SOURCE: A review of Ritual in Transfigured Time, in Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 654, July, 1988, pp. 217-18.

In the following review, Dusinberre discusses the place of individual and collective identity in Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time.

Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time merits special attention for a number of reasons. First, it synthesises all the major elements found in Deren's other films: psychodramatic condensation/displacement of time and space, the recourse to myth, and the use of dance as ritual expression of that myth. In addition, it represents the last of her truly 'accomplished' films (her subsequent work never quite attaining the same intensity and clarity). Finally, the film is strikingly relevant in the context of today's social trend towards serial monogamy; what Deren described as a woman's rite of passage from "widow into bride" could be pertinently paraphrased as 'the (cyclical) loss of one lover and the...