Movie Review: Choreography for Camera: a background to Maya Deren’s “Meditation on Violence” by Thomas Dayzie

Still from Meditation on Violence (1948)

Choreography for Camera: a background to Maya Deren’s Meditation on Violence by Thomas Dayzie

Meditation on Violence, directed by Maya Deren, 1948.

Art is transgressive insofar as it misleads the consumer. Maya Deren’s film Meditation on Violence has a title that, through misdirection, begins to intimate the truth of a matter it disdains to name. As a non-narrative silent film (with flute and drum accompaniment), the title promises a meditation that it cannot really - that is, discursively - deliver. The film’s wordlessness generates a vacuum for the audience’s thoughts. At the center of this vacuum is what Deren called, in an essay published in the magazine Dance contemporaneously with the film’s release, “a choreography for camera based on the movements of Chinese boxing” (Deren, 229). Between her chosen title and her explanation of the film’s actual contents is a conceptual vastness that demands the flares of commentary to sound out. This vastness is roughly that of the zone between an artwork’s significance and its author’s intent, a zone which we, as artists, inhabit, and as responsible inhabitants, should try to understand.

Authorial intent, insignificant as it may be for an understanding of an artwork on its own terms, is indispensable for demystifying the social significance of art-making. This social significance is especially important to us as Indigenous artists, insofar as we desire sovereignty over our praxis. In an extemporaneous comment, Adrian Piper explained the matrix of art-making like this: “In general I don’t think that artists have privileged access to the significance of what they’re doing, although they have privileged access to their intentions in doing it.” As artists, we live in between the intentions through which we make sense of our work and the field of significance which our work inherits. That field of significance is granted not by the writer but by literary analysis, which, however, can never shed light on the in-between of art-making. The shifting shapes of that vast in-between, so vital for developing an idea of responsible artistry, find an exemplary case in Maya Deren’s artistic and theoretical corpus. Had Deren preferred this vastness to remain an esoterically embedded effect of her films’ presentations, she would not have so painstakingly developed the theories of art and history with which her works of silent film were in constant and public conversation. It is this conversation, which we as artists are constantly having with our works whether we voice it or not, which the following commentary wants to make audible, though in a different form.

A commentary can enter this conversation by confronting the impossibility of the film’s promised Meditation and asking why Deren called it that in the first place. In program notes for a showing of this film twelve years after its production, Deren elaborates on the title, referring to the camerawork itself as a “meditating mind turned in upon the idea of movement, …[which] takes place nowhere or, as it were, in the very center of space” (252). The “turn[ing] in” of the camera “upon the idea of movement, …[which] takes place nowhere” resembles the conception of meditation as the mind’s focusing on an idea in the central nowhere of language. Understood as “a choreography for camera” that meditates “upon the idea of movement,” Meditation on Violence can be provisionally called a meditation by movement on movement. Somewhere in the process of shrinking the scope of its meditation to its medium, the “meditating mind” of the camera and the individual mind of the viewer become interchangeable: “There [nowhere or…in the very center of space] the inner eye meditates upon it at leisure, investigates its possibilities, considers first this aspect and angle and that one, and once more reconsiders, as one might plumb and examine an image or an idea, turning it over and over in one’s mind” (252).

That the object of a meditation would also be its means is predicated upon a moment in world history aspects of which Deren attempted to redeem. This is the European 17th century, one of the central and recentering texts of which is Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Here too the goal is given by the means: the narrator of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy operates as the “thinking thing” that we who participate in their thoughts climactically deduce ourselves to be. This intelligence’s self-discovery is initiated by the narrator’s first “suppos[ing] that all things I see are false…that I possess no senses…that body, figure, extension, movement, and place are but the fictions of my mind” (Descartes, 9). The dissipation of the human body in Descartes’ meditations creates a vacuum in the center of which is the human itself – the human as incorporeal, a “thing” that “doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels” (10). This thing manifests itself to itself in language. Descartes’ meditation, like that of Deren’s moving camera, “turn[s] in” on itself to find itself. But, just as the camera is identified with “the mind behind the eye,” (that is, the mind of the viewer), so too is the reader identified with Descartes’ “thinking thing.” Descartes prefaces his work with a disclaimer that the totalizing force of a darkened cinema would hardly require: “I should never desire anyone to read it excepting those who desire to meditate seriously with me, and who can detach their minds from affairs of sense, and deliver themselves entirely from every sort of prejudice” (4). The ensuing meditations, by methodically “setting aside all that in which the least doubt could be supposed to exist” - including, again, the physical world and our very bodies - seek an intense degree of intimacy with the reader which, by being mediated by language, is also universally accessible - an intimacy which, explicitly, depends on a readerly/writerly partnership of consensual “desire.” The passage of Descartes’ recalls Deren’s own demand for “an abandonment of all previously conceived realities” while viewing her films and “an attitude of innocent receptivity which permits the perception and the experience of the new reality” (Deren, 23, emphasis in original). Through language was Descartes able to define the human as the only being capable of such, necessarily disembodied, intimacy. Deren, on the other hand, saw that film, through movement, redeemed the human body’s unspoken intimacy with itself. Furthermore, that this intimacy stands as a crucial moment for the manifestations of consciousness before and after the intervention of language.

Conspicuously absent thus far from this dissection of Meditation on Violence is violence itself. Even more, the performer Ch’ao-li Chi and his demonstration of three modes of Chinese Boxing. It should come as no surprise that through the mediations detailed above neither turns out to be what it seems to be at first. The important question, why violence?, can only be accessed through another, why Chinese boxing?. In giving a brief survey of Chinese boxing, Deren defines Wu Tang’s social role as a “form of self-cultivation” that “incorporates the philosophical tenets of the Confucian Book of Changes [I ChingI] and the teachings of Lao-Tsu” (230). Reference to this social role is conspicuously absent from the film. As genuine as her personal admiration may have been for Wu Tang, Deren’s artistic interest in the practice stems from her understanding of Wu Tang as a kind of “sport.” She explains her choice of subject by relating “sports, with their emphasis upon coordination, rhythm, and balance,” to “dance” (229). The history of dance in cinema is the object of one of Deren’s most important polemics. In her theoretical essay “Cinema as Art Form” (published two years before the release of Meditation on Violence), Deren calls dance that “which, of all art forms, would seem to profit most by cinematic treatment, [and] actually suffers miserably” (28). Dance suffers on camera when it “is conceived in terms of a stable, stage front audience” and not “designed, precisely, for the mobility and other attributes of the camera” (29). The exercises Ch’ao-li Chi demonstrates in Deren’s film, predating film “by several centuries,” cannot be said to be “designed, precisely, for…the camera.” Nor are they dance. And yet, in a sentence comparing Meditation on Violence to her dance films alone, Deren implicitly treats Ch’ao-li Chi as the film’s “dancer.” Without noting a contradiction, Deren also writes that her “filmic means” “recreate…the sense and spirit” of the Wu Tang and Shao-Lin forms (230). That these athletic forms are not interchangeable with dance is not taken into account. Can the honest “recreat[ion]” of Wu Tang and Shao-Lin’s “sense and spirit” be distinguished in the product of an artist who treats these forms as dance?

The confusion here of the athletic and the artistic - exacerbated, on the one hand, by the cultural remove between the director and the athletic forms and, on the other hand, by the fact that the particular form of dance Deren seeks (dance “designed, precisely…for the camera”) remains to be established - is allowed by Deren’s expansive understanding of “ritual.” Deren, writing on her earlier film, Ritual in Transfigured Time, explains how she “create[s] dance out of non-dance elements by filmic manipulation” (226). The importance of such a “creat[ion]...by filmic manipulation” for Meditation on Violence – a film that, filmically meditating on an athletic performance, becomes dance –is obvious: Deren has it that the technical intervention endows the form of dance on what, unmediated, is not dance. Less obvious is why this technical intervention constitutes “ritual.” Deren explains: the film’s “pattern, created by the film instrument, transcends the intentions and the movements of the individual performers, and for this reason I have called it Ritual. I base myself upon the fact that, anthropologically speaking, a ritual is a form which depersonalizes…and, in so doing, fuses all individual elements into a transcendent tribal power towards the achievement of some extraordinary grace” (227). Deren’s definition, as “base[d]” on an “anthropological” “fact” concerning “tribal power,” removes herself from that which she applies to her work. In an earlier essay she notes the distance created by the “strictly anthropological usage” between her (and her audience) and the “certain specific conditions” of a “primitive society” to which “ritual” belongs. The slight is to “anthropological usage” more than it is to “primitive society” (which, anyway, is an invention of anthropologists). Deren seeks no return to nature through her very specific idea of ritual. For Deren, an artistically created “ritual” is the product of the artist’s form-giving “classicism.” This is already particularly a-romantic. The so-created “ritual form” itself, in that it produces a “new, man-made reality,” is “much more the art equivalent of modern science than…naturalism [that is, documentary realism]” (59).

Dizzyingly, athletic performance has been transformed into dance by means of a highly secularized understanding of “ritual” - the result of what Deren refers to as her “classicism” - as the artistic form nearest modern science. Deren’s self-identification as a “classicist” shines a new light on the preceding depiction of Descartes’ meditation. In her “Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film,” Deren gives a historical review that begins with the century of Descartes and culminates in the advent of classicism. “In the 17th century,” she writes, “man, along with nature, ceased to be a manifestation of the absolute divine will, and accepted, in the first pride of his newfound, individual consciousness, the moral responsibilities which he had until then left to the dispensation of the deity. All this was reflected in the classicism of the early 18th century, and it seems to me fully evident that if a period of classicism could occur in the full flush of this exhilarating belief that man was, to all intents and purposes, the dominant figure of the universe, then it must be a form predicated not upon absolutism, but upon the idea of consciousness” (56). That is, the “classicism” that arises “in the full flush” of the belief that humanity has replaced the deity as “dominant figure in the universe,” forgoes the “absolutism” one would expect from such an intoxicatingly self-centered belief. It instead works off of “the idea of consciousness.”

“The idea of consciousness,” Deren stresses, did not “originate in the 17th century” but, much more expansively, from “when man had considered himself a manifestation of divine consciousness” (41). According to Deren’s historical review (this, it seems, is her own idea of “primitive society), at that time “it was precisely through the exercise of consciousness that he could reaffirm his relationship with deity” (41). The “classicism” that gives form to Deren’s secularized “ritual” then has a foot in two irreconcilable modes: one which considers human consciousness to have replaced the deity, and the other which considers human consciousness’ “exercise” as its means of relating to the deity of which it is a “manifestation.” Her insight is this: the distance presupposed by being a “manifestation” of the deity’s rather than a deity oneself does not cease to be necessary after the total identification with deity has been achieved. Consciousness must paradoxically “reaffirm his relationship with [a] deity” it has usurped. The deity’s “moral responsibilities,” now properly belonging to humanity, are taken up by the classicist-artist. Only such an artist could create a form-giving ritual “predicated upon” consciousness’ need to “reaffirm” its “relationship” with itself. Deren’s definition of “ritual” as “that which depersonalizes…towards extraordinary grace” recalls Descartes’ disembodied intimacy. But whereas Descartes’ intimacy hovers in language, as is proper, in his conception, to “thinking things,” Deren’s tarries in “manifestation,” the responsibility of the divine, which consciousness – before and after Descartes’ contribution – must “exercise” in order to responsibly re-intimate itself with itself. Any such “manifestation,” taking after the impact of science on humanity’s idea of the universe, must exceed the “naturalism” of the unthinking “eye” and aim at the reconstitution of experience.

Meditation on Violence could be more properly named, in the theoretical terminology Deren manipulates above, a “manifestation” (for consciousness) of dance effected by her “choreography for camera based on the movements of Chinese boxing.” This, at least, is how Deren in the fullness of her thought understood it. The jumble of aethereal and solidly-referential words brought about by this investigation into filmic and philosophical intimacies are the product of her talent, her unique historical situation, and the unique historical situation of film. Film, working within the constellation of so many media and established artistic traditions, must mislead when any one element is valued higher than the rest. The guilt for any such unbalanced evaluation, when confronting a genuinely subversive work, falls on the viewer. Meditation on Violence condemns the viewer to consciousness – not in the manner of mythic original sin, but as a vacuum in the center of which one discovers oneself. In this case, oneself is the human body in its endless manifestations.

CITATIONS: 

Deren, Maya. Essential Deren: collected writings on film, edited by Bruce R. McPherson. McPherson and Company, 2005.

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Internet Archive of Philosophy, 1996. This file is of the 1911 edition of The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge University Press), translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane.

Piper, Adrian. “The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper,” conducted by Maurice Berger, Afterimage, October 1990, reproduced in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, edited by Maurice Berger, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Press, 1999.

Thomas Dayzie is a fiction writer working on his first novel. He earned his undergraduate at Princeton University with a concentration in English and certificates in Creative Writing and Humanistic Studies. His interests include media theory, Hebrew literature, Diné thought, and Indigenous futurism. He lives in Berlin and is a first-year MFA student in Creative Writing at IAIA