At Land

As the technology for film became increasingly accessible to a wider pool of talent, we start to see more experimentation in the sort of images that can be created -- a wider range of expression and an increased ability to captivate the audience and provoke their imagination. Early works, such as Buster Keaton's silent films, certainly pushed the boundaries of what is possible with film as a medium but tended to focus effort on simply providing amusement -- in other words, they were really only ever intended to be taken at face value.

Maya Deren's film At Land makes a good study in the fantastic sort of images and impressions one can create by simply experimenting with the sequence in which the filmed images are presented to the audience. Even from the very beginning, the film demonstrates this capacity to take a raw filmed sequence and make a simple change to paint an entirely new image of what is happening on screen -- in this case, to give the impression that the film's mysterious protagonist has been deposited on the shore by the receding ocean, simply by playing the sequence in reverse with respect to how it was filmed.

The prevailing technique Deren uses in the film is the splicing of images from entirely different scenes to create the impression that the two are connected, in spite of the obvious dissonance between the two. Take, for instance, the sequence of the character climbing up a cliffside, only to appear at the edge of a table at a dinner party. For a few seconds, the character is seemingly halfway between the two places, an impression created by jumping back and forth from an "under" perspective with the character's feet on the cliff as she disappears out the top of the frame, and an "over" perspective of her pulling herself up and onto the table. This technique is then used several moments later to equate the dinner party to a wilderness by flipping between images of the character crawling between the party guests and crawling among the wild greenery.

Another interesting facet of the Deren's film is the ambiguous presence of the main character in relationship to other characters in the film. Much of the time, the character goes completely unnoticed as she explores an environment that is apparently alien to her. At times she is only noticed partially, or in a transitory fashion. This gives the character an ethereal quality that dares the audience to speculate on who (or what) the main character is supposed to be.

Like any good film, At Land ends with a memorable, spectacular finish by creating a strange, asynchronous sequence. The character manages to steal (rescue?) a piece from the chess board and runs off, apparantly past herself as a sequence of images show her "past" selves (her at the chessboard by the sea, her in the room full of drop cloths, her on the cliffs and her at the dinner party) as she retreats to the shore from whence she came. Although the sequence is, in a technical sense from a modern perspective, fairly simple, it manages to challenge very elegantly the audience's sensibilities about experiencing time in the usual, strictly forward fashion.