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At Land
Silently, a woman wakes on a beach as the tides go in reverse. In her dreams, she tries to locate a chess piece traveling from the beach to a party to a country road and then back.
In the dream-like narrative of At Land, a woman, played by filmmaker Maya Deren herself, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey, encountering other versions of herself. Deren described the film as about the struggle to maintain one’s personal identity. Composer John Cage and poet and film critic Parker Tyler were involved in making the film and appear in it.
Bio Maya Deren
Maya Deren (1917-1961) was one of the most important American avant-garde experimental filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, poet, and photographer. She was married to Alexander Hammid; together they made Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). In the years following the release of her most famous film, Deren reached the peak of her career, with films like At Land (1944) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and the manifesto “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film” . From the mid-1950s until her death, Deren returned to obscurity. Nevertheless, she remained the face of experimental cinema and served as a mentor to …
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- This film was #28 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025