Joseph Campbell was born in White Plains, New York on March 26, 1904. He received a B.A. in English literature in 1925 and an M.A. in Medieval literature in 1927 from Columbia University. He was awarded a Proudfit Traveling Fellowship to continue his studies at the University of Paris. After he had received and rejected an offer to teach at his high school alma mater, his Fellowship was renewed, and he traveled to Germany to resume his studies at the University of Munich. During the year he was housemaster of Canterbury School, he sold his first short story, Strictly Platonic, to Liberty magazine. In 1934, he accepted a position in the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post… he would retain until retiring in 1972. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 40 books including The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Mythic Image, the four-volume The Masks of God, and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. During the 1940s and 1950s, he collaborated with Swami Nikhilananda on translations of the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He received several awards including National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Contributions to Creative Literature and the 1985 National Arts Club Gold Medal of Honor in Literature. He died after a brief struggle with cancer on October 30, 1987.
Sometimes called "the mother of the American avant-garde cinema," Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in the Soviet Union. At age 5, she fled the country with her parents and settled in New York. She attended Syracuse University, where she majored in journalism and became involved in political activism of the Left. She also studied at New York University and at Smith College, where she received an M.A. in English. In 1941, Deren took a job with choreographer Katherine Dunham and became fascinated by dance and movement, which was to serve as a subject for some of her films and inspired her thinking about camera movement as an art of dance. Her interest in film was sparked by Czech filmmaker… Alexander Hammid, who became her second husband in 1942. They collaborated on her first two films, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At the Land (1944). Both films use slow motion and subjective camera angles to disrupt the realist conventions of narrative film, undermining the coherency and continuity of time and space. Meshes of the Afternoon explores irrational violence, the unconscious, and female subjectivity in surrealist fashion, whereas At the Land more overtly manipulates time and space. A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and Meditation on Violence (1948) are all "dance films," in which the camera's constitutive role for film is explored through camera movement. Particularly striking is the use of the camera as a sparring partner for the boxer featured in Meditation on Violence. Throughout the 1940s, Deren worked in independent, experimental cinema, lecturing extensively and developing a network of nontheatrical exhibit spaces across the country. She also wrote a theoretical tract in An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946), which is testimony to her dictum that artists need to educate themselves in old and new knowledge---what she called philosophy. The fruit of her efforts was the Creative Film Foundation, which she established in 1954. Four years later, Deren made her last film, The Very Eye of Night, which she described as cool and classicist, contrasting it with the romanticism that she had come to despise in the work of some other avant-garde filmmakers.