Watch Ritual in Transfigured Time

Elusive and enigmatic, RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME begins with its director, the avant-garde pioneer filmmaker Maya Deren, winding a seemingly endless skein of yarn. She is ed by a young woman (the Trinidadian dancer Rita Christiani, one of Deren's closest friends) who is then led away from their increasingly nightmarish domestic task and into a party filled with luminaries from the 1940s art world (look for Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, John Cage and dancer/Deren collaborator Frank Westbrook within the crowd). At the soirée, the guests gesture with fleeting, graceful, movements that coalesce into the steps of an intricate dance. Suddenly outdoors, in New York's Central Park, they dance, float and leap thorough space, into and out of each others arms, and among statues and columns. Deren's dash into the Atlantic Ocean in the film's final act was her last on-camera appearance during her lifetime. Soon, she would leave Greenwich Village in favor of Haiti and turn her attention from the struggle for personal expression to the struggle for collective spirituality. The film ends in eerie reversal footage as Christiani, having turned from black to white, falls, veiled, through the ocean depths. - Livia Bloom