Maya Deren

“Where is the door? I don’t remember climbing stairs. ... Someone has changed the houses on the street.” This is how Maya Deren describes the sensations behind her classic short film, one of the earliest American experimental films by a woman. The fragment shown here as a curatorial intervention comments on how domestic space comes unmoored and turns into an uncanny battlefield of delusions and mysterious forces. Already as the artist climbs the stairs to her dollhouse-like Californian home, it is clear that something is wrong. Each step upward leads not to sanctuary but deeper into double reflections, subtle paranoia, and a confrontation with one’s split self. What begins as a sunlit, erotic afternoon dream quickly turns into a nightmare.

Maya Deren (1917, Kyiv, Russian Empire–1961, New York, USA) was a filmmaker and film theorist. Her experimental short films, such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and Meditation on Violence (1948), are considered classics of 20th-century avant-garde cinema.