The New York City apartment that revolutionised experimental cinema
New York City isn’t just a place that has been heavily featured in many cinematic classics, but one that saw the inception of a new form of storytelling.
If films were the only records available, contemporary NYC would seem like the most important place in the history of the world, based on how often it is featured. Everything from the seedy underworld of Taxi Driver to the national monuments in Ghostbusters has taken advantage of the many attractions and notable locations within the ‘Big Apple’. Given how beloved it is by popular culture, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s also home to some of the most cutting-edge, avant-garde artists of their respective eras.
Maya Deren might not be a New York filmmaker as iconic as Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee, but she was responsible for creating the sort of ‘tone poems’ that would provide the backbone for decades of experimentation by arthouse filmmakers. As a writer who was often consumed by her ideas, unable to think unless she had completely fleshed them out, Deren would often spend large swathes of time in her New York apartment tinkering on what her next breakthrough would be.
Among the most groundbreaking ideas that she came up with during this era of creative renaissance was the notion of ‘chamber films’, which were both created and viewed in specific, contained areas. Deren would frequently show her new films to invited audiences who could make it to her apartment, which is also where she filmed and crafted her latest work.
“This room, housing the flesh, is home for the heart,” she said, “Point of return and point of departure; contains those objects which, the sight fallen or fixed upon, are thresholds for the quick heart’s eye”.
While her chamber films may be easy to conflate with the sort of ‘home movies’ that became more popular once the average consumer had access to a commercial-grade videorecorder, she took her work seriously and enjoyed having a personal space where she could control all of the elements. Any film shot on location is dependent on some sort of unreliable element, such as the movement of extras or weather patterns. In Deren’s mind, there was no better way to be an auteur than to have complete control over everything that would eventually make it to the screen.
It’s often that these sorts of highly-individualised, experimental projects can be dismissed as being only possible for this with disposable income, but she fought to democratise the way she made movies. She co-founded the Creative Film Foundation, which invested in giving more resources for independent filmmakers in order to ‘legitimise’ their craft and give them the space to pursue similar chamber films.
However, the issues that she faced during her lifetime are the same that the industry deals with today: there’s a question as to whether cinema can truly be a fulfilling form of art if it is also a business.
Deren clearly never saw her films as a potential business, which is why they had a hard time penetrating the broader cinematic landscape beyond the select audiences invited to join her chamber film screenings. Given that, in today’s landscape, even film festivals seek to make a profit off of those that attend, it’s hard to imagine an environment as pure as what she created being willed into existence.
