FILM

Aurora Picture Show presents Maya Deren: Leading a Legacy, bringing the films of American experimental film visionary Maya Deren to Houston through a special collaboration with Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Deren received the first Guggenheim Foundation grant for “creative work in the field of motion pictures” and formed the Creative Film Foundation to broaden support for experimental film. She continued making and self-distributing her own films and lecturing and writing about avant-garde cinema theory until her untimely death at the age of forty-four. Her pioneering formal innovations—performing in front of the camera, using semiautobiographical content, and meshing literary, psychological, and ethnographic disciplines with rigorous technique—inspired future generations of experimental filmmakers.

This program was originally presented in “Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film” at The Museum of Modern Art. Sally Berger will be in attendance to introduce the films.

Sally Berger is a film and media curator, lecturer, and writer. She specializes in the areas of experimental video and non-fiction media. She is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art (1986 to the present). She was Executive Director of the Flaherty Seminar from 1989-94. She is an international guest lecturer and programmer and writes on non-fiction practices and media art. She received her M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 1999 and B.A. from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1986.