This screening presents seven experimental films by the legendary, experimental filmmaker Maya Deren (1917–61). Four of these are accompanied live with new, specially commissioned soundtracks by the Japanese musician Ikue Mori, icon of downtown New York’s improvisation and experimental music scene.

With original soundtrack:
Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943
The Very Eye of Night, 1959
Meditation on Violence, 1948

Accompanied live by Ikue Mori:
At Land, 1944
Ritual in Transfigured Time, 1946
A Study in Choreography for the Camera, 1945
Witch’s Cradle, 1943

Russian-born Maya Deren was an outspoken and influential filmmaker, writer, theorist and dancer and spent much of her adult life in New York. Her first and most well-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, is recognised as a seminal American avant-garde film and indicates her interest in dreams, ritual, psychological states, and the manipulation of space and time. Although heavily influenced by surrealism, Deren disliked labels, so when the film was called ‘surrealist’ and ‘Freudian,’ she added music composed by her third husband, Teiji Ito, in 1957. Deren was a key figure in the post-war avant-garde, and many of her contemporaries – including Marcel Duchamp, Anaïs Nin, John Cage and Gore Vidal – appear in the films. She pioneered dance performance in film through ground breaking experimental short films from the 1940s, which a New York Times dance critic termed ‘choreocinema’.

Ikue Mori moved to New York from Tokyo in 1977.  She formed the seminal New York No Wave band, DNA, with Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. In 1985 Mori started using drum machines and has created her own highly sensitive signature style in the filed of improvisation and experimental music. In 1999 she won the Distinctive Award for Prix Arts Electronics in the digital music category.