Ensemble for Somnambulists

As she progressed further and further into her brief career of avant-garde filmmaking, Maya Deren became less and less interested in conveying a narrative through symbolism, which she began her career with, and more and more interested in the beauty and grace of dance. "Ensemble for Somnambulists" is her seventh effort, and there's no question about it that it's not nearly as repetitive or as unnecessarily lengthy as her previous effort "Meditation on Violence", though the depth of what's here isn't much and nothing really occurs in these six minutes of footage. Apparently, "Ensemble for Somnambulists" is kind of like a primitive experiment using photographic negative that later resulted in Deren's "The Very Eye of Night" from several years later. It's really more like artistic scribbles for that film and thus can't be fairly judged because of this.

The unfinished short consists of some ghostly-looking dancers performing ballet while floating around in a black void, doing various dance moves and sometimes coming quite close to the camera. The way this differs from "The Very Eye of Night", which took the concept further, is mainly that it does not appear professionally photographed but is more a collection of shots thrown together to create a rather artistically well shot, if not overly interesting, work. In the end, only one really for Maya Deren fanatics or those into dance, since even as an avant-garde short it comes across as rather pointless.

The short begins and ends with a field of stars in a black night sky--not actual stars, mind you, but what appears to be a pinscreen or pinpricks of light bleeding through a black fabric.

Between the bookended imagery of artificial stars is, I suppose, an "Ensemble for Somnambulists," consisting of dancers pirouetting in and out of frame, the very active camera panning and tilting passed them. The camera flows and moves at erratic and canted angles at various points in a somewhat disorienting and kaleidoscopic fashion. Because the dancers are a white tone and the surroundings are a pure black, it appears as if they're flowing through a void, and this often obscures when the scenes are cut--with many scenes given the impression of being much longer takes. There's nothing very conceptual in this short. It's a minimalistic experiment. Nothing more, but for what it is, it's rather enchanting, with the freeform camerawork and the ghostly dancers, lending it an interesting atmosphere. Like most of her work that I'm familiar with, there's no sound.

This is a departure from her more symbolically-rich visual storytelling, wherein she focuses instead on the form and motion of dancers and high-contrast black and white tones so deep and grainy that it resembles solarization or negative images that you'd see experimented with often in early film photography. Worth a look for experimental film enthusiasts or for Maya Deren fans, but I'd suggest At Land or Meshes of the Afternoon as a starting point.