SOURCE: A review of A Study in Choreography for Camera, in Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 654, July, 1988, pp. 218-19.

In the following review, O'Pray praises Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera as being an innovative and unsurpassed film on movement.

With the exception of perhaps the early single-lake 'primitive' films of the Lumières, Maya Deren's A Study in Choreography for Camera was probably the simplest film, at least thematically if not formally, to have been made at the time, 1945. Nothing in the 1920s German avant-garde work of Richter, Ruttmann, et al., prepares us for its formal purity and rigour. It is also as far removed from the 'other' 20s avant-garde film movement—the surrealist-cum-dadaist work of Cocteau, Man Ray, Dulac, Clair and Buñuel—as Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren's first film, was close to that same movement. However, there is a sense in which all...