SOURCE: A review of The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, in Wide Angle, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 131-33.

In the following review, Rabinovitz discusses The Legend of Maya Deren as a biography which presents the relationship of a female artist to a male-dominated system.

The Legend of Maya Deren is the first book on the most frequently mentioned woman filmmaker of the postwar avant-garde cinema. Maya Deren (1917–1961) made short, modernist films that initially addressed an individual woman's subjective experiences but which later expanded to celebrations of myth and ritual. Unable to secure continued financial backing for her films, Deren became a lecturer, teacher, publicist and organizational administrator in order to create and to promote a more sympathetic climate for American independent filmmaking in the Forties and Fifties. Acknowledging Deren's central role in the New York avant-garde cinema, The Legend of Maya Deren constructs a...