Mosaic pilgrim: Maya Deren’s The witch’s cradle as filmic poem, dissociative medium, and fragmented channel facilitating a pilgrimage towards ecstatic awareness through art; and, Mosaic pilgrim: poems

Maya Deren is widely recognized for creating the ""trance film"" genre with her well-known, early work ""Meshes of Afternoon."" This dissertation explores a lesser-known, unfinished film: ""The Witch's Cradle,"" a collaboration with Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp, which drew heavily upon a formative experience of gendered violence that Deren had suffered at the hands of a well-established male author a few years prior, as well as early-life experience of violence based upon her ethnicity, and her subsequent emigration to the United States with her family at a young age. Incorporating ideas about identity and ego formation from established Western philosophers and psychologists, as well as a feminist approach to phenomenology, this dissertation examines Deren's early fascination with femininity, violence, occult knowledge, and ecstatic, dissociative experience, ultimately arguing that her lesser-known work as a poet is furthered by ""The Witch's Cradle,"" which, though it cannot stand on its own as a finished film, might well stand alone as a visual or filmic poem. The dissertation concludes by looking forward, examining ways in which Deren's aesthetic contributions might be brought to bear in the field of literature, particularly filmic poetry.