Abstract

This paper wishes to address the dialogue between Maya Deren’s cinema and writings, and Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). The connections between both author’s stances remain largely ignored, something that Nichols underlines in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde (2001). As such, this paper is, firstly, interested in tackling this gap in the literature about Deren, deemed the mother of American avant-garde film. Secondly, this paper aims to, through this comparative analysis, elucidate how reading Benjamin’s essay in tandem with Deren’s An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946) and some of her essays, can deepen our understanding of her ideas about art in the twentieth century, and beyond. Crucially, we conclude that Deren is somewhat opposed to Benjamin’s assertions about the decay of artistic “aura”, because she works outside of the Hollywood machine. Indeed, Deren’s experimental work, although aware of the illusory nature of film, is deeply influenced by ritual and tradition, as she references the likes of T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare in her films, which also explore ritualistic practices. Furthermore, Deren considers the filmmaker as the centre of the creative act, and technology only a tool. After all, Deren’s independent cinema may be closer to the “theology of art”, that Benjamin’s sees as threatened by modernity, than one might think. As such, Deren proposes a modern, yet traditional and humanistic artistic philosophy, in a century already aware of the growing pervasiveness of the machine.