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Maya Deren

"Top and tailing" the set of essays on American filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961) in Maya Deren and the American avant-garde are Bill Nichols' introduction and Deren's own essay on film form, "An anagram of ideas on art, form and film" published in 1946. Nichols explains that the anagram structure of Deren's essay has informed the shape of his own volume and the contents page is laid out as Deren's is, encouraging readers to map overarching themes and ideas across discrete sections by following any number of suggested reading sequences. In her essay, Deren puts the concept of the anagram another way when describing a "simultaneity" of operations in life and "great art":

But man's great dream is to achieve a whole whose character is far more mysterious and miraculous – that dynamic, living whole in which the inter-action of the parts produces more than their sum total in any sense. (13)

Whether or not this idea can be applied to Nichols' book is debatable, but the connections across and between individual essays are multifarious and do, in fact, tie the discrete works together.

Having Deren's own writing included in Maya Deren and the American avant-garde is appropriate to any discursive exercise surrounding this filmmaker whose legacy is firmly grounded in the relation between her films and written exegesis. "An Anagram... is an essay of its time, both surveying and critiquing the film practices in currency in the mid-'40s; documentaries (she gives particular attention to the documentation of WWII), mainstream Hollywood features, the films of the surrealists (particularly Marcel Duchamp) and Jean Cocteau (whom she admires), the post-war influx of progressive foreign films, and abstract animations. While she reserves plenty of analysis and a certain respect for the documentary form (her quotation of Alexander Hammid pre-empts the position of Jean Rouch regarding documentary film as "an illusion of reality"), her critique of the other genres and movements is...