“Facts of the Mind Made Manifest in a fiction of Matter”

Abstract

As actor, producer, director and editor of her films, Maya Deren can be said to utilize autobiographical strategies. However, as a modernist, Deren would deny that her films are autobiographical in any immediate sense. However, in the context of the contemporary deconstruction of a unified subject and subjectivity, the concept of autobiography has been problematized, constructing the portrayal of the autobiographical self in relation to space and time – much like film, poetry, music and dance. Similar to autobiographical acts, filmic manipulation and distortion are always performative and in flux rather than simply a clearly defined form or genre. Filmic reality, like the self in dream reality and memory, is fleeting, only to be recaptured in its narration. Using examples from Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Rituals in Transfigured Time (1946), this essay argues that her film work forms and at the same time does not form an autobiographical text based on the unreliability of a unified, embodied subject in both film and autobiography.