Maya Deren was an Avant-garde filmmaker who made experimental, dream-like narrative films during World War II. Her films were meant to use symbolism to convey a story or an idea. In her previous shorts, "Meshes of the Afternoon" and "At Land" we are told of a woman's struggles through symbolic objects and surrealism. This gives all her shorts a mysterious and dreamlike atmosphere. Watching them as a film with a story, you'll be left wondering "Huh? What just happened here?" So to analyze a film like this, you must watch it, then look at the symbolism, think about it, and piece together the narrative entwined into the imagery.In "Meshes of the Afternoon" a woman is struggling with her marriage, wondering if she made a good decision. This film (the director's first film) may have come from Deren's own life, as she had three different husbands. And in "At Land" the woman portrayed is struggling with her place in life. Maybe at one point, Deren too struggled with this same problem. Here, in this film, the woman shown is struggling with men.In the beginning, the woman is innocent. She knows no men and is free. After helping another woman ball up some yarn (symbolic of something, but I can't think what) a mysterious woman lures her into a new world: a world of men, which she knows nothing about.The woman is taken into a ballroom with people exchanging hands and talking. At first they are oblivious to her, communicating to us that men no nothing of her, either. But soon she has become part of their world too, a decision which she later regrets.Later, out in the garden a man is talking with other women. The woman we have been following looks on and watches. She sees the man freeze the other woman in time. The woman is shocked and tries to escape the world she has entered. She runs away while the man chases in choreographed movement. And, in a final pose, we see the woman shining as an angel, telling us she has finally freed herself of the world she had entered and is clean once more.Rita Christiani played the woman, while Maya Deren herself plays the woman at the beginning. The film is beautiful and artful. Who knows? Deren married three times, maybe that fact shows us that she too, like the woman in the film, struggled with men?

Maya Deren has sometimes been called a proto-feminist due to the topics she explores in many of her films, including her famous "Meshes of the Afternoon" and the lesser known but still stunning "At Land". This film would be the one that comes closest to feminist concepts. Women in this short are trapped in "rituals" of subservience, marriage, and victimization, often being passed around, chased, or ogled by the men in their various aspects.If Deren's work is about dreams, this is probably the one that comes closest to an anxiety dream. The party scene (which I feel is slightly clichéd, but then again Deren may very well have been the one to have created these clichés) is claustrophobic, the chase is paranoiac, and many of the clothes the women wear are iconoclastic (nun-suit, any one?).My favorite scene involves the man who dance-leaps after the woman as she moves through Greek architecture. Deren captures the motion of the dancer in freeze-frame always in moments where he is balanced so as to look exactly like a Helenistic sculpture. It's another one of those Derenist moments that has an uncanny relevance even to those who aren't familiar with Deren's own personality.--PolarisDiB

Ritual in Transfigured Time may be the piece in which Maya Deren puts all her interests and achievements: a surrealistic narrative and dance choreographies. It is beautiful and powerful, but may have too many elements to be coherent and to possess her earlier works' strength.

Ritual in Transfigured Time is like a dream, meaning that the various sequences don't seem to have any connection to each other unless you try to approach this film in a different way and not as a conventional hollywood movie.The main character in the film is Rita Christiani who after a strange scene with Maya Deren herself who disappears startling Rita, appears in this ball with ladies and gentlemen dancing. This film has one of the most beautiful scenes in a Maya Deren's film when Rita Christiani while she's dancing she appears to float in the air.Unlike most films that were made 50 or more years ago Ritual in Transfigured Time appears to be timeless and a lot of directors who try to do something innovative should get a lesson or 2 from Maya Deren.I was very surprised to find out that the famous writer Anais Nin is in this movie as well (I was also very pleasantly surprised when I found out that avant garde composer John Cage was in another film by Maya Deren, "At Dark").