Maya Deren’s ‘A Study in Choreography for Camera’: film as a form of dance
Experimental cinema owes a lot to Maya Deren, a revolutionary artist who injected a sense of surrealism and femininity into all of her work. Her short films are fluid, as though the images Deren wants us to see can hardly be contained within each frame; they spill out through metaphors and ambiguity. Her work often grapples with the dichotomy – or lack thereof – between the corporeal and the spiritual, sometimes focusing on the flexibility and fleshiness of the human body and other times, often in the same breath, framing it as something innately otherworldly and transcendent.
The filmmaker frequently returned to dance as a form of filmic language, manipulating choreography by wielding her lens as another body involved in the routine, dissecting free and flowing movements, chopping them apart and allowing her subject to be at the camera’s mercy. This idea is exercised in A Study in Choreography for Camera, released in 1945. At just two minutes long, on the first watch, it’s easy to see it as nothing more than Deren filming a man dancing in various locations, but if you watch it again, the film will unravel a unique tapestry of technical experimentalism.
Deren once described the choreography in the film as “a dance so related to camera and cutting that it cannot be ‘performed’ as a unit anywhere but in this particular film.” Deren set out to explore how the movement of the human body can be manipulated through film, and in doing so, she brings attention to elongated limbs and a face in the midst of concentration, but also a figure that is unchained and utterly ethereal, floating from one setting to another.
From the beginning of her career, Deren was fascinated by dance, an act that connotes protest, expression, exercise, determination, possession, religion, ritual, and cultural significance. For most humans, bodily movement can be used as a silent form of communication, and dance can be used as both a way to transmit emotions to others and to feel and process them ourselves. The filmmaker was interested in how this could be brought into the cinematic world, where the director can be in control of another’s movements, allowing their interpretation of these bodily expressions to be at odds with the one held by the dancer.
In A Study in Choreography for Camera, a dancer appears outside, but a pan across a woodland landscape soon reveals him behind another tree, and then another fluid movement transports him to another area of the forest. He is not pinned down, moved at the camera’s will, with Deren turning him into a spectre that is at once ghostly and doubtlessly corporeal.
Cleverly, Deren films the dancer lowering his leg, only for the setting to change; he places his foot on a solid floor, now indoors, suddenly confined to artificial, man-made creations that sharply contrast the wide expanse and freedom of the natural world. How much freedom does this dancer have when he’s being controlled by the higher force of the camera?
The film ends with the dancer moving around religious statues, referencing the spiritual and ritualistic history of dance as he becomes one with these impressive artistic encapsulations of the impressiveness and beauty of the human body. Deren then plays with editing and framing as she shoots the dancer’s face close-up, letting him spin faster and faster until she cuts to his feet. He then flies across the screen, back into nature, each movement being precisely controlled by Deren.
She composes a whole new form of dance through her formal techniques, demonstrating the ability to deconstruct and reconstruct through editing. Deren was incredibly ahead of her time, and A Study in Choreography for Camera is a perfect example of her innovative approach to something as universal as dance and movement of the human body.
