Director · Actor · Screenwriter · Producer · Editor · 1917–1961

Maya Deren

2: briefs
13:00: average
26 min: in total

On film.briefs2

Meshes of the Afternoon

Maya Deren, Alexandr Hackenschmied · 1943

A fourteen-minute 1943 American experimental film directed by Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied, starring Deren and shot by Hackenschmied. It uses repetition, recursive editing, and shifting subjectivity to map the interior logic of anxiety and dissociation—not as metaphor but as cinematic structure. Silent on release, later scored by Teiji Ito. Preserved in the US National Film Registry for cultural and aesthetic significance.

13:00

At Land

Maya Deren · 1944

Maya Deren’s 1944 silent short At Land is a fifteen-minute experimental film in which Deren, playing a solitary woman, traverses a series of uncanny locations — beach, dining room, forest, covered interior — encountering doubles and shifting figures. Shot on Long Island, it uses precise editing, physical performance and repetition to explore identity not as essence but as embodied action. There is no dialogue, no score, no exposition — only movement, recurrence and resistance.