Maya Deren's 'At Land', and its influence on our Experimental Film

Having completed a presentation on an article by Maya Deren for the Approaching Research module, I became familiar with the various concepts she deals with in her writings and the techniques utilised in her films. As part of the research process, Jordan and I also watched several of these works.
Among these was At Land, an experimental film using Deren's own technique of 'creative geography', linking separate locations together through cleverly-hidden transitions in order to create a continuous sense of movement through them. The protagonist (played by Deren herself) journeys across these scenes in a manner suggesting she is searching for something. The closing of the film reverses the order of these locations as she returns to the beginning scene of the film.
This sense of circular chronology appealed to me, and so I wrote Likeness with the intention of creating a similar loop in which the opening and ending of the film take place in the same location, and potentially at the same point in time.

A belief of Maya Deren's as argued in her writings, is that the photographic process results not in a capturing of reality, but the creation of an entirely new and separate one. The image is a representation of the mental process relating to what the viewer identifies as its subject, and the context in which it is viewed changes entirely its meaning. In this way, a cinematographer chooses aspects of reality to photograph that serve the purposes of their film and the meanings they wish to create. In At Land, this attitude is shown in the surreal blending together of carefully-chosen locations and scenarios, including a particularly surreal scene in which the protagonist crawls along a table, without drawing any notice from those sitting at it. Often throughout the film, an object (such as a chessboard) is used in order to link two locations together more cohesively and suggest no change in time but only a change in space.

In doing this, Deren exploits the unique ability of film to deal with time, and to represent time as required by the filmmaker.

In Likeness, we hope to channel some of these creative elements in order to produce our own piece of work that takes advantage of the qualities exclusive to filmmaking, and manipulates the viewer by using editing to alter real-life space in order to create an entirely new one existing only in the world of the film.