[…] this is where the film choreographer departs a little bit from the dance choreographer and that is what I attempted to do in A Study in Choreography for Camera. I retitled it, actually, Pas de Deux… because what happens there is that although you see only one dancer, the camera is as partner to that dancer. And carries him, or accelerates him, as a partner would do to the ballerina, making possible progressions and movements that are impossible to the individual figure.
Maya Deren
The film’s formal achievement lies in the dyadic interplay between cinematic and dance choreography. And the aim: to add to human movement, through cinema, what it cannot have on its own. Maya Deren has achieved something monumental here.
Consider the initial movement. A dancer engaged in a rotational sequence in the forest. At center, at a distance from the camera. As the camera moves horizontal, a faux-rotational movement, like it is registering a Möbius strip, we find the dancer kept in view. A half-seated rotation, the same, an upright rotation, a sudden teleportation from the distant center to the closed-up left. A curved cinematic geography has been created, the dancer’s movement implied to be diagonal, the Möbius strip rotation morphing it curved.
What about the hallway? The camera takes on a curving-to-horizontal action that reveals the diagonal rhythmic hops. It shows the hops in rhythm, the dancer’s full figure as the sequence reaches its end at distance, and as he returns (or when he began), the head ceases to exist, the neck, and the entire torso – a complete reset.
And the transitions! An arcing step from the forest into the museum. The dip below the cinematic frame as the dancer stoops his back and neck, producing an uncanny effect. Finally, the flight of the dancer with his legs wide out. A physical jump that becomes flying, an impossibility in human movement, unveiled in the cinematic.