SOURCE: "The Maya Mystique," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXIII, No. 20, May 15, 1978, p. 50.

In the following essay, Hoberman explains how Deren was an innovator in filmmaking for her generation.

Seventeen years after her death, Maya Deren's films (at the Film Forum, May 11 through 14) continue to provoke a violently mixed response. A pioneer working in a virtual vacuum, she invented the two genres—psychodrama and dance-film—that most characterize American personal cinema from World War II through the late 1950s. So many of Deren's devices have grown shopworn in other hands that it takes an active imagination to recognize just how innovative her work really was.

Of the six films Deren completed, her three psychodramas are the most substantial. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was the first and, Un Chien Andalou aside, probably the most widely seen avant-garde film ever made. Like that film, Deren's has the logic of a...