Maya Deren "The Very Eye of Night"

While watching this video in class, I was awed by the simplicity of the video. With todays computers we can do much of what she did with a few simple keystrokes. And yet it was such a feat for her to hand cut the film and by hand do all the animation of the stars and dancers. There was a distinct hand made feel to it that made it actually more interesting then when we use computers to pull off the same effects. The computer is more mechanical and it does things more precisely; you could see the random shaking in her hands.

It was an engaging video that captured my attention.

Mary Hallock-Greenewalt: Media Pioneer

Portrait of Mary Hallock-Greenewalt (1871-1951) by Thomas Eakins

In watching the following video about the work of Thomas Wilfred, there was mention of his contemporary Mary Hallock-Greenewalt. When you watch it, look at the way that the video treats her work as secondary. As the first comment says, she is damned with faint praise. In my role as a media student and a woman artist, I feel that this kind of slighting of women media pioneers happens far too often. And I am very interested to now be aware of the careers of such notables as Loie Fuller (thanks Shamar), Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, and Maya Deren, all of whom worked with Light in some manner. Learn about her work with color and light at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Hallock-Greenewalt

The Very Eye of Night

Astrophysics [For Maya]

Our bare feet in the damp grass, we spin after dusk,

As our mothers call us in by ones and twos, insistent.

Dizzy with freedom, palms and planets revolving together,

We play our games, pretend to be statues, or spin while laughing,

Giddy cosmonauts awaiting our landing.

Above us the stars traverse the stage in elegant alignments.

The Twins with their sculpted torsos cavort with the Pleiades,

Some goddesses so faint that they are almost forgotten,

Lost amid the rush of vertigo and gravitas,

Eleusian Mysteries conducted to flute, chime, and drum.

Three Graces pose themselves just so,

The curvatures of intention in a constellation of movement.

And for a while there is no up or down, beyond buoyancy,

No rules to obey, only floating perspectives,

The ancient forms breathing again,

For we are at the axis, peering into the very eye of night.