The biggest shakeup for me on the latest edition of the Sight & Sound Top 100 list was not the much-discussed displacement of Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the #1 slot by Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, but the total elimination of one of the precious few short films on the list: Buñuel & Dalí’s 1920s surrealist landmark Un Chien Andalou. The only thing that lessened the sting of that loss from the canon-defining list was that another surreal masterwork was added to take its place: Maya Deren’s 1940s follow-up Meshes of the Afternoon. Whereas Un Chien Andalou is a free-association free-for-all that defies any ascribed linear narrative, Deren’s later mutation offers more tangible themes, characters, and progression from scene to scene. Remarkably, it loses none of the dream-logic surrealism in the process, simulating the out-of-body experience of a young woman taking an ill-advised afternoon nap and becoming unmoored from reality as a result. Like Un Chien Andalou, its dreamworld iconography is foundational to the artform, recalling monumental works to follow as daunting & disparate as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Often cited as “The Mother of the Avant-Garde,” Deren collaborated with then-husband Alexander Hammid to translate her artistic background in dance & poetry to reinvent cinema as a medium in works like Meshes. She traveled internationally with her films, staging lectures & debates to reshape public perception of what The Movies are and what they could be. Anyone who watches Meshes of the Afternoon instantly understands her to be one of the medium’s all-time greats, just as worthy of prominence on the Sight & Sound list as Buñuel (who, as of 2022, has fallen off the publication’s prestigious Top 100 list entirely).

So, after years of respecting Deren as one of the all-time greats based on that one title alone, I figured I was overdue to catch up with the rest of her work. Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray disc The Maya Deren Collection is as good of a crash course in her greater catalog as any, making for a much clearer, more concise compendium than the Wikipedia articles listing her most notable works among her unfinished projects. After spending an evening with that collection, it’s clear to me that Deren has at least a trio of films worthy of the all-timer status Meshes now enjoys. 1944’s At Land and 1946’s Ritual in Transfigured Time are just as essential to appreciating Deren’s artistry as Meshes of the Afternoon, something Deren seemed to be aware of herself when she screened that exact trilogy under the banner “Three Abandoned Films” in New York City in 1946, in one of her earliest art-scene triumphs. For its part, At Land feels like a direct beach-trip sequel to Meshes, like those TV movie sequels to sitcoms where the cast goes on a tropical vacation. Deren’s dazed everywoman washes up on a mysterious shore, then impossibly sprints through interior & exterior spaces in the exact looping, interpretive-dance logic she puzzles her way through in Meshes. By the time she made Ritual in Transfigured Time, she feels more firmly rooted in New York City, staging an East Coast cocktail party where guests continually move affectionately towards each other but never convincingly make contact — every single interaction belonging in the next day’s “Missed Connections” newspaper column. As a trio, they hardly feel like Deren’s “abandoned films”; they’re by far her most convincingly complete, accomplished works.

The other Deren titles considered to be her major works all register as camera tests, sparks of ideas put to greater use in her “Three Abandoned Films” masterworks. The most stunning of these camera tests is 1945’s A Study in Chorography for the Camera, in which a muscular dancer spins with such precise, relentless fury that he stops resembling a ballerino and starts resembling a multi-faced deity. That ferocity is again echoed in 1948’s Meditation on Violence, which similarly documents & abstracts the dance-like movements of a Wu-Tang style martial artist, teetering on the border between ballet & violence. By the time Deren got to the 1950s, her ideas were less cutting-edge but no less fascinating, culminating in the film-negative outer space fantasia of 1955’s The Very Eye of Night, in which balletic performers are superimposed over the Zodiacal cosmos. Any one of these shorts would kill as a background projection at a hipster house party or a living room punk show, emphasizing visual splendor over theme or narrative. As a group, they feel like watching an avant-garde filmmaker invent the music video as a medium in real time, which is a bizarre takeaway given that they are intentionally silent, with no sound component to match the musicality of their dancers’ movements. The way she manipulates those movements by playing with projection speeds and backwards looping in the edit are interesting as standalone ideas, but those ideas are put to much more coherent use in, say, the backwards tides of At Land or the freeze-frame human statues of Transfigured Time.

The most baffling entries in Deren’s filmography are the ones where sound was added in later edits. Whereas At Land will feature silent footage characters engaging in a vigorous walk-and-talk, 1947’s The Private Life of a Cat has since been edited to include a narration track that explains every action & intention of its subjects. The result practically feels like an industrial or educational short for a 1950s Biology classroom, to the point where it’s confusing to see it listed as an “experimental film” at all. I cannot tell if that designation carries on because of who made it, when it was made, or because of how notoriously difficult it is to work with cats. In any case, Deren & Hammid document the live birth & early parenting of a litter of kittens in their NYC apartment, later ascribed meaning in narration that compares the domesticity of the modern housecat against the ferocity of their wild-predator ancestors. It’s one of the longest titles and also one of the most straightforward, a combination repeated in her final work, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, which was completed posthumously in the 1970s. Divine Horsemen looks & sounds like Anthropology 101 homework, documenting the dancing rituals of Vodou religious practices, which became a major interest of Deren’s late in her life. At nearly an hour in length, though, the relentlessness of the dancing does gradually evoke a kind of genuine delirium in the audience, especially if you can tune out the dryly academic narration track added after her death. As Deren’s films got less visually experimental, they paradoxically became more aligned with the ritualism of Kenneth Anger’s work, just with different spiritual interests. She was more interested in Vodou than in cinema, only using the latter to access the physical poetry of the former.

Frustratingly, the rest of Maya Deren’s catalog appears to be unfinished or unpublished in one way or another. I could find no useful information about 1949’s Medusa or 1959’s Season of Strangers other than their online listings in her filmography. Meanwhile, 1951’s Ensemble for Somnambulists did not make the cut for the Kino Lorber disc, but once you watch it on YouTube, the reason for its exclusion is immediately apparent. It feels like an early-sketch camera test for the film-negative space ballet of The Very Eye of Night, which itself is already thinly conceived. The only exclusion from Kino’s Maya Deren Collection that I can really fault is 1944’s The Witch’s Cradle, which pulls on the same artistic strings as her masterful trio of “Abandoned Films.” Unlike that now-canonized trio, The Witch’s Cradle was actually abandoned in that it was left unfinished, but its surviving footage (also available on YouTube) features some of her most strikingly surreal, darkly magical images. Its cloistered apartment setting and yarn-stringed spiderwebs suggest that Deren reworked its basic ideas into the more accomplished & coherent Transfigured Time, but it’s got enough of its own distinct texture & personality that I wish she saw the project through to completion. In general, her filmography feels frustratingly incomplete, since cinema only appears to have been one of her many artistic & spiritual interests, among poetry, dance, Vodou ritual, Leftist labor organizing, and whatever else struck her fancy on the fringes of NYC social life. She pounced on the medium with great ferocity, then wandered away from it like a bored housecat, distracted by her next momentary prey. Even the three great works we got out of her before she moved on were self-described as “Abandoned Films,” a series of dreams that she awoke from, dazed.

-Brandon Ledet