TRANSFIGURED TIME
Maya Deren

TRANSFIGURED TIME

Maya Deren
May 17 – June 30, 2025

The motion-picture camera, in introducing the dimension of time into photography,
opened to exploration the vast province of movement. The treasures here are almost
limitless, and I can suggest only a few of them.

—Maya Deren, 1946 

OCDChinatown presents a screening program of five short films by Maya Deren. Born in Kyiv
in 1917, Deren and her family soon fled the pogroms, arriving in Syracuse, New York, in 1922.
While still at university, Deren moved to New York, where she studied literature and was active
in the socialist movement. She wrote poetry and took photographs, but her fascination with
dance led her to the choreographer Katherine Dunham. In 1941 and 1942, Deren toured with
Dunham’s dance troupe as a personal assistant, traveling through the segregated American South
and to Haiti, where she learned about Voudou. A year later, she picked up a film camera for the
first time. Meshes of the Afternoon, made on a $275 budget, would become a classic of
experimental cinema.

In New York, Deren’s milieu included artists, writers, poets, composers, and choreographers.
Many of these friends appear in her films, including Anaïs Nin, John Cage, and Marcel
Duchamp. In the 1946 film that lends its title to this exhibition, Ritual in Transfigured Time,
Deren literalizes the concept of social choreography, turning a party scene into a kind of dance.
Men and women walk across a room, greet each other, turn together, and continue on their ways
separately. As Deren has described, “an informal social encounter . . . assumes the solemnity and
dimension of ritual.”

Deren plays with time through her use of the medium, incorporating freeze frames, slow motion,
and loops. Influenced by the Symbolist and Imagist poets, she also incorporates figurative
allusions to the passage of time: the lapping of waves on the sand in At Land (1944); the skein of
yarn in Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), which evokes Penelope’s weaving (and unweaving)
as she awaits Odysseus’s return; the spiraling stairs (and multiple Derens) in Meshes of the
Afternoon (1943) hark back to Duchamp’s 1913 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, which
attempts to capture movement in a still image.

Both a Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Meditation on Violence (1947) focus on
dance. The former is an exquisite three-minute-long gem, in which Talley Beatty moves
seamlessly through a forest, a domestic interior, a museum, and back into the landscape. “The
movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was,” explained Deren. “With a turn of
the foot, he makes neighbors of distant places.” In Mediation on Violence, Chao-Li Chi performs
movements based on Chinese martial arts. To describe Deren’s work, New York Times dance
critic John Martin found himself coining a new term: “In her approach we have the beginnings of
a virtually new art form of ‘choreocinema’ in which the dance and the camera collaborate on the
creation of a single work of art.”

Deren’s interests in time and movement, choreography and anthropology, all come together in
the concept of ritual. The artist defined ritual as an “action” that “seeks the realization of its
purpose through the exercise of form. . . . In ritual, the form is the meaning.” In other words, to
Deren, “ritual is art.”

Screening program:
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), 14 minutes, black-and-white, sound
At Land (1944), 15 minutes, black-and-white, silent
A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), 3 minutes, black-and-white, silent
Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), 15 minutes, black-and-white, silent
Meditation on Violence (1947), 15 minutes, black-and-white, sound

In September, OCDChinatown will continue exploring concepts of time with New York–based
artist ms. z tye. She will premiere Counter, an ephemeral installation based on perceptions of
time and its relationship to identity. In this multimedia exhibition, the artist confronts a series of
analog signals in comparison to the term clockable. Through multiple activations, ms. z tye sits
with the softness accumulated in patience while contemplating what went dormant in the
waiting.