A Response to Maya Deren's "Amateur vs. Professional"

Maya Deren -- Amateur vs. Professional

To Maya Deren, experimental film is freedom. Where some may view not having the tools or resources of a studio as holding them back she calls them to run forward using what they, the amateur, have. This conceptualization of experimental film is more powerful than a definition centered around opposition.

If an amateur filmmaker sees her work as being in opposition to the system, she is held back by the need to "respond" to the mainstream. If an amateur filmmaker sees her work as free from rather than against convention than there is nothing to hold her back; her film can be anything, everything and nothing.

Freedom is the power of experimental film. freedom from convention, from sense, from communication, from an audience, even freedom from the act of creation itself.

This freedom is what marks experimental film.