Isabella Boylston: I’m Isabella Boylston and I’m a principle ballerina with
American Ballet Theater in New York City.
Sophie Cavoulacos: Assistant Curator, Film: I’m Sophie Cavoulacos.
I’m Assistant Curator in the Department of Film at MoMA, and I’m so excited to watch
the film that you’ve picked today, which is A Study In Choreography for Camera, a collaboration
between Maya Deren and Talley Beatty.
Sophie: So we’re looking at this in a 16mm print, which is the original format of the film.
If we go to the galleries later, you’ll see that it’s showing in digital.
But since we’re in the cinema, I thought I’d show you the cinematic format.
Isabella: Yeah, I love this!
His starting position reminds me of Nijinsky in Afternoon of a Faun.
How he starts in a low crouch and then he stretches up and stretches up in each frame.
I feel like he’s definitely a depiction of strength from the first frame.
Sophie: And strength in so many ways!
Isabella: And what year was it made?
Sophie: It’s from ’45.
Isabella: ’45. It’s so incredible.
And just to have like a woman making her own films at that time.
Sophie: A woman and an African American man who both had great expression and great successes
and great recognition, but also hurdles, you know, their respective hurdles.
And so I really see the work as a work of affirmation and of celebration and of presence
and of virtuosity and beauty, and all those things rolled into one.
Isabella: I mean he has like the perfect ballet body.
Watching it, it’s just like, oh man, those legs and arms and face, everything.
He’s doing a Développé.
That’s what it’s called.
With a pointed foot.
I feel like dance is such a difficult thing to capture on film, because, part of the beauty
of live performance is that it’s live and it’s in the moment and then it’s over
and you can’t like edit it or filter it, and I feel like when you see dance depicted
on film and it’s able to reveal something different about the dance that you wouldn’t
get in a live performance, that’s when, to me, it’s really effective and powerful.
Sophie: She had a name for that. She called it “choreocinema”.
Isabella: “Choreocinema!” Cool.
Sophie: So it’s choreography for camera.
It’s not choreography on camera.
It’s not a document.
It only exists in the film that they made together.
Isabella: Yeah, and I love how in the credits it says “by Maya Deren and Talley Beatty.”
Sophie: That’s it.
That’s exactly it.
It was a complete collaboration.
Camera and editing follows his movements, so as you said earlier, it just completely
seamlessly goes from one movement to the other, and jumps from interior-exterior.
Yeah, I mean, this work is self-portraiture.
These are somehow dual self-portraits by the filmmaker and the choreographer.
Isabella: It’s almost like he’s achieving godlike status in the end.
Leaping in front of the sky.
And I love how it builds too, from like him being in a more natural location and doing
sort of slow and lyrical movements, and then the fast turns, and then the big grande jetés.
It has a nice upward build.
Sophie: I love that.
Isabella: -like through the physicality of what he’s doing.
Sophie: I wouldn’t know that without you. It’s true.
Isabella: Really? Cool.
Sophie: Well in a way.
Because, of course, there’s an arc to the movements as well. Right?
Sophie: We are now in the galleries, looking at the Deren film installed with its wonderful neighbors.
This gallery is about New York in 1945, so thinking about bodies and intimacy and symbols.
You have Wildredo Lam, you have Deren, you have Bourgeois, and then you have- I mean,
just the kind of conversation you can have visually or emotionally.
Isabella: And honestly, it just makes me want to dance.
Like when I come into a big open room like this.
I just want to like move around.
I want to be him in the museum.