Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera lasts only a few minutes, but it does something that remains surprisingly modern. Dancer Talley Beatty begins a movement in one location and completes it somewhere completely different. Through precisely matched editing, a gesture can carry him from a forest into a domestic interior or museum space without appearing to stop.
The cut becomes part of the choreography.
That is what interests me from an audiovisual perspective.
Normally a camera records a dancer moving through physical space. Deren realised that cinema could create another kind of space entirely.
The body obeys continuity.
The location does not.
Today we can create far more complicated transitions using digital compositing, realtime graphics and projection systems, but technical complexity does not automatically improve the idea.
Deren needed only movement, framing and a cut.
The result demonstrates something useful for VJ work too: an edit becomes much stronger when it continues an action rather than merely replacing one image with another.
Movement can hide the cut.
The cut can extend the movement.
