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"Ritual and Ordeal," Maya Deren's Unfinished Work

A screening of Ritual in Transfigured Time (Maya Deren, 1945, 15 min.) will be shown during this lecture by Sarah Keller about the woman often hailed as the mother of American avant-garde film. Deren made just over an hour’s worth of completed films during a career of two decades. However, she left behind a wealth of unfinished projects that illuminate her agenda as a filmmaker and working artist in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, these fragments and abandoned or repurposed works necessitate a reappraisal both of her own oeuvre and of the value of incompletion for producing critical and creative work. This lecture will consider these issues by looking at Deren’s 1945 film, Ritual in Transfigured Time, and its earlier iteration, Ritual and Ordeal, which she finished just before her first trip to Haiti to embark on an ambitious but ultimately unfinished project about Vodoun rituals. Sarah Keller, assistant professor of English and cinema studies at Colby College in Maine, is the co-editor of the collection Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), and her current book project, Incomplete Control: Maya Deren’s Unfinished Business, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. The lecture is made possible by the generous support of the Spencer Barnett Memorial Fund.

Location on campus: Donnelley Film Theatre/Lecture Hall in the Heimbold Visual Arts Center

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