Meshes of the Mountain
On Maya Deren and King Hu's cinema of movement
Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera opens with a revolving leftward pan across a forest finding Talley Beatty dancing in place, indifferent to the camera which passes him by. Due to near-invisible edits he appears to be teleporting across the forest, waiting for the slowly panning camera to catch up with him again, or perhaps he exists throughout the forest simultaneously and the camera would find him wherever it looked. The editing trick itself is clear enough, but this film, while full of similarly clever “tricks” of the camera, relies little on novelty. Even if the technique is understood, its effect is mysterious.
Later, when we see isolated parts of his body in close-ups soaring across an empty sky, the point isn’t to believe he is flying, or even off the ground, but to feel a new kind of motion that can only be achieved with cameras and montage. The tension between photographed reality and the construction of supernatural fantasy is the central beauty of this and many other films by Maya Deren. We cannot free the body from the confines of physics, but we can suggest that freedom with the modest means of a camera, a dancer, and some constructive editing.
Dance in the Sun by Shirley Clarke is simpler in conception: the dancer (upon seeing a seashell in his bag) begins dancing in the studio but imagines himself on a beach. The film alternates between these locations with careful match-cuts on action—a leap through the air, an outstretched arm. There is a clear delineation between reality and fantasy, the binary states of the artist at work and his imagination that fuels him. Even in his fantasy, the movement of his body never moves beyond physical possibility. Unlike in Deren’s work, he is not soaring through the sky or teleporting from place to place, but simply dancing on the beach with all the beauty and limitations of his physical form. In Deren’s work, no such delineation exists. The reality she depicts is immediately understood to be either deceptive or fantastical, so the cutting between locations is not a projection of fantasy, but a document of it. Clarke’s film is a celebration of the body, Deren attempts to transcend it through means of montage.
Deren and Clarke’s approaches to dance on film were too complex and evolving to be summarized by such a simple dichotomy, but those ideas—the physical and the transcendent—reappear throughout their careers.
Deren’s final finished film, The Very Eye of Night, and her previous, unfinished Ensemble for Somnambulists are in some ways a departure of her earlier style, but are a continuation of her attempts to abstract the body from physical constraints through the image. Both films show dancers floating against a black backdrop, which removes any visual information required for spatial orientation. The camera is in constant motion, but without any visual context it can be difficult to determine which movements are of the dancers and which are of the camera. It is tempting to try and suspend disbelief, to assume the frame is static and to ascribe any movement to the dancers themselves, to imagine them soaring and twirling through space, but Deren’s handheld camerawork is too expressive to ignore. Instead, as in Choreography for Camera, a new kind of motion is created—one that can only exist when the body and the moving image become one.
Four Journeys Into Time: Initiation also showcases dancers set against a void of blackness, but is totally stage bound. Clarke accentuates the choreography with subtle pans, zooms, and crossfades, but her work is meant to enhance the effect of the dancing, not to subsume it. Which is not to say the work isn’t cinematic—her guiding emphasis of the frame and the delicate bloom and grain of overexposed 16mm film make it an essentially pictorial experience, not a mere facsimile of a live theatrical one—but once again Clarke is in service of the capabilities and limitations of the physical body. Individual frames of Clarke’s and Deren’s films may at times look strikingly similar, but in motion and in sequence they are fundamentally different.
Though the conditions that he worked in and the kinds of films he tried to make were far different than those of Deren and Clarke (two dancers-turned-avant garde filmmakers in the 40s and 50s), a surprisingly apt comparison of technique is that of the wuxia films of King Hu from the 60s and 70s. A major draw, if not the major draw, in most martial arts films is the acrobatic feats of the performers and images that emphasize and exaggerate the violence. Directors like Chang Cheh, Lau-Kar Leung, and Tsui Hark all had unique ways of framing and editing action but were unified in their dedication to the spectacle of the body in motion. King Hu was also a skillful director of choreography, but his style became increasingly abstract and expressive. Incredible acrobatics were required for his films, but were often merely a tool that was used for the greater goal of image-making and sequencing.
Near the halfway point of A Touch of Zen there is a fight in a forest. A swordswoman leaps into the air, propels off of a tree, and in a flurry of cuts seems to fly to the tree tops before lunging downward for a climactic strike of her sword. Like Choreography for Camera (or a more similar physics defying lunge from the ceiling in Meshes of the Afternoon), at no point are we tricked into believing that the feat depicted has actually been performed. Their technique is not attempting deception or verisimilitude. When people are bouncing off of unseen trampolines in A Touch of Zen to depict impossible agility, no deception has occurred—a child would recognize the distinct thrust and curved motion. What’s not easily recognized is why the result is so captivating. That the technique is so forthright yet the effect so disorienting is where both Hu and Deren’s magic lies. A more convincing deception would not improve the films and would be antithetical to their beauty.
Deren and Hu were both involved with (if not entirely responsible for) the editing of their films and had similar goals: not mere continuity, but to expand, contract, shuffle, or distort motion and time. At the climax of The Fate of Lee Khan there is a sequence where a man and a woman leap from a cliff to join a battle happening below. Hu uses a dozen shots and as many seconds to show them jumping, falling, and bouncing (trampolines, of course) down to the ground. There are much more efficient ways to show this action, but for Hu the spectacle isn’t the stunt, but the pose of the body set against the blue sky, the wind in their clothes, and the feeling that the restraints of physics and time can be broken with a strong enough will. The entire action could have been viewed in the duration of any one of these shots, but the pleasure of this scene lies in the friction between the expanded movement and duration against the expectation of reality. We recognize the movement as both real and not real simultaneously.
In Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren sees a knife at the bottom of the stairs then runs up the steps in slow motion, appearing to float for a moment after each step. After seven stairs she cuts to an even closer shot of her feet for another nine, then to a wide shot from above for another four, meaning she’s taken twice as many steps as there are stairs. The timing of the cuts suggests a continuity of motion, not a replaying of it. She expands the action to make the event feel larger than the confines of the actual location. As in Lee Khan, the expectation of continuity is subverted for expressive means.
King Hu’s most Derenesque scene is near the end of A Touch of Zen when an abbot and four young monks come to help in the fight against the evil commander Hsu. They’re first seen standing high on a rock cliff, glowing in the golden light that streaks the fog drifting through the forest. In one shot they prepare the jump, then in the next shot they’re already in mid-air, falling in slow motion. Still in the air, their movement turns forward, and in a series of close-ups we see their faces, robes, and hands gliding through the trees. The continuity of the sequence quickly becomes indecipherable as the abbot alternates between floating, falling, and bouncing back upward (trampolines again), between inserted images of shaking leaves and grass and the sun glistening on water. The transparent artifice, the graceful motion of the body, the distortion of continuity, and the contrasting of photographed reality against the unreality of the sequence all combine to create one of Hu’s greatest achievements.
The images of Maya Deren and King Hu, like words in a poem, are easily understood in isolation, but their combination creates an elusive kind of beauty that is all the more powerful due to its mystery. The gaps in logic and continuity subvert the photographic reality, pushing the action to the edge of our understanding. When meaning is glimpsed but not fully grasped it’s like a spark caused by two conductors nearing but not touching. Although Deren and Hu worked in different eras, genres, and cultures, they both used these gaps in logic and comprehension to explore new possibilities for beauty, and perhaps even transcendence, through our bodies in motion.
Joseph Elliott is a musician, filmmaker, and chess player living in Kingston, Ontario.
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Nice one Joseph!