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A Study In Choreography For Camera / Realatives |
Julie Dash’s pre & post
Daughters Of The Dust work is/was highly experimental in that the narrative was often abstract and there wasn’t much dialogue. There seemed to be more of an emphasis on dance & movement reminiscent of Maya Deren.
Julie Dash is very much her own filmmaker and Maya Deren is hardly the first filmmaker to document experimental dance. However Deren is a staple within film studies & film academia so it wouldn’t surprise me if Dash was influenced by Deren in an indirect or abstract kind of way.
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At Land / Realatives
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To be clear - imagery of waves and people walking on the beach is a common arthouse staple, but Deren did popularize and heighten that imagery early on (she didn’t invent or do it first, but she did make it popular with films like
At Land and finale of
Meshes Of The Afternoon).
Even some of the imagery in
Daughters Of The Dust can be traced to the same history in Deren’s films like
Divine Horseman: The Living Gods Of Haiti.
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Divine Horsemen / Daughters Of The Dust |
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Divine Horsemen / Daughters Of The Dust
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The voodoo documented in
Divine Horseman and the Gullah culture seen in
Daughters Of The Dust both have a connection to slavery. That connection is what sparked this specific blog entry…
Outside of
Daughters Of The Dust, the dance & movement explored in Dash’s seldom mentioned short film work is rooted in African dance. I don’t want to credit someone like Maya Deren with popularizing something like African dance, but, to me, at the end of the day there is a visual similarity between the work of Deren & Dash (I’m also aware that experimental & interpretive dance is very vast & vague and I could be reaching).
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Meshes Of Thefternoon / Four Women
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Divine Horsemen / Praise House |
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Meditation On Violence / Praise House |
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Ritual In Transfigured Time / Four Women |
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A Study In Choreography For Camera / Realatives
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A Study In Choreography For Camera / Realatives
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Ritual In Transfigured Time/ Praise House |