A Study in choreography for camera

This is the third film of the prominent American experimental film-maker, Maya Deren. It elaborates a technique developed in her previous film ‘At Land’ in which fresh contiguities of shot relations were achieved through the device of photographing a movement begun in one place, and concluding it by photographing the completion of the movement in another place, thus creating a cinematic time and place which enabled unrelated persons, place and objects to be related and brought into harmony, resulting in a new complexity of meaning and form. ‘A Study in Choreography for Camera’ features a leap by the dancer Talley Beatty, in which he begins his leap in the woods, continues it against the background of the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian Hall, and finishes it on the cliffs overlooking a river. Slow motion is used to prolong and dramatise the movement. John Martin, dance critic of the ‘New York Times’ called this film “virtually the beginnings of a new art, choreocinema, in which the dancer and the camera collaborate on the creation of a single new work of art.”