ABSTRACT
Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Hilary Harris’s Nine Variations on A Dance Theme (1966) redefined the possibilities for the creative transformation of dance into avant-garde film.1 Both films center on the solo modern dancer. Both are shot in black and white. Both transform modern dance into cinema through specific techniques that reveal the structural essence of modern dance in a way possible only on the screen. Both films use continuity of dance motion to overcome fragmentation of the body in time and space, asserting a transcendent sense of the wholeness of the human individual. And both use dance to reveal principles of cinematic motion.
