Friday, January 7, 2022

THE SCHOOL OF MAYA DEREN: JULIE DASH

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.


At Land / Realatives


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.

Divine Horsemen /
Daughters Of The Dust

Divine Horsemen /
Daughters Of The Dust


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).


Meshes Of Thefternoon /
Four Women

Divine Horsemen /
Praise House

Meditation On Violence /
Praise House

Ritual In Transfigured Time / Four Women

A Study In Choreography For Camera / Realatives

A Study In Choreography For Camera / Realatives

Ritual In Transfigured Time/
Praise House




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