A Study in Choreography for Camera

Maya Deren always loved dancing and always wanted to make a film about that art. A study in choreography for camera is a result of her collaboration with dancer Talley Beatty and while it's too short to make someone understand what Maya Deren's films were about it will surely interest her fans.

A difficulty in reviewing an avant-garde short is the danger of coming from the wrong mind-set. Some films are self-explanatory with varying amounts of attention. Some aren't. My first reaction on seeing this film – after falling in love with Deren's early, seemingly oneiric, stories – was not very positive.

But I could have been looking at something written in a foreign language and not known it. I dismissed it as artistic scribbles. Or perhaps I am not sufficiently steeped in film-making to recognise what she tried to illustrate.

Compared to Meshes of the Afternoon or At Land, I initially found A Study rather disappointing. I couldn't see it as an abstract exercise in 'creative geography' – merely a step down from something I had been able to relate to enthusiastically and immediately. I was wrong.

I take a second look at this well-regarded short some time later, when thinking about Sally Potter's ideas on the similarity of dance and film (in The Tango Lesson). Potter agonised over the moment before being, the blank slate, that hovering moment of 'becoming'. It made me think back to Maya Deren, this short film which unexpectedly sees a dancer transition through different surroundings.

Deren herself described her film as having, "the characteristic time quality of a woman." She explains it by comparison. "I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy. They are a 'now' creature. And a woman has strength to wait, because she's had to wait. She has to wait nine months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness, and she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming."

There are (at least) two important features of A Study In Choreography For The Camera that make it interesting in this respect. They are interesting as part of the study – which the film is eponymously intended to be (rather than, say, just entertainment). The first of these is the transitions. A dancer raises his foot in a forest and puts it down again indoors – as part of the same step. He explores the museum. Then, with an intense spin, he returns to the outdoors, but without any suggestion of continuity in space. He does not leap so high physically that he escapes the walls of the museum. The outside simply is 'there' for him. The reality is that of the dancer, not of the external world. (The transitions are accomplished so skilfully that Gene Kelly was to seek her advice on how to approach them.)

"In any time-form, this is a very important sense. I think that my films, putting as much stress as they do upon the constant metamorphosis – one image is always becoming another – it is what is happening that is important in my films, not what 'is' at any moment. This is a woman's time sense, and I think it happens more in my films than almost anyone else's." Now, it is also possible to see the common train of thought between this and her earlier, more diegetic but equally challenging, films.

The second feature of the film which bears on time is Deren's specific decision to use slow motion. "Motion picture is a time form," says Deren. "Just as the telescope reveals the structure of matter in a way that the unaided eye can never see it, so slow motion reveals the structure of motion. Events that occur rapidly, so that they seem a continuous flux, are revealed in slow motion to be full of pulsations and agonies and indecisions and repetitions."

What better way to illustrate this than with the hidden exertions of a ballet dancer? Strength, concentration, even pain, all sublimated to look effortless and beautiful. Magnified and stripped of the illusion created by performance in normal time, the dancer becomes more like a moving sculpture. We can examine him at leisure. It is this focus which particularly separates the work from say, Shirley Clarke's A Dance in the Sun, which also explores a dancing moving through different locations but whose overall effect is to isolate energy and the state of mind of the dancer.

Like dancing, Deren's finished work appears so effortless that it is all too easy to miss its subtlety. (For a similar microscopic examination of the film-making process distributed after her death, an accompanying film, called Outtakes from A Study in Choreography for Camera, assembled 15 minutes of footage from which the final film had been distilled.)

The title points us towards yet another innovation. Instead of statically recording, the camera is an active participant (the subtitle of the film is 'Pas de Deux'). The 16mm Bolex is an equal partner to Talley Beatty, the dancer. Near the beginning, it makes some long pans. We see Beatty several times, among the trees. It is almost as if trick photography has been used, but in fact we are simply seeing him from the camera's point-of-view-as-a-dancer. The camera is not limited by space and time. Or as Deren more poetically wrote, "The movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was. With a turn of the foot, he makes neighbours of distant places."

Deren has used the principles developed in her earlier films to create a window within a film. We see the dance as separate from the surroundings, in order better to study its nature.

But unless such ideas excite you, A Study in Choreography for the Camera is not going to blow your socks off. "I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick," she famously said. If however, you also harbour a suspicion that Hollywood "has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form," then maybe it's time to take a walk – or a leap – into the world of Maya Deren.

I liked. Maybe little more than her previews films. Because it is pure poetry of dance, the different locations : the forest, the living room, the museum hall working just well , the dance representing the beautiful bridge between them, with inspired reference to a classic like The Afternoon of a Faun.

It is only choreography in maximun two minutes. A pure delight, I suppose, not only for dance admirers and a seductive work of camera.

Difficult and pretty unfair to write too much.

Only a beautiful show and admirable poetry of image .

For me, like in almost each film by Maya Deren, the story lives in myself and imagination gives it coherence.

One of the distinguishing features of the work of Ukrainian/American experimental film-maker Maya Deren is the attention she paid to exploring the depiction of movement on screen, a feature so distinctive it led one critic to coin the neologism "choreocinema" in an attempt to better describe her work. Such a feature is to be expected when you consider that as well as a director, actress, and (under-rated) film theorist, she was also a choreographer and dancer, and 'A Study…' is the first of her films to foreground dance so explicitly.

Having previously watched, and been blown away by her first two films 'Meshes in the Afternoon' and 'At Land', I watched 'A Study...' expecting much of the same but found myself somewhat at a loss as to how to appreciate it. As it's by far her shortest film (at only a few minutes length) I watched it a few more times, and endeavored to settle on an appreciation which would enable me to answer the question which came to mind: do you need to be a dancer or lover of dance to appreciate this film? Eventually I did come to an appreciation, and would answer by saying that while a dance background is not necessary...I get the feeling it would certainly help.

The eventual appreciation I came to have of the film consists in acknowledging the lack any other message or (dream-like Deren-esque) narrative and simply allowing Deren to direct my attention to oft overlooked worlds of movement enacted by the dancers body through the use of various camera techniques. However, the dream-like quality of her previous films is still evident in the use of movement matched editing of single actions over separate locations first introduced in 'At Land' (and indeed so masterfully are these shots executed that Gene Kelly sought out Deren for advice on how to do the same thing) which allow the dancer to traverse a living room, a museum and the outdoors in a few elegant steps.

All this being said, I can't help but feel that my lack of interest in dance means I am unable to engage with the film as fully as the dream-like narratives of 'Meshes...' or 'At Land', but as dance would go onto to figure so explicitly in all her subsequent films (especially 'A Meditation on Violence' and 'The Very Eye of Night) the effort put in to understand this short curio certainly offered a perspective I could employ again to try to appreciate these later films.

Maya Deren's shortest, five-minute A Study in Choreography for Camera seems like an exercise piece to capture a dancer's movement on celluloid, which later on developed into her masterpieces such as Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence.