Maya Deren in Ithaca

Wendy Haslem writes about Maya Deren in senses of cinema.

In 1935, Deren, then named Eleanora Derenkowsky, was living, off and on, near Onondaga Lake in central New York State. Extraordinary rains lay over the hills and lakes a counterpane of torrents, standing water, and new scapes. She had understood that in Ithaca, at the foot of Cayuga Lake, the lowest of all the Finger Lakes, the water-level was covering much of the lowland area of the city. Fall Creek and Cascadilla Creek added to the burying; many houses were lost, and eleven persons died.
One wants badly to believe that Maya Deren filmed the area of town in which she would have been most interested, the Rhine, but her cinematic visualization more likely existed only in her imagination.
But as Ford Madox Ford wrote: "that is quite enough on which to go."