Please turn off the sound and listen to this silently, as intended. Maya Deren, in particular, seems to attract people who wish to re-imagine her films.
The first characteristic of a true work of art is that is creates a reality and itself constitutes an experience. It does not merely describe something of which we are already fully aware. This new reality consists of elements selected from natural reality and is achieved through the establishment of a new, imaginative relationship between these elements of the natural world.
The creation of this new relationship constitutes the form of the work of art, and thus the form incorporates the intention of the artist. That is, the artist assigns meaning, value and weight to the selected natural elements by giving them a certain position in the work as a whole, and thus their natural values—that is, the value which these elements have in a natural reality—are transformed into new values which are assigned them by the artist according to the function he gives them in the context which he creates.
-- Maya Deren, "Introduction to the films" (1945)
