Too much of everything

The Age of Commercialism

Such a frustrating disappointment

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Maya Deren was a pioneer: at a time when the Hollywood studio system was at its peak pumping out crowd-pleasing genre movies with huge budgets, Ukrainian born Deren was carving out a position for herself as a self-financed avant-garde female director and (under-rated) film theorist whose films explored the role of women in society through non-narrative cinema which also explored the potential of dance on film. And as such, "Ritual in Transfigured Time" seems to balance both of these strands of her work (compared to the crushing feminist existentialism of her debut "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943) and her totally abstract dance-dominated later films like "The Very Eye of Night" (1958)) and stand as possibly the greatest encapsulation of the themes that motivated her.The film is essentially in three parts in the classic set-up / conflict / resolution style but the transitions between each "act" is characterized by a dream-like spatial shift: at first from a room where a young dancer (Rita Christiani) helps Maya manically roll a ball of wool, before being led by another woman (played by prolific diarist and Henry Miller's squeeze, Anaïs Nin) to a crowded cocktail party. Whilst here, the young woman navigates through the gathered party-goers whose movements in and out of conversations become increasingly stylized and choreographed until they are essentially dancing. Finally, the young dancer meets a young man and the scene switches to outside where the young man pursues the woman in a manner both elegant and threatening.As with earlier Deren's films "Meshes of the Afternoon" and "At Land" (1946), the film seems to have something to say (in this case about the various social rituals, sometimes so choreographed as to be a "dance", which we are forced to perform) and does actually convey this through a plot…albeit a dream-logic one. However, like a poet, Deren also articulates her message through the choices she makes in regard to the form of the film – in this case the unusual spatial cuts and use of effects like freeze-framing and negative prints – which, rather than distract us from the story (as in a "traditional" film), makes us question the relation between the events happening on screen as well as our relationship to it, with the effect that we are pulled further and further into Deren's unique vision.

The first five minutes of Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946 )are probably the finest she did up until then. That first third still partakes of that atmosphere dreamline and supine characteristic of her earlier work, but stripped from that which the mind is quick to associate meaning to, that symbolic quality is often an end in itself rather than a means. The beauty of the surreal, and perhaps the most difficult thing to achieve, is to create the situation the viewer will project upon his own feelings rather than try and decipher the filmmaker's. The film still guides you in that it chooses X visual instead of Y but there's no right or wrong interpretation to be deciphered. Kind of like walking around London with a map of Berlin without knowing you're in London or the map is of Berlin. The scene in the crowded room wasn't quite as good, it's still a drone, but not a visually interesting one I thought. The dancing segment that closes the film recalls A Study in Choreography for Camera but how it all ties in remains a mystery.

Maya Deren has sometimes been called a proto-feminist due to the topics she explores in many of her films, including her famous "Meshes of the Afternoon" and the lesser known but still stunning "At Land". This film would be the one that comes closest to feminist concepts. Women in this short are trapped in "rituals" of subservience, marriage, and victimization, often being passed around, chased, or ogled by the men in their various aspects.If Deren's work is about dreams, this is probably the one that comes closest to an anxiety dream. The party scene (which I feel is slightly clichéd, but then again Deren may very well have been the one to have created these clichés) is claustrophobic, the chase is paranoiac, and many of the clothes the women wear are iconoclastic (nun-suit, any one?).My favorite scene involves the man who dance-leaps after the woman as she moves through Greek architecture. Deren captures the motion of the dancer in freeze-frame always in moments where he is balanced so as to look exactly like a Helenistic sculpture. It's another one of those Derenist moments that has an uncanny relevance even to those who aren't familiar with Deren's own personality.--PolarisDiB

Ritual in Transfigured Time may be the piece in which Maya Deren puts all her interests and achievements: a surrealistic narrative and dance choreographies. It is beautiful and powerful, but may have too many elements to be coherent and to possess her earlier works' strength.