Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Maya Deren was an Avant-garde filmmaker who made experimental, dream-like narrative films during World War II. Her films were meant to use symbolism to convey a story or an idea. In her previous shorts, "Meshes of the Afternoon" and "At Land" we are told of a woman's struggles through symbolic objects and surrealism. This gives all her shorts a mysterious and dreamlike atmosphere. Watching them as a film with a story, you'll be left wondering "Huh? What just happened here?" So to analyze a film like this, you must watch it, then look at the symbolism, think about it, and piece together the narrative entwined into the imagery.In "Meshes of the Afternoon" a woman is struggling with her marriage, wondering if she made a good decision. This film (the director's first film) may have come from Deren's own life, as she had three different husbands. And in "At Land" the woman portrayed is struggling with her place in life. Maybe at one point, Deren too struggled with this same problem. Here, in this film, the woman shown is struggling with men.In the beginning, the woman is innocent. She knows no men and is free. After helping another woman ball up some yarn (symbolic of something, but I can't think what) a mysterious woman lures her into a new world: a world of men, which she knows nothing about.The woman is taken into a ballroom with people exchanging hands and talking. At first they are oblivious to her, communicating to us that men no nothing of her, either. But soon she has become part of their world too, a decision which she later regrets.Later, out in the garden a man is talking with other women. The woman we have been following looks on and watches. She sees the man freeze the other woman in time. The woman is shocked and tries to escape the world she has entered. She runs away while the man chases in choreographed movement. And, in a final pose, we see the woman shining as an angel, telling us she has finally freed herself of the world she had entered and is clean once more.Rita Christiani played the woman, while Maya Deren herself plays the woman at the beginning. The film is beautiful and artful. Who knows? Deren married three times, maybe that fact shows us that she too, like the woman in the film, struggled with men?

"Ritual in Transfigured Time" is a film by experimental movie maker Maya Deren. She made this one shortly after World War II when she was still in her 20s. Basically everything that applies to her other works describes this film as well. It's very experimental, has no real storyline, is in black-and-white and looks much older than from 70 years ago. Deren appears in this film herself, but there are also other cast members. The film runs for 15 minutes and is thus among her longest movies. The story does not really have anything to do with war or the political climate. The first half we see a party for example with really a lot of guest. Must have been a big occasion. The second half has some ancient references with statues etc. All in all, I am not a great fan of Deren's works and this movie here does not change my perception. Not recommended.

Maya Deren was a pioneer: at a time when the Hollywood studio system was at its peak pumping out crowd-pleasing genre movies with huge budgets, Ukrainian born Deren was carving out a position for herself as a self-financed avant-garde female director and (under-rated) film theorist whose films explored the role of women in society through non-narrative cinema which also explored the potential of dance on film. And as such, "Ritual in Transfigured Time" seems to balance both of these strands of her work (compared to the crushing feminist existentialism of her debut "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943) and her totally abstract dance-dominated later films like "The Very Eye of Night" (1958)) and stand as possibly the greatest encapsulation of the themes that motivated her.The film is essentially in three parts in the classic set-up / conflict / resolution style but the transitions between each "act" is characterized by a dream-like spatial shift: at first from a room where a young dancer (Rita Christiani) helps Maya manically roll a ball of wool, before being led by another woman (played by prolific diarist and Henry Miller's squeeze, Anaïs Nin) to a crowded cocktail party. Whilst here, the young woman navigates through the gathered party-goers whose movements in and out of conversations become increasingly stylized and choreographed until they are essentially dancing. Finally, the young dancer meets a young man and the scene switches to outside where the young man pursues the woman in a manner both elegant and threatening.As with earlier Deren's films "Meshes of the Afternoon" and "At Land" (1946), the film seems to have something to say (in this case about the various social rituals, sometimes so choreographed as to be a "dance", which we are forced to perform) and does actually convey this through a plot…albeit a dream-logic one. However, like a poet, Deren also articulates her message through the choices she makes in regard to the form of the film – in this case the unusual spatial cuts and use of effects like freeze-framing and negative prints – which, rather than distract us from the story (as in a "traditional" film), makes us question the relation between the events happening on screen as well as our relationship to it, with the effect that we are pulled further and further into Deren's unique vision.

Ritual in Transfigured Time may be the piece in which Maya Deren puts all her interests and achievements: a surrealistic narrative and dance choreographies. It is beautiful and powerful, but may have too many elements to be coherent and to possess her earlier works' strength.