Maya Deren, Take Zero

It is hard to tell why this remarkably short and simple piece has taken us almost ten years to complete. The whole story started in a second hand store in Barcelona. A bootleg video tape of Maya's films was there and the picture on the cover was so beautiful that we had to buy it. After seeing the films, fascination had increased considerably and by the time we had read all the books available both by her or on her, it was clear we had to make a documentary. One day, searching for information on the internet, we got an e-mail by Alexander Hammid, Maya's second husband and co-director of some of her films. He was 95 then, and his kindness and willingness to help us with the project was the spur that fueled us into New York. We had just finished our studies and we didn't even have a video camera, so we bought a shared one with some friends and, since September 11th was still quite recent, we were able to find plenty of cheap flights to New York.

Although we had some experience working for broadcast companies, this was really one of our first personal projects. and, in that sense, we were absolute beginners. Travellling to New York and meeting all this amazing people was, for us, a jouney of discovery, and, most of all, a great time. Encountering filmmakers like Jonas Mekas or Jean Rouch (whom we met later in Barcelona) we realised that someone's ideas on life and on film can change your way of filming them and your way of approaching both life and film later on.

Before we started shooting, we had many preconceived ideas of what we wanted to show in our film. After we finished, all these ideas were gone and, luckily enough, our footage had nothing to do with our previous conceptions. Yes, a nice departure point for creative editing, but it wasn't so easy. At that time, video editing stations were not so easily available or affordable as today. We could have borrowed one for a very limited amount of time, but we knew we had to work for quite a while on the materials. Then, the fact that we went to live to different cities didn't help much to the quick conclusion of the project. From then on, we met from year to year for a few days, usually during the Summer, to work on the film and, finally, here it is!

Maya Deren, Take Zero is not a biographic film. Even though it includes some anecdotal data regarding the relationship between Deren and people such as Alexander Hammid, Margaret
Mead, Gregory Bateson or Marcel Duchamp, anyone looking for a detailed essay on Maya's life should better find a copy of Martina Kudlacek's excellent film In the Mirror of Maya Deren or the available volumes of Maya's amazing biography, The Legend of Maya Deren, by Neiman, Hodson and Clark.

Maya Deren, Take Zero is, to us, a reminder of different ways of thinking cinema. Through the fictional dialogue between Maya's friends and her own voice recordings, the documentary re-enacts
some of the Deren-Mekas debates regarding form and improvisation that filled the Village Voice's pages between 1960 and1961. The film also links all these ideas to cinéma vérité and ethnographic films by revisiting Maya's unfinished film on Haitian Voudun along with her thoughts on dance, ritual and art.

Maya used to say she made her pictures for what Hollywood spent on lipstick. Nowadays, when almost everyone has a camera in their cell phone, Maya's ethic and aesthetic ideas are very much alive. The main purpose of this film is no other than to celebrate these ideas and, as happens in Voudun rituals, to meet at the Crossroads and give new flesh to old spirits.

Jaime Ballada & Gerard Gil
December 2011