Maya Deren on Film

Born in Kiev and raised in the United States, Maya Deren was the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is among the artists featured in LACMA’s exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. She worked primarily in 16mm film and is considered the inventor of two genres: the dance film and the psychodrama. She worked primarily from 1943 until 1959, when she died at the age of forty-four. This program presents all of her completed shorts—from the hallucinatory trance film Meshes of the Afternoon, which she shot in her Los Angeles home and remains a landmark of avant-garde cinema, to The Very Eye of Night, a stunning ballet kaleidoscope—as well as her unfinished collaboration with Marcel Duchamp (The Witch’s Cradle).

Bing Theater | $10 general admission; $7 LACMA members, students, and seniors; $5 LACMA Film Club members. | Tickets 323 857-6010 or purchase online.