People have always been interested in technologies that would make it possible to communicate with a great number of people. Nowadays new technologies distributing the arts allow individuals to personalize their input in the sphere of culture and arts. Technologies also provide artists with the new means of creating works of art in such a way providing opportunities for them to address their audience directly. They also can collaborate with their colleagues in their own country and from abroad. “Technology is changing the behavior of the organizations that produce, present, distribute, market, and collect art by expanding both the size and the geographic spread of the arts and entertainment market, the costs and benefits of success and failure, and the business models upon which their operations are based” (Mccarthy, 19). The use of the Internet in the capacity of a tool for transmitting recorded video to consumers has already altered the role of intermediaries in performing and literary arts.
The Internet creates more links between artists and audiences. To be more accurate, the audience for such works must be described as “users” than viewers. Nowadays leisure time has become fragmented; people are apt to choose activities they can participate in at home.
YouTube makes art accessible to wide audiences that were impossible before the appearance of the internet. Due to YouTube lots of people are able to watch videos and upload films they like. Millions of people visit this site. YouTube makes the works of innovative moving image artists known to a broad audience. Very often these deeply personal works are marginalized by the leading entertainment industry. They were almost unavailable some years ago. Many of these films are unique; so YouTube helps the artists and the audience to share their thoughts and feelings.
Microcinema is a term that is used to denote amateur or low-budget films. Usually, they are shot in relatively cheap formats, edited on a computer, and after that are distributed via the Internet or disk. The number of people taking part in the creating of such films is relatively small, usually less than 10 people. In the last few years, these films gained popularity all over the world due to the rise of YouTube and some other large video hosting websites.
The term “microcinema” is often used as a synonym for the word “underground”. It is often used to describe an alternative movement, a kind of cinematic microbrewery.
For avant-garde or experimental films, it was traditionally difficult to find venues.
But due to YouTube lots of people are now able to watch videos and upload films they like. This site makes the works of innovative moving image artists known to a broad audience. Very often these deeply personal works are marginalized by the leading entertainment industry. Many of the films are unique; so YouTube helps the artists and the audience to share their thoughts and feelings (Mccarthy, 72).
One of the most prominent figures in the history of microcinema is Maya Deren; she is considered to be a pioneer of experimental cinema. Like Eisentein and Godard, Maya Deren was a film theorist and filmmaker in one person (Geller, 140).
Her biography was as special as her films. Eleanora Dereknowsky, known as Maya Deren, came from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where she was born in the year of the revolution. In 1992 the family immigrated to America. She studied journalism at the University of Syracuse. When she married, the young couple moved to New York. There Eleanora tried herself in many spheres of work, but filmmaking was the activity that made her famous. Deren was convinced that “the distilled experimental emotion of an incident […] was more universal and timeless than the incident itself”. She was sure that a camera was a perfect tool to capture this distillation. Deren was convinced that mass-market films did not fully utilize all the resources of the camera; “she felt that cinema as an art form had scarcely been touched”.
She treated a camera as something alive and capable of thinking: “The complexity of the pictures camera creates, at times, the illusion of being almost itself a living intelligence which can inspire its manipulation on the explorative and creative level simultaneously” (Sitney, 35). She was an artist in filmmaking; everything she produced was to serve the original intent to create a work of art.
Maya Deren’s husband, Alexander Hackenschmied, was a professional filmmaker. In filmmaking circles, he was known as a director, editor, and cameraman.
Together they shot their first film, Meshes of the Afternoon. After that Eleanora resolved to change her name to Maya. In total, she produced six short films and some works which were incomplete. She was also the author of two books.
The film was shot in their own house with the use of primitive equipment. They worked out the outline together and they were also the actors.
Deren is considered to have made the first narrative film for the American avant-garde. The special features of her works are abstract representations and the usage of Formal experiments with animation.
This film can serve to exemplify an avant-garde work in cinema. It stresses the duplicity of the scenario and specific interpretation of the female subject.
The film is characterized by an intricate spiral structure which is based on the repetition of the initial scene of the film. In the first shot, the viewer sees a thin tender hand that reaches down to leave a flower on the ground. A young woman walks along the road, then picks up the flower and looks at the back of a figure which is going ahead. She tries to catch up with the figure but fails.
She comes up to the house, tries the locked door. Then she takes the key and opens the door. When the woman eventually enters the house, the viewer can see a disordered room. In the upper bedroom, the window is open and the wind is blowing a curtain. Back downstairs the woman relaxes in a chair by the window. Here comes the climax of the film. From the window, the viewer is able to see the initial scene, the road. We can see a figure in black with a mirror for her face, walking slowly in the same direction the heroine had in the very beginning. Again this figure is followed by the young woman. When she gives up the idea to catch up with the figure, she comes up to the house, and we see her face for the first time. Then she is in the bedroom and we can see the distorted reflection of her face in the blade of a knife. When she goes downstairs she sees herself sleeping in a chair… (Sitney, 18).
In the final scene, we see a man watching a young woman whose throat is slit. “This film is concerned,” Maya Deren wrote, “with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event that could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience” (Sitney, 22).
Even in this first attempt to share this “critical emotional experience” some features typical of Deren’s style can be observed. In the still shot, she manages to establish a speechless connection with the eyes. This suggests a possibility for dreaminess or even hallucination. This technique foreshadows Deren’s experiments with the juxtaposition of disparate spaces. In this film, the viewer can trace the most typical themes for her work: reflection, vision, dreaming, and ritual.
Often her films are seen as a kind of cinematographic autobiography. It is “a personal performance, an action that exemplifies the character of the agent responsible for that action and how it is performed” (Atwood, 53). She attempted to replace realism with her experiments with self-representation. One of Deren’s specific traits is a representation of the sexual self.
Some critics think that the film is based on the “typical theme of the masculine subject’s Oedipal narrative, with Woman as the object (and outcome) of desire” (Deutsch, 132).
Due to Deren’s works, the audience came to know all the benefits microcinema allows. Microcinema is a very special art because it allows the filmmaker to show a long story full of emotions and thoughts within a very short period of time. In these films, even the smallest detail usually conveys an important meaning.
These days avant-garde cinema is flourishing due to the new technologies and to the input of the pioneers of microcinema.
Works Cited
Atwood, Kathryn J. Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren. Afterimage 33.5 (2006): 53.
Deutsch, James. Bill Nichols, Ed. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. American Studies International 42.1 (2004): 132.
Geller, Theresa L. The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Critical Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde. Biography 29.1 (2006): 140.
Mccarthy, Kevin F., and Elizabeth Heneghan Ondaatje. From Celluloid to Cyberspace: The Media Arts and the Changing Arts World. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2002.
Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.