Maya Deren - The Very Eye Of Night (1958)

Maya Deren - Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

Maya Deren - At Land (1944)

At Land  (1944) is a 15-minute silent experimental film written, directed by, and starring Maya Deren. It has a dream-like narrative in which a woman, played by Deren, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey encountering other people and other versions of herself. Deren once said that the film is about the struggle to maintain one's personal identity.

The composer John Cage and the poet and film critic Parker Tyler were involved in making the film, and appear in the film, which was shot at Amagansett, Long Island.

Maya Deren - The Divine Horsemen: the living gods of Haiti

Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, Documentext/Mc Pherson & Co.: New York, 1983

Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985) is a black-and-white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian vodou that was shot by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren between 1947 and 1954.

Maya Deren Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Maya Deren Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

From Senses of Cinema (http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/deren-2/)

Thomas Schatz points to Meshes as the best known experimental film of the decade. He categorizes it as the first example of “the poetic psychodrama”, films bearing the impression of art cinema which were seen as “scandalous and radically artistic.”  He writes that the poetic psychodrama “emphasized a dreamlike quality, tackled questions of sexual identity, featured taboo or shocking images, and used editing to liberate spatio-temporal logic from the conventions of Hollywood realism.” 

Rhythm also impacts significantly on spectatorship. The rhythm of the sound, movement and editing conspire to produce the effect of a trance film. Meshes of the Afternoon‘s dream-like mise-en-scène, illogical narrative trajectory, fluid movement and ambient soundtrack invite a type of contemplative, perhaps even transcendental, involvement for the spectator.