Maya Deren
Here’s a collection of shorts by Maya Deren, an influential ’40s filmmaker. She took the kind of narrative techniques that were just getting to a mature state in the commercial features of the day and applied them to her art films. Emotionally-affecting conventions that movie audiences had become sophisticated enough to expect–like “limited third-person perspective,” where the camera is restricted only to items of interest to one character–were still a startling novelty in the art world.
(Tangent: limited third-person perspective is so ubiquitous in films today that it’s better to illustrate it with an example of its absence. Part of The Phantom Menace’s lack of emotional affect is rooted in its mysterious reliance on “omniscient,” and not limited, third-person perspective, where the camera takes the viewpoint of an outside observer.
When Natalie Portman enters the Galactic Senate, most living filmmakers would, somehow or other, contrive to show us her face together with a view of the chamber from where she’s standing. We see a thing, we see an actress looking at the thing, and we read her for clues as to how we should respond to the thing emotionally. Instead of this, we get a wide shot of the chamber alone, like something out of Metropolis. Omniscient third-person perspective was a common tactic in the silent era, and it’s a key reason why modern lay audiences watching a silent film sometimes have trouble caring too much about what’s going to happen next. )
It’s perhaps a bit more difficult to appreciate Deren’s originality these days, when there’s a broad public understanding that Eisenstein’s rules aren’t for “the movies” alone, but can be deployed to whatever weird ends you like. (To get a better idea of her impact, consider that she influenced Kenneth Anger, generally credited as the inventor of the music video.) “Meshes of the Afternoon” is her most famous film, but I’ve always liked “At Land” best. Oh, and according to Wikipedia, the rumor that she died in a voodoo ritual gone horribly wrong is not true.