The main thing I want to do in life is make movies. My favorite thing to do (besides getting drunk under a bridge somewhere overlooking the river when it's warm and rainy out) is to watch movies. There are a bunch of movies that I love, but there aren't too many directors whose entire career is in my list of favorites. David Lynch is one of those people. He has directed (and if I'm not mistaken, written) such goodies as Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Dune (he didn't write the book, but he wrote the screenplay after 3 other people had failed), and (the best thing to hit TV) Twin Peaks! The background may look familiar to anyone who has watched the show, it's the doorway to the entrance to the Black Lodge.

Maya Deren

From the early 1940's until her death in 1961, Maya Deren both evoked and exemplified the American avant-garde movement...Meshes of the Afternoon set the tone for the decade and linked the movement to the older European avant-garde films of Cocteau and Bunuel." - The New York Times

"Intensely personal, symbolic and surreal films that reveal her deepest, darkest fantasies with constantly inventive and mysterious cinematic techniques. She's Fellini and Bergman wrapped in one gloriously possessed body. Watching these films can change forever your concept of what cinema can be." - L. A. Weekly

Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky in 1917 in Kiev during the Russian Revolution. Her father took the family to the United States to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine. She became interested in film while a student at Syracuse University, and later took a B.A. from New York University and an M.A. from Smith College. Maya had already established a reputation as an aesthetic theorist, photographer and maker of "personal" experimental movies - what she called "chamber films." These were high concept, low budget, technically innovative, artistically uncompromising, doggedly noncommercial and psychologically challenging when not outright disturbing. Maya received a Guggenheim grant to film Haitian dance for a photo-montage project. It was both the first awarded for creative filmmaking and the first awarded to a woman. She made her first trip to Haiti in the spring of 1947.
"Maya Deren began her creative life as a poet, and then turned her verbal images into visual ones as a filmmaker, and with the book Divine Horsemen broke through everyday life into the world of symbolism and myth. She died young, at age 44, but left an impressive body of work. She is celebrated for her pioneering work in Haitian studies - she filmed over nine hours of footage and recorded 48 hours of sound. Her film Divine Horsemen was completed posthumously by Teiji and Cherel Ito and her audio recordings are in distribution. She is best known today as the 'mother of American avant-garde film'."