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. . . Mais d'abord il faut être un poète. . . .
Ezra Pound, in Poetry, 1913, quoting MM Duhamel and Vildrac's Notes sur lar Technique Poétique
. . . it was necessary to begin by an emphatic insistence on the rather elementary fact that it was conceivable that there might, and even should be, a filmic equivalent to poetry.
"Maya Deren, "Films in the Classicist Tradition," from Maya Deren files at Anthology Film Archives
In 1939 Eleanora Deren was a few years away from a name change (to Maya, Sanskrit for "illusion of life"1) and the shift in her primary medium of creative expression from the study and writing of poetry to filmmaking which soon made her a pioneer of the American avant-garde film movement.
In 1939 Deren was completing her master's thesis at Smith College, "Influences of the French Symbolist Movement Upon Anglo-American Poetry," a broad survey of French, English and American poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The thesis indicates more than Deren's wide-ranging knowledge of poetry, however; in it she pays particular attention to Ezra Pound and the other Imagists, and to T.S. Eliot as a Symbolist. At this time she also was writing verses she considered "not very good," and until 1942 (about the time she became Maya Deren the emerging filmmaker), she considered the writing of poetry her artistic medium.2
In 1943, four years after completing her master's work, Deren produced her first film with then-husband Alexander Hammid, "Meshes of the Afternoon."3 The following year she produced her first solo film, "At Land ;" the year after that, she produced "Study in Choreography for Camera," and in 1946, "Ritual in Transfigured Time." These four films, which constitute her first and most innovative phase of filmmaking,4 show her debt to the Symbolist and Imagist poets she had studied. Moreover, the ideas which led to the tentative verses she had attempted in graduate school find a more mature and fuller expression in her films. In fact, the poet Maya Deren became accomplished in her endeavors only after she turned to filmmaking, as she admitted:
. . . the reason that I had not been a very good poet was because actually my mind worked in images which...