Living fast and dying young

Eleanora Derenkowsky emigrated with her family from Kiev in 1917, the year that saw the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II from Russia’s throne, the institution of a provisional government and, ultimately, the formalization of the Bolshevik government. Derenkowsky died of a brain hemorrhage due to extreme malnutrition in 1961 as “Maya Deren,” modern dancer, pioneering avant-garde filmmaker, author, early film advocate and Haitian Voudon expert.

The inspired and tumultuous 44 years in between are the subject of In the Mirror of Maya Deren, the 2002 German documentary directed by Martina Kudlácek. The film will show this weekend at Portland State’s 5th Avenue Cinema.

Deren was a bohemian through and through. Her early CV sounds straight out of 21st century Portland. After earning her undergrad degree, Deren studied English lit at Smith College, then moved to Greenwich Village, where she found work as an editorial assistant and freelance photographer.

Around this time, Deren began working for Katherine Dunham, the preeminent African-American dancer, choreographer and dance impresario. One of the film’s most charming and human moments comes when Dunham, then in her 80s, recounts how Deren—who Dunham calls “robust” as she recalls Deren’s “low-cut” outfits—would rise as the troupe’s drummers pounded away and begin dancing wholeheartedly, shouting, “How can you sit still!” as prospective investors watched, entranced. “She was possessed with rhythm,” Dunham says.

For a time, Deren considered pursuing dance as her career, but she was soon captivated by the still-nascent medium of film. “In film,” Deren says in one of the documentary’s many audio clips, “I can make the world dance.” Deren’s first film, Meshes of the Afternoon, was a 14-minute collaboration with then-husband Alexander Hammid and was released in 1943. Most of Deren’s completed films are roughly the same length, and their brevity makes for ample material for Kudlácek to mine.

Kudlácek devotes a large swath of the film’s midsection to Deren’s four sojourns to Haiti, which feels apt. Deren clearly found something in the Caribbean that she couldn’t shake, and the specter of the traditional Haitian Voudon religious practices hangs over the second half of her life. Her desire to travel to Port-Au-Prince was certainly influenced by Katherine Dunham, who had received a Guggenheim fellowship to visit Haiti in 1935 to conduct an ethnographic study of Caribbean dance forms. (Deren ultimately edited Dunham’s subsequent master’s thesis based on her studies.)

In the film’s interviews with Katherine Dunham, it’s clear that, even 60 years later, she still harbors some enmity toward Deren. Just 11 years after Dunham’s trip, Deren also procured a Guggenheim (making her the first filmmaker to do so) to travel to Haiti. There’s a subtext here that, though present, Dunham only nominally hints at: Deren, the daughter of a white, upper-crust family, educated in Switzerland and at NYU, had poached Dunham’s passion project. Dunham’s father, after all, was of West African descent, the birthplace of Haitian Voudon. One senses that Dunham construed Deren’s actions as more than a little exploitative.

The nine years that Deren spent researching, filming and recording Haitian Voudon rituals never resulted in a finished film. Instead, she used her exhaustive research (she allegedly shot 18,000 feet of film) to write and publish Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. The book was hailed as an excellent work of scholarship and is stilled widely viewed as one of the most important books on Haitian Voudon culture.

Kudlácek uses Deren’s Haiti footage generously here, and it provides a lively counterpoint to Deren’s silent, subdued films. Kudlácek also returns to Haiti, where we meet Deren’s original translator and several Haitians whom she touched in one way or another. This portion of the film has a certain redemptive quality: Whatever qualms the viewer has about Deren’s potentially exploitative trip to Haiti are assuaged as these men and women discuss her humanity and grace.

After her book was finished, Deren made only one more film, The Very Eye of Night, an odd picture featuring ghost-like negatives of ballerinas superimposed onto a starry night. These lithe, athletic bodies become “celestial bodies,” in Deren’s words. There is, of course, no better testament to Deren’s filmmaking prowess than the films themselves. It’s a joy to watch the early films, but The Very Eye of Night feels disjointed and half-baked. Regardless of one’s opinions on Deren’s films, the archival footage and the numerous audio clips create a thorough picture of Deren the artist, warts and all.

Although In the Mirror of Maya Deren’s on-screen interviews feature many of her friends, collaborators and former lovers, we are given only a handful of casual, ill-conceived explanations for her death. It feels like a group of friends passing the buck on any responsibility they may carry for a loved one dying of malnutrition at age 44.

Some blame it on Voudon, some on poverty (“If they had money, it went to feed the cats,” a friend says). Some blame it on her anger issues, others on some variation of “living too fully” until, near the end of the film, we come to find that Deren had been injecting herself with Dr. Max Jacobson’s “cocktails”—a.k.a. speed—on a daily basis for 20 years.

This is a documentary made in 2002 and not, say, 40 years ago when a quack doctor’s “cocktail” was apparently an accepted method of self-medication. And not one of her friends steps in to say, “Hey, maybe it was her 20-year addiction to amphetamines that torpedoed her appetite and gave her a brain hemorrhage.”

Maybe that’s harsh. But it’s a shame to see a film about such a captivating artist and human being skirt the complexities and addictions that drove her to her death. The film shows us all of her life’s peaks, for sure, but only dares hint at the valleys.