Deren is one of the great screen presences; with her billowing hair and lugubrious gaze, she incarnates the eternal bohemian, rendering morbidity alluring and turning the air of idealistic purpose into a dance of seduction.

Often her own visually arresting, dramatically intense onscreen protagonist, Deren conveys a sense of entrapment as a quintessentially female condition...

Deren took the dreamlike, intellectual surrealism of Un Chien Andalou and made it intimate.

Whether or not it's an exercise in pointed symbolism or abstract surrealism or a manifestation of suicidal thoughts, it's utterly mesmerizing.