CinéFemme

About me:

Moira Sullivan aka CinéFemme is one of the world's leading experts on the work of avantgarde American filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961). Invited to USA, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and Sweden about her work.
Deren wrote that a filmmaker has to make use of "the art instrument", camera and editing in order to create "something new" and make experimental films in the spirit of Deren's "personal film". Maya Deren is known and still inspires filmmakers today. How is that someone who worked in the non commercial short film genre continues to influence young filmmakers nearly 50 years after her death? The answer can be found by closely observing her innovating editing techniques and cinematography: jump cuts, double exposure, and creative uses of temporality through duration.
In 1993 I created the Maya Deren Forum (mayaderen.org) dedicated to this excellent filmmaker that has left a magical legacy to us.

Maya Deren was an artistic filmmaker that not only made ethnographic films such as shooting 18 000 ft of Haitian rituals and secular dances in the 1940's and 1950's but a film called "Meditation on Violence" (1947), a film on Shao-lin and Wu Tang martial arts.

She was married to Teiji Ito who played over a dozen musical instruments. Beset by financial difficulties through most of her career, she produced and distributed all her own movies, and never gave up her art. Her ashes were scattered at Mt Fuji by Teiji Ito after her death in 1961. See my reviews of her films Maya Deren 2x, in Film International, promoting intellectual film culture since 1973.