At Land
‘At Land’ has been called a trance film but its near-hallucinatory images also trace a sharply defined conflict between a woman and her environment. At the start of the film we see the woman (played by Deren) washed up on the beach from the sea, then follow her on an anxious odyssey through a series of landscapes both social and symbolic. She remains isolated from those around her – at the dining table along which she crawls, round a chess board, in a country lane – till she finally pulls back from this chaotic, external world towards the sea once more. Severely beautiful and with a devastating sense of composition, this is a film in which the panic of the moment is overwhelmed by the rhythm of the whole.
'At Land’ presents a relativistic universe in which the problem of the individual as the sole, continuous element, is to relate herself to a fluid, apparently incoherent universe. In a sense it is a mythological voyage of the 20th century
– Maya Deren
In ‘At Land’ Maya Deren uses symbols, in particular the sea and certain kinds of landscape, which have frequently been associated with the feminine, but instead of using them to define a patriarchal notion of the feminine which is conveniently used to restrict women, she uses them to provide a very open questioning of the feminine.
– Judith Higginbottom
Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.