campbell.
Deren was born in Kiev in 1917. Deren’s father was the Russian psychologist Solomon Derenkowsky and her mother Marie Fiedler. During the rise of the second world war, her family moved to New York. Deren grew up around the time of the emergence of the avant-garde and she was exposed to many interesting influences while in living Greenwich Village. She soon met her husband, Alexandr Hammid who was a well-known Czech filmmaker and had a circle of friends including Anais Nin and Joseph Campbell. Deren was originally named Eleonora Derenkowsky, but she sought out a new identity, so her husband (at the time) and cocreator Alexandr Hammid found the name Maya for her, the name of a goddess in several different religions around the world. In the computer online dictionary, Maya is defined as “the supernatural power wielded by gods and demons to produce illusions” and “the power by which the universe becomes manifest; the illusion or appearance of the phenomenal world”.
Deren mentions in her essay Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality that despite the advancement of filmmaking in the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood "interrupted" this "by the intrusions of theatrical traditions into the film medium" (1960, 152). For Deren the purpose of experimental film was manipulating the image-like property of film in a conscious way so that the film is built one piece at a time, with each image having importance and meaning, and so developing new forms of cinematic narrative. She explains in her book An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film that film and image are not to be confused, and only that by them being understood in their own right can they be used to create new narrative forms (1946, 3-5). Some of the new forms Deren created were montage sequences, applied jump-cuts, altered speed and camera settings. These often had an effect which upset concepts of time and space. -- in Deren's words -- "to create [an] experience" (1946, 4). (Varga)
Deren differed from Hollywood filmmakers in that her lead female characters, often played by herself, were not objectified or used for the purpose of visual pleasure. Deren created a "personal cinema [that] exemplifies the feminist anthem 'the personal is political'" and through this approach positioning her films "against cinema's typical theme of the masculine subject's Oedipal narrative, with wom[e]n as the object (and outcome) of desire". (Geller 2006, 142; Varga)
Deren saw her work as innately feminine. She saw her film making as coming specifically from the perspective of the female. Deren explains how women are always in state of becoming and men are focused on the moment. In Kudlacek's documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren Deren stated that her films are “very characteristic of woman, dealing with the time quality. The strength of men is their great sense of immediacy, women have strength to wait.” She says time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. She said women see things in the stage of becoming, seeing a child as the creature they will become. In any time form this is an important sense. Her films put stress on the constant metamorphosis. “One image is always becoming another. It is a woman’s time-sense”.
Maya Deren has been considered by some as the first feminist film maker, but she was far more than that. She was well versed in Psychology and also pioneered in Anthropology and Dance. She began her artistic career as a poet, but found film to be a much better medium due to her visual thinking. Her work is often associated with surrealism and although her work may bare similarities, she took a separate stance on the artistic process.
The idea of magical thinking and the primitive is described by Deren in her manifesto Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. The idea of the “modern primitive” is an inaccurate description of art in relation to what is considered early “primitive” art in that early “primitive” art was actually ahead of its time and represented the forefront of a social system. Early man had a direct relationship with artwork and would often use it as a means of affecting the world around him. Two dimensional images were created in a simplified form as a means for controlling one’s environment, and often had “magical” connotations. This is in contrast to the “modern primitive”, who is considered an outsider or on the outskirts of contemporary society in order to create a “pure” art form.
Vilém Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography Considers a similar perspective on the development of man in relation to art. He looks at an interpretation of photography within the frame of history and evolution of humanity. Flusser describes how humanity has two major turning points - the first being the development of the written word which takes ideas and puts them into symbols, and the second being the advancement of technology with the development of photography. Flusser argues that the development of writing changed the way people think from “magical thinking” to linear thinking. Before writing, time was seen as circular, there was no sense of advancement simply direct cause and effect. The sun rose and set, and seasons changed and repeated. It wasn’t until humans could record the past that time had meaning and change could be accounted for. Writing also served as a symbolic mediary between an idea and reality. The next development came with photography. The significance of which is that photos become a way to bypasses meaning or symbolic reference of meaning and instead transforms ideas into a direct form without a "symbolic" intermediary. Flusser discusses how once machines were an extension of humans, but now humans have become an extension of machines. He goes on to describe the apparatus of the camera, and how using these devices distances humanity further and further from the meaning of things because we do not need to understand how it works we simply push a button. He defends a need to promote a philosophy in photography, where the "author" of the photograph be encouraged to systematically understand their intention and carry out a purposeful image that has meaning instead of just pushing a button.
In “Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, Moving the Dancers Souls”, Ute Hall talks about Deren’s association with surrealism and her aversion to it. Her methods may bare a strong resemblance to surrealism, with her techniques and object relationships. Although, “Deren’s cinematic tricks that associate, condense, and displace the visual material actually correspond to what Freud described as the process of dream work and to what the surrealists called expressions of the subconscious. The difference between her art form and that of the surrealists is that Deren never thought that these techniques derived from a hidden, unconscious secret self or soul. She insisted that they were the result of consciously applied effort by the artist through his or her art instruments” (Nichols 163, quoted in Hall).
Deren again argues a similar perspective in her manifesto. She explained how her perspective differs from that of surrealism in that surrealism argues for instinctive unconscious motivations for creative output, where instead she believed that one should harness creative methods consciously to make a deliberate effect. Deren says in Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film “My repeated insistence upon the distinctive function of form in art – my insistence, that the distinction of art is that it is neither simply an expression, of pain, for example, nor an impression of pain but is itself a form which creates pain (or whatever its emotional intent)-might seem to point to a classicism.” Where surrealism turned to Freud (who believed actions are guided by unconscious motivations which stem from repressed infantile sexual desires), Deren, who was well versed in psychology, may have had a perspective more similar to that of Carl Jung- a contemporary and student of Freud. Jung had a profound influence on Campbell, who adopted many of his concepts regarding a “collective unconscious” and universal mythological symbols and archetypes which represent aspects of human nature that are common to all peoples.
According to Joseph Campbell, “These [mythological] symbols stem from the psyche; they speak from and to the spirit. And they are in fact the vehicles of communication between the deeper depths of our spiritual life and this relatively thin layer of consciousness by which we govern our daylight existences.” (Pathways to Bliss)
As Campbell writes in his introduction to The Portable Jung
“Briefly summarized, the essential realizations of this pivotal work of Jung's career were, first, that since the archetypes or norms of myth are common to the human species, they are inherently expressive neither of local social circumstance nor of any individual's singular experience, but of common human needs, instincts, and potentials; second, that in the traditions of any specific folk, local circumstance will have provided the imagery through which the archetypal themes are displayed in the supporting myths of the culture; third, that if the manner of life and thought of an individual so departs from the norms of the species that a pathological state of imbalance ensues, of neurosis or psychosis, dreams and fantasies analogous to fragmented myths will appear; and fourth, that such dreams are best interpreted, not by reference backward to repressed infantile memories (reduction to autobiography), but by comparison outward with the analogous mythic forms (amplification to mythology), so that the disturbed individual may learn to see himself depersonalized in the mirror of the human spirit and discover by analogy the way to his own larger fulfillment.” (xxii)
Joseph Campbell first met Maya Deren just after he completed Hero with a Thousand Faces, and right after she returned from her first stint in Haiti. In 1947, after receiving a grant from Guggenheim Fellowship, Deren left for Haiti. She had the intention of filming Haitian dance practices, but after a particularly potent rapture she called “The White Darkness”, she became inspired and ended up writing a book on Voudoun Mythology. In Deren’s book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti Joseph Campbell wrote the foreword in which he says “Maya Deren…was an artist: therein the secret of her ability to recognize “facts of the mind” when presented through the “fictions” of mythology”
In Campbell’s foreward to Maya Deren’s book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti Campbell described her writing on Haitian Voodoun as “an experienced and comprehended initiation into the mysteries of man’s harmony within himself and with the cosmic process”.
In “Maya Deren’s Ethnographic Representation of Ritual and Myth in Haiti”, Moira Sullivan writes:
“Deren argued that the process of creation for the artist/magician and the scientist was similar: making the invisible visible. She discovered this was also true of the priest/priestess of the religion of Haitian Voudoun. Embracing this rich, metaphysical vision, Deren united the organic nature of the universe, she worked to combine the elements of ritual, myth, and dance in film and written representation.”
In Haiti Deren was initiated as priestess of Ezili Freda or Erzulie who is a feminine water deity of love and sensuality and fine things. Erzulie is related to the arts and to everything that is beyond necessary. This is how the Haitian Voodoo sees the goddess of love-as everything that is beyond human, unnecessary for survival. Deren in the documentary says Possession is the becoming of an identity not the freeing of an identity.
‘To understand that the self must leave if the loa is to enter, is to understand that one cannot be man and god at once... The serviteur must be induced to surrender his ego, that the archetype become manifest’ (Deren quoted in Jackson 2002: 156). The use of drumming is necessary in providing a common rhythm for all participants, the sound that ‘unites’ them, depersonalizing them through the collective” (Deren1953: 258)
According to Sullivan, Divine Horsemen provides an important background to the ritual enactment of myth in Voudoun. As Deren points out in her introduction: “myth is the voyage of exploration in this metaphysical space”. Campbell’s cross cultural studies and Jungian conceptions served as foundations for this approach.”
Deren writes of Campbell “it is my subsequent contact with Joseph Campbell, and my readings in his many writings (particularly The Hero with A Thousand Faces), which sharpened my awareness of that which man has in common, as expressed on the cosmic level of mythological concepts”. (Lazaro,
Campbell outlined the basic stages of this mythic cycle and explores common variations in the hero’s journey, which he argued is an operative metaphor for a whole culture as well as for an individual. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell posited the existence of a “Monomyth” which refers to “a universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to, heroic tales in every culture”.
Deren’s three films Meshes in the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time are often seen as a trilogy due to the continuity of themes and similar symbolism and style pervading throughout. Each of the three films has Deren appearing as a leading figure in the central narrative, and each share visual and symbolic elements in common linking each of the three individual stories. The female character always appears in a transforming landscape, which describes a voyage both literally and metaphorically, traversing a physical landscape and dreamlike dimension. The protagonist’s perspective is also seen in relation to herself, her surroundings, and society – demonstrating the perception of the ego from the inside and outside. In Kudlacek’s documentary Deren explained: “[t]he girl in the film is not a personal persona – she’s a personage”.
The cyclical nature of these films, and their universal symbolic themes could be interpreted within the framework of Jung, Lacan, as well as Campbell’s ‘Monomyth”. Many have written interpretations and psycho-analytical explanations some of which I will offer as interpretative references to display the symbolic nature of Deren’s work and its relationship to psychology. My intention is not to offer these as concrete explanations but as examples of scholarly references showing the effect of her films.
In the article “Going Through the Motions: Journeying through Myth and Ritual in Three Maya Deren Films”, Daniela Mejia writes:
“By manipulating the camera’s ability to switch points of view and evoke symbolic understanding, Deren highlights the subjectivity of actions as the woman continues her journey. Familiar mise-en-scène additionally joins the films together on a more theoretical level. Especially evident in their opening and closing scenes, actions in one physical setting often leave off unfinished, only to pick up again in the subsequent movie...” As an example, “…in its first climax – where the female Deren character shatters an illusion of a man into multiple, mirror-like shards – a rare break occurs from the filming of domestic spaces indoors to reveal waves tumbling onto a shore. The resulting superimposed image of both constructed “inside” and natural “outside” spaces then proceeds with a shot taken completely removed from the home and facing the beach. A similar outside shot starts the next film At Land, as a washed-up female emerges from a tide in its opening minutes. Continuing this thread, the second film also contains a beach scene later mimicked in the third movie, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946). Just as At Land ends with a female on the shore, running into the horizon with her arms raised high, a parallel figure emerges in Ritual, whose ending again returns the setting to the ocean. From her earlier appearance when she was playing with yarn, the Deren character reappears at the end on a harbor, plunging into the water with her arms raised similarly above her head. These similarities again link the three films literally while also drawing on the cultural associations of constructed spaces versus natural spaces. As the journey progresses, these independent-yet-interdependent narratives gradually reveal a deeper meaning behind the three enigmatic voyages: to examine the relationship between the internal self as it relates to the external.” (Mejia)
The mirror and water are common symbols used by Deren in her films. I believe it is worthwhile to note that Deren had a strong connection with water. Not only was it a common motif in her work, but also in her life. In Kudlacek’s documentary, it is said “In her mind, she was a sea creature”. The idea of water, and its constant state of flux bares similarity to her film concepts.
For Jung, Water ‘is the commonest symbol for the unconscious… which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness’… whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.” (Jung 1968 quoted in Paganopolus)
The mirror stage is a concept of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. In basic terms it is a stage in which infants recognize themselves in and by doing so they become an object that can be viewed by the child from outside themselves. This new perception relates to the duality between the ego and the body as well as the real and the imaginary.
Meshes in the Afternoon
Gellar writes in The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde:
“The dream commences a cycle of repetition that illustrates Deren ritualistically chasing an androgynous person with a mirror where its face should be, a person who threatens confrontation while nevertheless eluding Deren's gaze. It is significant that this mirror never reflects back Deren's image. Instead, the mirrored enigmatic figure places on the bed the paper flower, the original signifier of sexual difference. In this way, the flower, and its relationship to the mirrored character, communicates the correspondence of the Other (ultimately Deren in relation to Alexander Hammid's male character) with sexual difference, a difference that is threatening to the female subject. With each circuit of the chase of the mirrored Other, and each refusal of the mirror to cast back a reflection, the female character becomes more and more infantilized, presenting a regression of subjectivity. This scenario is paradigmatic of the stakes of mirror-stage for the female, as Jacqueline Rose explains: “Lacan's conception of the mirror-stage is founded upon a structure of subjectivity whose basic relation is that between a fragmented or inco-ordinate subject and its totalizing image (the structural equivalent of the metonymic relation, part for whole). In order to vehicle the image, the subject's own position must be fixed. ... It is from this fixity, and the images that are thus produced, that the subject is able to postulate objects of permanence and identity in the world. The mirror-stage is, therefore, the focus for the interdependency of image, identity and identification. ... As a result of identifying itself with a discreet image, the child will be able to postulate a series of equivalencies between the objects of the surrounding world, based on the conviction that each has a recognizable permanence.”
The Oedipal complex, in a very condensed explanation, is a Freudian term relating to the concept that man’s impulses can be linked to a repressed desire to kill his father and marry his mother. Although Jung was a student of Freud and learned much from his dream theories, he later broke off from Freud and developed his own theories where sex played a secondary role to a more spiritual impulse. According to Gellar:
“Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) could be said to exemplify Teresa de Lauretis's idea of "the really avant-garde work in cinema and in feminism," which "is narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance, since it seeks to stress the duplicity of that scenario and that specific contradiction of the female subject in it-the contradiction whereby historical women must work with and against Oedipus"”
In The World of Maya Deren, Zsanett Varga describes Deren’s work in Meshes as images which reflect the "doubled self" of the dreamer. She talks about how the idea of duality of the self brings up questions about the self through the structure of self-images. Deren writes in her notebook how she viewed film as two-dimensional, but "adding the dimension of time […] made it metamorphic" (1947, 23). Symbols, combined with the manipulation of time and space through various shots, allow for the function of the film to be fulfilled by creating a new reality. Inside this "relativistic universe," the individual is the focus with the addition of "continuous elements" she attemps to find her way in an "apparently incoherent" environment (Deren, 1946).
At Land
Maya Deren’s At Land begins on a beach where Deren’s character lies on the shore with the waves tossing around her. The waves are also shown in reverse, and mimic the ending of Meshes. Deren writes about the female: “She is not drowned; rather the scene implies a birth or passage from one element into another” (Adventures” 80). This contrasts with the implication of death in Meshes where the female is shown after the murder/suicide scene lying on the beach with seaweed.
The chess game being played could be understood as a symbolic representation of society and the social roles individuals play. When Deren’s character returns to the beach and watches the chess game, she takes the white queen and runs away from the two female players. Pramaggiore explains that this scene symbolically depicts society relations and it implies a connectedness between individuals, as the pieces are only allowed their moves in relation to others. So by Deren taking the chess piece she could be showing "the escape from oppressive social, sexual, and aesthetic rules" (Pramaggiore 1997, 31).
In her essay, Deren says “the protagonist, instead of undertaking the long voyage of search for adventure, finds instead that the universe itself has usurped the dynamic action which was once the prerogative of human will and confronts her with volatile and relentless metamorphosis in which her personal identity is the sole constancy.” (1960, 165)
In Kudlacek’s documentary, Deren says she intended the film as "almost a mythological statement in a sense that folktales are mythological archetypal statements". At the same time, the focus on the individual does not shift as this short presents a relativistic universe […] in which the problem of the individual, as the sole continuous element, is to relate herself to a fluid, apparently incoherent, universe. It is in a sense a mythological voyage of the twentieth century. (Deren 1960, 166; Varga)
Ritual in Transfigured Time
As in the previous two films, Ritual in Transfigured time ends with an escape into the sea. There are three related sections - beginning with three females (which could represent three aspects of the self who metamorphise into each other throughout the piece), a social gathering or party and an outdoor dance. Deren constructed this as a three part “rite of passage” who is said to transform from “widow into bride”, (Kelman quoted by Mejia). The middle section or dinner party has the Deren character interacting with the guests in a mechanical push and pull fashion wearing black, emphasizing Deren’s reference of the female at this section as “the widow” (Sullivan quoted by Mejia). This continues until she meets a male figure and from here the setting changes into an outdoor area with references to Greek Myth. There is a sense of liberation and joy. The widow becomes a bride again, the cycle continues, and the woman returns to the sea completing the trilogy within a trilogy, which may be perhaps a circle. (Mejia, 2012)
In the notes from Ritual in Transfigured Time Deren explains that
“A ritual is characterized by the de-personalization of the individual. In some cases it is even marked by the use of masks and voluminous garments, so that the person of the performer is virtually anonymous; and it is marked also by the participation of the community... as a homogeneous entity in which the inner patterns of relationship between the elements create, together, a large movement of the body as a whole. The intent of such a depersonalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension and frees him from the specialization and confines of personality... the collective is the creative artist” (“An Anagram”21).
Daniela Majia interprets Deren’s work as: “The final metamorphosis thus occurs at the moment of change from life to death. But Ritual inverts the traditional meaning of death by presenting it as a step in a process, a stage in a ritual to liberate the self. Rather than tragically ending her life, the female enters the primordial, “eternal form of life and nature” (Kelman quoted by Mejia) Through the inversion, Deren uproots the normal associations of termination and sadness in death.” (Mejia, 2012).
According to Jung, the synthesis of unconscious contents into consciousness becomes a ‘psychic transformation’ in which ‘we recognize as an individuation process’ (1968: 147). ‘Individuation’ is described as ‘a life in which the individual becomes what he always was’ (Jung 1968: 40)
Michelangelo Paganopoulos writes about Jung and Deren in “The Archetype of Transformation in Maya Deren’s Film Rituals”:
“For Jung ritual was a matter of experience; the personal way to connect to the wider collective through the luminous experiential concept of ‘numinous’ (Otto 1958: 5-11). This is manifested in both rituals and films, which bring on the surface certain a priori forces kept within us: on the one hand, Jung’s concept of ‘collective unconscious’ which assumes the primacy and reality of the psyche, and on the other, Durkheim’s concept of ‘collective consciousness’ which begins with ‘society’ as the a priori external force that influences our everyday being. Deren’s films about rituals illustrate the tensional but also complementary relationship between the collective unconscious (internal) of the director and the collective consciousness(external) of her society. Particularly, Ritual in Transfigured Time, which portrays the initiation and descent of a young girl into the dark abyss of her soul, is Deren’s personal journey from the surface of the collective consciousness of her bourgeois background into the depths of her unconscious. The film’s rich dream-symbolism of the metamorphosis of a widow to a bride, invites for ‘Jung’s theory of symbols of transformation (that) provides a language to understand the permutations of desire in cultural psychology’ (Williams 2001:121).” (Paganopoulos; Jung and Film II: The Return).
Paganopoulos refers to the archetypal themes of transformation in relation to anthropological approaches to the phenomena of possession, as filmed in Deren’s documentary Divine Horsemen. He argues that Deren fuses “fiction and reality in making her life the heroine of her films, in order to reflect on the ‘dark’ Other as the collective libido of Western culture”. Deren unearths the “bourgeois mask that hides the real self/society underneath it, as she reverses the ‘mirror of water’ towards the world she comes from, reflecting on the hypocrisy of her own life in New York.” He argues further that “in her instinctive reaction to run towards the ocean: ‘The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself, new-born from the dark maternal cave of the unconscious where he was stranded by the introversion or regression of libido’ (Jung 1967: 374)”(Paganopoulos).
“And so it happens that if anyone…undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures (any one of which may swallow him).” (Campbell, Hero With A Thousand Faces)
Paganopoulos compares the escape into the ocean with Jung’s concepts of transformation. ‘...along-drawn-out process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being. This “other being” is the other person in ourselves... the inner friend of the soul... Our attitude towards the inner voice alternates between two extremes; it is regarded as undiluted nonsense or as the voice of God’ (Jung 1968: 131- 132). The sequence could be viewed as a portrayal of self-sacrifice, which Jung describes as the ‘pre-condition of the manifestation of the Archetype of the Transformation of the Libido’. This self-sacrifice represents individuality in the ‘highest sense’ which ‘can be called transcendent’ (Jung 1969:258). (Paganopoulos)
“Viewing these three shorts as a collective trilogy morphs their conclusions from a frustrating setback for understanding, to the very meaning of how myth and ritual can provide important motivations for human existence, as they have throughout history…As the journey progresses, these independent-yet-interdependent narratives gradually reveal a deeper meaning behind the three enigmatic voyages: to examine the relationship between the internal self as it relates to the external…The film extends this concept to create a psychological allegory for understanding how mental perceptions project outward onto existence. By blurring the distinctions between conscious-subconscious and dream-reality, the film shows how pervasively the external penetrates the internal mind and vice versa” (Mejia, Film Matters dec 2012)
I would argue that this cycle could be seen as a symbolic example of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Going into the underworld (death in meshes), confronting the self and society (at land), and returning to the whole (Ritual). Deren’s concepts of depersonalization appear very much in sync with Jung’s individuation process and Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Although it may not have been her conscious intention, I would simply argue that Deren’s work could benefit by being viewed in the light of Joseph Campbell and some of the contemporary thinkers of her time. Maya Deren’s symbolic uses of mirrors, water and time, along with her thoughts on the self and artistic expression all reflect concepts referred to in the psychology of Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell and philosophers whose work had an impact on the former.
Campbell wrote “All mythology, whether of the folk or the literati, preserves the iconography of a spiritual adventure that men have been accomplishing repeatedly for millennia, and which, whenever it occurs, reveals such constant features that the innumerable mythologies of the world resemble each other as dialects of a single language”. I believe this statement also encompasses Deren’s own films, and the transcendent mythology she created.
Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung appear to have direct relationship to the artistic work of Maya Deren. Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a thousand faces, which argues for a universal myth that is inherent in all people and also ties into Jung’s concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes could all be seen as being represented in Maya Deren’s work and her interests. Deren’s continued interest in anthropology, leading her to travel to Haiti and write a book on Haitian Voodoo (with an introduction by Campbell no less) further demonstrates an interest in magical and mythical thinking in relation to art.
“Full circle from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb we come, an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us like the substance of a dream.”
― Joseph Campbell
Works Cited
Campbell, Hero With A Thousand Faces Princeton U Press. 1949. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.604.4916&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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Campbell, Joseph The Mythic Dimention – Comparative Mythology. Ed Kudler, David; Van Couvering, Anthony. Joseph Campbell Foundation 2011
C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell (Editor). The Portable Jung. R.F.C. Hull (Translator)
Penguin Books 1976. https://archive.org/stream/MemoriesDreamsReflectionsCarlJung/The+Portable+Jung_djvu.txt
Jung, Carl Gustav
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung(2ndedition) Translated by R.F. C. Hull London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1967)
CW Volume V : The Archetype of Transformation (1968)
CW Volume 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1968b)
CW Volume 9, Part II: AION (1969)
CW Volume 11: Psychology and Religion
Deren, Maya. “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film”. Yonkers, New York: The Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946.
Deren, Maya. "Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality." Daedalus, 1960: 150-167.
Deren, Maya. "From the Notebook of Maya Deren”, 1947. October, Vol. 14 MIT Press; 1980: http://www.jstor.org.proxy.artic.edu/stable/pdf/778529.pdf
Deren, Maya and Gregory Bateson. "An Exchange of Letters between Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson." 1980: 16-20.
Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Germany 1983
Geller, Theresa L. "The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes in the Afternoon and its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde." Biography, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, pp. 140-158,270, Art, Design & Architecture Collection, http://proxy.artic.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.artic.edu/docview/215621501?accountid=26320.
Geller, Theresa L. “Each Film Was Built as a Chamber and Became a Corridor”. There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond. 2009
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