Ritual in Transfigured Time

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.

Maya Deren's films are generally either surrealist non-narratives or dance/motion films. This one is a bit of both.

The film starts with Deren in what is essentially a cameo as a lady with some yarn, but it mainly follows a young woman wondering through a puzzling world. The highlight of the film is an extended party scene. It's a dance based on the way people move when they're at a party, pushing through, greeting people, moving on. Perhaps it's wrong to say it's a dance - it's a study in movement, and it's not until you see that movements are repeating that it's really clear it's choreographed.

There's dancing that's closer to what we think of as dancing after that, but that was only mildly interesting.

Honestly this probably would have been a better film if it had been nothing but the party. But it's genuinely interesting.

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.

The tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian intervenes in the narrative of gender. From domestic roles to social gatherings to the classical garden, the progressively disordered transitions between these spaces are threaded by the performers' dances or mechanical movements, which constantly remind the viewer that this is a ritual. Across the three scenes, the rituals concern women but are not centered on them: the absence of men in the domestic sphere, the dominance of men in the social space, and the guidance of men in the garden are all clearly portrayed.

In the stylized social interaction scenes, although Pina Bausch's Kontakthof employs a different method, it gestures toward the same conclusion-underscoring how deeply entrenched this gendered structure of the social realm is. The tableau-like freezes in the garden setting create an illusion of sculpture, invoking a sustained pursuit of a "Hellenized" ideal order of the human form-where the eternal stillness of life and the ecstasy of the moment coexist in a single instant.

Within the film's forceful imposition of order, the restrained expression of the Dionysian becomes all the more charged. The female protagonist moves through, merges with, and escapes from these various rituals, experiencing and observing this collective unconscious from both first- and third-person perspectives. The final sacrificial dissolution represents Maya Deren's feminist re-evaluation of the Dionysian spirit. Beneath the experimental imagery lies not an optimistic vision, but rather a critical inquiry.