Maya Deren

In her reading Maya Deren says, "A major portion of the creative action consists of amanipulation of time and space...The kind of mapipulation of time and space to which I refer becomes itself part of the organic structure of a film." As we discussed in class Deren does this by manipulating the stairs. She uses the same set of stairs but makes them look like different stairs by taking different perspectives. As well as making the stairs to not look like stairs for example when the camera is upside down and it looks as though she is crawling on the ceiling and you can not tell that she really truly is not. Also she manipulates time by the repetition and looping of the events in the first short film we watched. She is manipulating time by the main character watching herself out the window walk toward the nun, walking up the stairs as if in a dream like state watching herself go through this routine over and over as if it were truly manipulating time. You also see Deren manipulating space in the beach/dinner scene when she is crawling up the tree of some sort but then cuts back to the dinner table where she is crawling acrossed it. Making it as though there is a break in reality what she sees and what we may see is not necesarily the same thing.
The best thing about Deren's writings on her creative use and reality is that she practices what she preaches. Everything she goes over in her writings she uses in her films and is influential to many other filmographers.