Maya Deren: Incomplete Control 9780231538473

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M AYA DEREN

F I L M A N D C U LT U R E John Belton, Editor

F I L M A N D C U LT U R E A series of Columbia University Press Edited by John Belton For the list of titles in this series, see page 279.

MAYA DEREN INCOMPLETE CONTROL

Sarah Keller COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keller, Sarah. Maya Deren : incomplete control / Sarah Keller. pages cm. — (Film and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16220-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-16221-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53847-3 (ebook) 1. Deren, Maya—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.D47K46 2014 791.4302'33092—dc23 2014021782

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cover art: From “Experimental Portraiture,” c. 1942 (courtesy Boston University Howard Gotlieb Special Collections), and from the cover for Voices of Haiti record (courtesy Boston University Special Collections). cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Portions of chapter 1, “Done and Undone,” were published as “Frustrated Climaxes: On Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle” in Cinema Journal 52.3 (Spring 2013): 75–98. Copyright © 2013 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Figures 1.4, 1.5b, 1.6, 2.6, 3.2, and 4.4 are frame captures from the DVD of Martina Kudláček, In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Zeitgeist Films, 2004). Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.5, and 4.1 are frame captures from the DVD Maya Deren: Experimental Films (Mystic Fire Video, 2007). Figure 3.3 is a frame capture from the DVD of Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Mystic Fire Video, 2007).

The place you begin doesn’t determine the place you end [ . . . ] —LO UI S E GLÜCK , “NEST ”

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Unfinished Business 1 O NE

Done and Undone

Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle TWO

31

Toward Completion and Control

At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time THR EE

F O UR

Haiti 135

Full Circle

189

Conclusion In Completing a Thought

Notes

247

Index

269

241

81

Acknowledgments

This project has taken shape with all the earmarks of the same tensions in Maya Deren’s work that it describes. As John McPhee has written, “People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? [ . . . ] What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.”* Producer Lorne Michaels has been reported as saying that an episode of Saturday Night Live was finished not because it was ready but because it was Saturday. Keeping these things in mind, I close off the labor put toward this book and recognize the enormous debts of gratitude I owe to so many people and institutions that helped it come to be—such as it is—finished. Thanks are due to Colby College, especially Dean of Faculty Lori Kletzer, whose office was unstintingly generous in its support of this work. Thank you to the Humanities Center Research Grants, the English Department, and the Cinema Studies Program for the resources to complete this project. Thanks to the Columbia University Seminars Aaron Warner Publication Funds for support with image rights and reproduction. I am especially *John McPhee, “Structure,” The New Yorker, Jan. 14, 2013, 55.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

mindful of all the financial support that has benefited this project considering how much Deren struggled to find such support. I benefited from a great deal of help from people at several institutions. J. C. Johnson and the staff at the Maya Deren Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University were invaluable to my research. Robert Haller, John Klacsmann, and Erik Piil and their colleagues at Anthology Film Archives assisted me with the materials there. I’m grateful to them and to the archivists at Columbia University Library Special Collections, who helped me with the Amos Vogel Papers. I profited from thoughtful colleagues at Colby College who offered encouragement for my work in innumerable ways. Special thanks are due to Patricia Burdick in Colby College Library Special Collections for help with journals contemporary with Deren’s work. Warm thanks to John Belton and Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press, who are not just helpful, insightful, and generally extraordinary editors, but people I like to sit down and talk with as often as possible. I am also deeply grateful to Roy E. Thomas, who expertly and efficiently copyedited the manuscript, and to Kathryn Schell, who shepherded the project from beginning to end with great patience. I was fortunate to have insightful early readers both at Cinema Journal, which published an earlier version of chapter 1, and at Columbia University Press. Their thoughtful comments helped me to focus my argument. The people who served as interlocutors to me for various stages of this project are many. Several of them offered insights or asked questions that helped me to develop ideas. These kind individuals include Robert Bird, Audrey Brunetaux, Noam Elcott, Allyson Field, Oliver Gaycken, Anton Kaes, Emily Kugler, Kerill O’Neill, Maple Razsa, Ira Sadoff, Jacqueline Stewart, Dan Streible, Winifred Tate, Julie Turnock, Malcolm Turvey, Jennifer Wild, Steve Wurtzler, and Joshua Yumibe. Special thanks to Ken Eisenstein, Rebecca Meyers, and Oliver for also allowing me productive time in their welcoming aerie in Cambridge. I thank Louisa Bennion for her assistance with interviews and for introducing me to Judy Reemtsma, who so generously opened her glorious home to my family while in New York for the summers of research and writing. In addition to talking with me about this project, a few extraordinary people have taken significant time away from their own pursuits to offer x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

careful, thorough readings of drafts at various stages of the process. If there is any advice I did not take from these generous and brilliant friends, it is to this book’s detriment: Leah Culligan Flack, Tom Gunning, Katharina Loew, Caitlin McGrath, Daniel Morgan, Ariel Rogers, Theresa Scandiffio, and Lisa Zaher. Special thanks are also due to Martina Kudláček, Miriam Arsham, and Barbara Hammer for incisive, useful conversations about Deren. I am also grateful to Nancy Allison, who generously offered access to and information about the work and papers of Jean Erdman. Thank you at last to my dearest friends and extended family—three Roberts, Donna, Eve, Jane, Tom, Moira, and Karen, whom I miss all the time—who helped in many practical ways and whose support and care have sustained me for so long. And most of all, my love and thanks to my Jonathan, Greta, and Henry, whose constant encouragement have made this work, and everything else, both easier and infinitely more worth the doing.

xi

M AYA DEREN

Introduction Unfinished Business

On October 23, 1961, Maya Deren’s car was parked illegally, and she was issued a ticket. Deren’s car was often parked illegally; her archives contain a sheaf of emerald green violations from 1960–61, neatly bound together. However her liability for the tickets might have been determined prior to late October of 1961, Deren could not be held responsible for this particular ticket: she had died in a Manhattan hospital ten days earlier, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage. In the days that passed between suffering collapse and her death on October 13, Deren lay in a coma. While in that state, lingering between life and death, was she aware of both sides of consciousness? Did she worry about her car parked illegally? What other unfinished business might have troubled her? At just 44 years of age, Deren died much too early. A formidable filmmaker in her own right, she was also a tireless proponent for opening avenues of distribution and funding that would benefit aspiring experimental filmmakers, among them Stan Brakhage and Shirley Clarke. She possessed a precociously bright intellect, which she had turned toward plans for an array of creative projects, many of which she did not complete but which have settled instead into boxes containing the diverse materials of her archive. Looking through these boxes has occasioned several questions related to her legacy, perhaps none more so than the usual question asked of

INTRODUCTION

a gifted, inspired artist who comes to an end too soon: what if she had lived longer? Would she have finished, for instance, the major project having to do with Haitian Voudoun rituals that took up so much of her energy and time for some fourteen years? Of what other work did her death deprive us? Further: would she have been able to advocate for other aspiring artists through the Creative Film Foundation, artists whose work we will never know? Was she poised to contribute something to other emerging branches of the fields of photography, music, anthropology, or any of the other disciplines in whose pots Deren had her thumb? The potential losses are vast in Deren’s case, in that she was possessed of a restless, copious energy for cross-disciplinary engagement, heeded a strong call toward mentorship, and had a penchant for coming up with ideas for new work. Teiji Ito, her third husband and musical collaborator, recollected that Deren often said, quoting her father, that “The most important thing in this world is an idea.”1 At a minimum, her early death put an end to the specific labor she had already invested in a range of projects, cutting short a promising creative trajectory. Of these projects, the work she planned and spent over a dozen years working on in Haiti is only the most remarkable case of her unfinished, interrupted labor. Several other films, plans for films, and fragments from completed fi lms were also left behind in an open-ended, unresolved state and now comprise the bulk of her voluminous archives. But the whole of Deren’s work—even long before her tragic end, even indeed from the very beginning—was always already marked by incompletion. She liked to refer to the poet Paul Valéry’s statement that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” so much that during one period she advertised her fi lm screenings as “3 Abandoned Films,” with Valéry’s quotation on the program notes. Unfinished, contingent, or liminal states appealed to Deren, and her aesthetic exploited these conditions wherever possible. Not benighted by failure, she in fact depended on an aesthetic of open-endedness. Even her long-unfinished projects, rather than representing failure (a persistent lament plaguing appreciations of Deren’s work), further indicate an aesthetic that respects a rejection of closure and completion. This aesthetic explicitly draws on energy produced in excess of a finished product. In her writings and films, Deren prompts reflection on interac2

INTRODUCTION

tion between and among sets of binaries: life/death, conscious/unconscious, visible/invisible, and so forth. Rather than resolving the tensions between opposites to discover truth, or synthesizing or creating a collision between them to generate a third term (thus rejecting the strictly dialectical forms that precede her efforts), Deren fi xates on the space between them and strives to maintain a “tension plateau” that will extend the life and rub of binary pairs for as long as possible, without resolution, without closure.2 Through this strategy, she articulates a vision of how cinema specifically relates to the realities it encounters, records, and/or transforms—so that her films consciously cleave and rejoin locations to create effects of proximity and relationship for her subjects. They bind widows and brides, movement and stasis, and interior and exterior as variations on a whole, selfsame state of being. Eschewing permanent conclusions and fi xed relations, Deren’s work embraces incompletion as a way to keep things open to possibilities. A great deal of her work accordingly remained in process. This is not to say that she never “finished” anything; often, her work very simply revises, revisits, or otherwise reopens what had appeared to have come to a point of closure, if it ever reached that point in the first place. Completing something for Deren is not necessarily the end—in fact, as her fi lm Witch ’s Cradle makes plain (through a visual motif that shows the phrase written in a circle that endlessly repeats the words): “the end is the beginning is the end is the . . . ” (and so on). Unfinished, unclaimed, or fragments of full works pose the intriguing problem of where and how to include them—whether as a generalized whole or on a case-by-case basis—in cinema theory and history.3 In the case of an accomplished fi lmmaker whose “complete works” amount to a scant 70-some minutes but whose incomplete projects more than triple that amount, the question of what to do with unfinished work proves of utmost importance. For Deren, what at first seems to be the problem of incompletion plaguing her work in fact points to the polestar of an aesthetic overall. As her remarks about the form of her 1949 film Meditation on Violence demonstrate, for instance, she consciously drew on the principle of incompletion to structure her works—in that film, with movements that alternate “in accord with the negative-positive principle from Confucius. Accordingly, the movements open and close. Moreover, they round back on themselves and are never completed in terms of extension. [ . . . ] The essential princi3

INTRODUCTION

ple is balance in constant flux.”4 The openness that comes from such incompletion lies at the heart of her approach to cinema. Furthermore, Deren foregrounds the fragmentary qualities undergirding cinematic production, indicating the power of “creative cutting” and drawing on but transcending the solidity of the world in front of the camera to generate wholly new images specific to cinema. She often keeps the possibilities inherent in such an approach open for as long as possible before (at least temporarily) closing them off. Circularity, recursion, repetition, and open-endedness: these features are at the center of Deren’s thinking about filmmaking, and they shape her understanding of both fi lm practice and film aesthetics. We could say that she privileges the open over the closed or the process over the product, but even more so, it is in the tension between the two that the energy of her fi lms is generated. Deren repeatedly strives to keep key oppositions—especially openness and closure, but also accident and assertion of control, circularity and linearity, absence and presence, reality and imagination, etc.—in motion. One of the pivotal fi lms in Deren’s filmography, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), made just before her first trip to Haiti, demonstrates the significance of these tensions and how they play out on several levels toward productive ends. As we will see in chapter 2, this fi lm was significantly reimagined and changed during the process of its making, aspects of which haunt its current structure and symbols. Deren kept multiple options available to it open for as long as possible. But what I want to emphasize here is the way this film’s internal dynamics also depend on maintaining tensions—articulating them but not allowing them to come into closure— to actuate its meanings. In the first place, like many experimental fi lms, Ritual initiates aspects of traditional narrative devices, but uses them without loyalty to their causal logics; in Ritual ’s case, this push-pull between potential closure and resolute openness parallels the film’s themes. Ritual begins with a scene in two adjoining rooms that eventually accumulate three women: Deren comes into view at first moving between two doorways set side by side with a dark wall between them. As she crosses, she disappears behind this dark space before reemerging, pacing in the light of each doorway. She sits in one of these lighted doorways and begins to wind wool with an unseen partner (apparently hidden behind the wall between doors). After a moment, Deren is joined by dancer Rita 4

INTRODUCTION

Christiani, who enters from the adjoining room (in the foreground of the shot). As Christiani approaches, the camera cuts to a closer view of Deren, who continues to talk and spin when she looks up into the camera, suggesting that we are seeing her from Christiani’s perspective. The camera begins to engage a shot/reverse shot pattern from Deren to Christiani, who beckons to Deren. Another match on action uses Christiani’s arm reaching out (but in longer shot) as she turns and moves toward the empty second doorway. Her entrance into the interior room signals the second part of this first sequence. When Christiani enters, the camera frames her movement in a subjective shot of The Lady in the Lake variety: her hand is before her and she follows it into the room (we are seeing just what she would see).5 Surprisingly, she finds Deren there quite alone. After a moment, Christiani picks up the partly wound ball of wool that rests on a chair, sits, and starts to spin and listen while Deren (again in a reverse shot) talks vivaciously. Distracted by something behind her, Christiani turns to look, and sees that a woman (played by Anaïs Nin, grand dame of the bohemian Greenwich Village literary scene) has appeared at the same doorway from which Christiani came. As they come to the end of the skein, Deren is shown in slow motion, letting go of the yarn and leaning back. In the next shot, Christiani discovers she is alone. Nin motions with her head, and Christiani follows her through the threshold back into the other room, where a party takes place. Deren called this sequence “The Entrance and the Winding of the Wool.” In at least one version of the preparatory writing she made for the film, this opening scene does not exist; instead the fi lm begins with the party that in the fi nished version follows directly after this sequence. Its addition puts emphasis on the individual undergoing the socializing rituals of the fi lm, rather than on the rituals themselves. The scene suggests a narrative thread: Christiani, curious, approaches the room to join Deren and Deren’s fellow spinner of thread. That goal is thwarted by the absence of that supposed partner, so the fi lm changes tack and resets the possibilities: Christiani becomes the partner herself and attempts to play the role she (and we) wrongly assumed was being played by another, until she discovers she too has no partner and the fi lm’s direction shifts again, and so forth. 5

INTRODUCTION

Meanwhile, taking the place of the resolutions being denied the audience because of the narrative breaks, this short but complex sequence depicts a set of relational transactions that prompt a tangle of associations among binaries that combine to generate all the key concerns of the film. Deren propels an oscillation between interior and exterior (in terms of both the two rooms and the subjective vs. objective shots of the sequence), visibility and invisibility, appearance and disappearance, dark and light, movement and stasis (at one point Deren freezes her activity so that Christiani may take her place winding the yarn). Not resolving the tensions generated by their oscillation, Deren chooses instead to initiate through them an oblique but explicit commentary on subject/object relations. For instance, the shot/reverse shot pattern reinforces the separateness of Deren and Christiani, but immediately following Deren’s disappearance Christiani begins to play one half of their double role (they become wholly interchangeable, effected through matches on action, similarities in gestures and roles, and costuming). In her notes to the fi lm, Deren explains: “The shift from one to the other throughout the fi lm always takes place gently, imperceptibly. There must never be any doubt that it is the same person.”6 Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Deren was in the process of researching Haitian ritual as she made this film, individual versus collective interests also find thematic articulation here, effected not through narrative means but through disruption of narrative expectations in favor of ideas held in tension without proceeding toward resolution. Sitting as it does at the crux between the first part of Deren’s career and her shift into investigations with documentary and ritual when she first goes to Haiti in 1947, Ritual in Transfigured Time represents a moment of great volatility in Deren’s aesthetic development. The years 1946–47 are typically identified in studies of her work as the moment failure comes to dominate her efforts. Read in this way, what she accomplishes after this point is necessarily lesser work, or doesn’t come into being because she lacked resources or got stymied in some important way. I argue that this assumption not only does great injustice to the work itself but also that it prevents us from understanding major features of Deren’s interests that run throughout her career. The work of this period, and indeed of Deren’s entire career trajectory, examines issues and ideas with rigorous intentionality coupled with an openness to possibilities: it is work guided by 6

INTRODUCTION

choice and faith in an often very long process. It draws on the vitality of incompleteness. Deren’s example is particularly acute, but these dynamics are by no means unique to her. The history of cinema is strewn with the detritus of unfinished, abandoned, rejected, or otherwise laid-aside work. There is also all the finished work to which film historians have no access, either because those works are lost forever to the flames or because they are locked away in archives in a fragile state waiting to be preserved, or because any records outlining considerations for identifying definitive works are elusive, nonexistent, overlooked, or inconclusive. (Paula Amad’s work on the Albert Kahn archives is a particularly rich example of how such work opens fascinating ways to address the study of cinema history’s related discourses.)7 Moreover, the collective nature of most cinematic endeavors leads to an excess of creative energy being winnowed down into a single product. In some cases—John Huston’s documentary Let There Be Light, for instance—the ratio of the amount of footage taken so exceeds the fi nal product (by some accounts, about seventy hours to one finished hour) that it begs consideration of what is not in the finished film.8 Indeed, all of this raises important questions: What does cinema studies do to account for lost work or the details of the process, as well as the runoff, the excess, the clips on the cutting-room floor, the performance of an actor or the color palate of a designer that changed a director’s vision, the contributions (potential or actual) of creative personnel? This book places value in that which was not included in a final product, or which never even prompted a final product; it finds interest inhering in promises either not yet fulfi lled or redirected for other things; and it recuperates and repositions work accomplished by an important filmmaker who may have managed to complete only a handful of films but whose creative range extends further than that. It attempts to recuperate the work that is not usually considered when one considers Deren’s accomplishments, and places it within a broader theoretical and methodological investigation. Theories of absence suggest a model for the one I wish to adopt for understanding Deren’s work. Patrick Fuery, for example, rejects the persistent notion “that centers and presences are to be desired,” and remarks on the weight we grant to a “metaphysics of presence—that privileging of the centre over its margins and the marginalized.”9 Elsewhere, through the 7

INTRODUCTION

notion of desire, he links the hegemony of presence with its opposite: one must look to discourses surrounding an absence or a longing (which presupposes an absence) to provide a structure for understanding either state.10 Fuery designates the central paradox of theories of absence as pointing to a structure (absence signifying something rather than nothing) that refuses to be filled in. Similarly, Deren’s films strike out against the edges of the frame, and her fi lms generate connections through which what is seen and what is unseen might traffic. She gives precedence to things accomplished through suggestion or association, rather than through causal links. For example, her forays into metaphysics, both as a student of literature and more pointedly in her writing about Haiti, explore making representable that which is apparently not present but is actually simply invisible, privileging a fragmented, incomplete state. Such strategies suggest another of Deren’s prevailing documentary and creative preoccupations: how to access inaccessible states of being; how to gesture toward the unknowable and thereby render it even minutely comprehensible; or, simply, how to visualize invisible realms. Poetry, a touchpoint for her aesthetic throughout her career, often draws upon these principles in formal terms: rather than shine a light on the ineffable thing directly, a certain slant of light is bound better to illuminate elusive ideas, feelings, or states of mind.11 The modernist poetry Deren worked on for her master’s thesis (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, et al.) and the art scene of which she was a part similarly traffic in fragmentation, suspended states, and faith in non-resolution. The work that comes out of her Haitian experience draws on energies related to the incomplete, missing, or desired but absent object that she labored to represent. Over her career, she asserts the need to make room where resonances might accrue toward meaning, not where meanings might come to a predetermined or forced closure.

It is daunting to write a book about incompletion. The trajectory of this book has often felt freighted with the worry that it would come to the same end as so many of Deren’s well-laid plans or the works proposed by several stout hearts who similarly intended to grapple with her materials, only to end up coming at last (or should I say “so far”?) to the same, incomplete, 8

INTRODUCTION

and open-ended end as those materials. As much as Deren’s work was inspired by incompletion, it in its own turn inspires incompletion, which is not generally a state to be desired in the world of scholarship. The Legend of Maya Deren, an utterly invaluable resource for all studies of Maya Deren’s work, has been in the making for thirty-five(!) years and is only about half done as originally conceived. Another volume has been imminent for close to a decade, and it has been beset by complications that have indelibly shaped the outcome (if indeed there will be an outcome).12 Robert Steele, the Boston University professor who is responsible for bringing Maya Deren’s copious, fascinating papers intact to the archives at the Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Research Center, spent years similarly compiling and, through interviews, adding to Deren’s materials, at one point envisioning a nine-part, multivolume book detailing her life, writings, and interests. That project, representing years of effort, never found a publisher and now shares space in the Deren archive in the shape of more than thirty folders in box 18. Martina Kudláček spent years researching, advocating for, and adding to the Deren archives starting with her work making her film In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2002). For myself, in a way not at all unique to the state of authorship, I suspect that this book will never quite feel “complete”: it is ever haunted by all the parts that didn’t fit (I sympathize with the above writers/editors/artists and their urge to include everything) and the shadow of directions it might have gone. Yet knowing how way leads on to way, it is unlikely that those now-lost possibilities will ever find fulfillment in the manner originally considered. On the other hand, it has also been liberating, even exhilarating, to focus on incompletion. This book champions the idea of irresolution and its fickle, changeable, frustrating, transgressive, unfi xed, exciting energies. It values roads not taken, recognizes the benefits of keeping options open, and attempts to bring certain materials—many of them languishing, untouched for long stretches of time in archives, stray texts, or people’s memories—out of the realm of the nearly lost and into the light. Every art form grapples with these kinds of questions, but cinema carries additional freight so far as questions of its purview pertain to the binary of completion/incompletion. For instance, editing depends on incomplete fragments, put together to build meanings that far outstrip the product of its components. In Deren’s experimental milieu, those meanings are 9

INTRODUCTION

multidirectional and built in the same way that poetry juxtaposes its pieces, amasses them toward conglomeration, or allows them to reverberate outward toward exophoric referents. Might there be a roomier, portmanteau approach that would allow elaboration of issues related to completion and incompletion? Deren’s work is a good place to start for such an approach. The central questions that drive this project concern how we should address “unfinished” creative work, particularly in the case of a gifted artist’s whole oeuvre, with that oeuvre understood to encompass more than the films for which she is known. In the tendency for an author-centric context within cinema studies (at the very least as an organizational strategy for dealing with fi lm texts: a strategy which inheres as well in many of the humanistic disciplines that abut cinema studies), the apparent cohesion of the artist’s work in relation to the figure of the artist him- or herself matters a good deal. The finished, definitive text matters, too, and in cases where its definitiveness comes into question, we tend to turn to clues provided by the author— in her other works, in her writings, in the traces of process and intention she left behind—to find answers. For me, the question is: Aside from their role in upholding the cult of the author, how might we reconsider the value of remnants, fragments extant or lost, plans abandoned, works never screened, options that were once available to the “definitive” text but now dog it with “what if?”, labor that went into the artwork but apparently never emerged as part of its final form?13 Orson Welles, whose work Deren admired,14 could easily serve as a similarly comprehensive case study for incompletion as an artistic strategy, especially in terms of the effects of incompletion on an approach to authorship specific to cinema studies. It may help briefly to note his more readily familiar career to show what issues arise when considering more popular work, the status of which as a set of finished products cannot in fact claim to be wholly untroubled. The director of that stalwart on the lists of the greatest films ever made, Citizen Kane, has enjoyed a position in the “pantheon” of film directors via one of the originating texts of auteur studies in this country, Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968. There, Sarris places Welles among the greatest and most signatory of directors, one whose films unmistakably assert his authorial presence: 10

INTRODUCTION

The Wellesian persona looms large in Wellesian cinema. Apart from The Magnificent Ambersons, in which his presence was exclusively vocal narration, every Welles fi lm is designed around the massive presence of the artist as autobiographer. Call him Hearst or Falstaff, Macbeth or Othello, Quinlan or Arkadin, he is always at least partly himself, ironic, bombastic, pathetic, and, above all, presumptuous.15

Designing ambitious narratives and generating richly detailed, complex characters, many of them expressive of his own larger-than-life personality and channeling the artist/self, Welles is assured of the position as fi lm auteur. As Peter Biskind recently noted, Welles was “his own greatest production.” Building a reputation fit for the stature of an auteur depends in certain ways more on the Welles’s persona than on the status of the work, and questions of whether the work is fully intended or completed have often concerned his legacy little; however, such questions do arise when we acknowledge the robust but complicated nature of the work that established Welles’s position. The curious feature of Welles’s legacy is that a large part of it rests on the ambition of projects that never came to be finished. Those films play a role in his legacy, too, if only at times as foil for the “masterpiece” designation that accompanies his work. As a reviewer for the documentary film about Welles’s unfinished work for his Pan-American anthology film made in Mexico and Brazil alleges: “Though Welles’s own It ’s All True remained unfinished, its place in history is firm: if Welles had not undertaken the project, the chances are that his greatest film, The Magnificent Ambersons, would not have been butchered by the studio while he was flying down in Rio.”16 Such revisionist histories are blithe in the wonder that comes of guesses about what might have been: they lay anchors in the harbors where assertions of authorship moor. These are not the only—nor even necessarily the most prominent— approaches to cinema history, of course. But they provide a stable, assertive, and familiar account of how to organize an oeuvre. Even so, there are alternative viewpoints. Jonathan Rosenbaum has persuasively argued that when Welles died in 1985 he left behind an untidy collection of films that can be considered incomplete, each “unfinished in a different way and for somewhat different reasons.”17 For instance, The Magnificent Ambersons and Mr. Arkadin were completed by others. Other 11

INTRODUCTION

films Welles added to, or revised in retrospect, with new work. His Othello—of which there exist alternate versions—as well as his Filming Othello, a documentary on the making of the earlier film/s, proves an interesting example. Welles concludes Filming Othello with reflections that would have suited Deren’s case, hinting at the desire to reopen the nowclosed text of the fi lm (Othello), which in fact the new fi lm (Filming Othello) affords him: There are too many regrets, there are too many things I wish I could have done over again. If it wasn’t a memory, if it was a project for the future, talking about Othello would have been nothing but delight. After all, promises are more fun than explanations. In all my heart, I wish that I wasn’t looking back on Othello, but looking forward to it. That Othello would be one hell of a picture.18

“That” Othello of course does not exist, except as suggestively outlined in the new film. But it exists in a limbo much like that in which we might place his many fi lm projects that were initiated, drafted, partly filmed, or otherwise started on some level, but did not advance or could not withstand neglect for personal, financial, legal, or other reasons. These may be found in various stages of completion, revision, and/or satisfaction of Welles’s wishes. Some projects were more ardently suppressed; for instance, parts of It’s All True were thrown out, literally tossed overboard at sea.19 Moreover, Rosenbaum argues that Welles in certain cases and for good reasons kept work, such as his decades-long project of filming a version of Don Quixote, in a state of incompletion. One possible explanation for this is that “a good many of Welles’s creative deliberations were in a continual state of flux,” a state that highlights, as I mean to do with Deren, the unclosed, generative creative process as worthy of consideration over and above the definitive product of his “creative deliberations.”20 Rosenbaum explains that Welles periodically returned to the Quixote project “intermittently for the rest of his life, [which] obviously gave him a great deal of joy.” Rosenbaum opines that Welles may have shied away from ending the film because it would have brought him in confrontation with the tragic finality of Quixote’s death. Such an impulse signals the wish to leave narra-

12

INTRODUCTION

tive ends loose for as long as possible and serves as a key to the way I want to think here about incompletion more generally. In the conclusion of his essay, Rosenbaum turns to the way a lack of closure can also be regenerative for a creative work’s relationship with its audience: When will—and how can—we finish Orson Welles’s Don Quixote? Truthfully, we can’t finish it, though we can certainly choose whether or not we want to be finished with it. I choose not to, because I think our imagination—which is at times difficult to distinguish from our capacity to become delusional—is always the most basic tool in Welles’s bottomless bag of tricks, and I’d hate to put it out of work.21

A case made for the element of incompletion in Welles’s oeuvre goes a long way toward getting at why his films work the way they do: they foreground and exhibit a restless, creative mind actively at work. While Welles’s reputation has never exactly suffered from lack of consideration, putting this element of incompletion in his spotlight offers new boundaries in the view to his body of work, including making space for considering what to do with his very recently rediscovered, pre–Citizen Kane “lost” film, Too Much Johnson (1938).22 A very early work, preceding Citizen Kane by three years, Welles created the silent comedy Too Much Johnson with the Mercury Theatre to serve as a set of three prologues or entr’actes for an upcoming performance of a play of the same name. Set just before the turn of the century, the fi lm deft ly draws on tropes of silent comedy and includes, for example, several sequences of the actor Joseph Cotten nearly falling off steeply sloping roofs of lower Manhattan. Another sequence, shot from a high angle surveying a tangle of wooden crates, vividly predicts the final shots of Citizen Kane. Certainly in these and other scenes, the film suggests several things about the Welles oeuvre, and I suspect scholars will soon be discussing it in earnest as part of that oeuvre, especially as it becomes more widely available. The film moreover presents issues related to the recovery of lost films, preservation of those fi lms, and presentation or archiving of those films, issues Paolo Cherchi Usai, who labored intensively on its preservation at the George Eastman House, adroitly asserted in his live commentary for

13

INTRODUCTION

the film at its premiere. The preservation of the film in fact inspired a rich, provocative set of contextualizing details for the film that Cherchi Usai and the George Eastman House have assembled, illuminating its provenance and production circumstances for present-day audiences. As Cherchi Usai emphasized in his accompanying speech to the footage for the film, Too Much Johnson was not completed, nor should be taken as if it were: [ . . . ] the fi lm we will present tonight has come to us in the form of an unfinished work. Please remember—what you are about to see is not a complete fi lm. You should also keep in mind that the fi lm was not intended as something to be seen in a normal movie theatre.23

The George Eastman House kept the film intact in their preservation efforts, not editing or changing the order in which anything appeared for the screening at the premiere. Instead, Cherchi Usai provided details about the original plan for the film and simultaneously allowed the audience to experience it in its semi-inchoate state, preserving a tension between the condition in which it exists some sixty-five years after the film was produced and Welles’s stated intentions or recollections about it from the moment of its making. For example, Cherchi Usai noted: Orson Welles had shot about 25,000 feet or 7500 meters of fi lm, corresponding to over four and a half hours of running time at the speed of twenty-four frames per second. [ . . . ] By the time [he] stopped editing his fi lm, the work print was  about sixty-six to seventy minutes long; Welles should have cut another twenty to twenty-five minutes in order to bring the fi lm to its desired length. In other words, the fi lm we will be screening tonight was intended to be almost half an hour shorter than it is today in its unfinished form.24

The premiere event thus underlined and valorized the incomplete nature of the footage while filling out many of the details that might make the film more comprehensible. Such an ideal balance between completion and incompletion could well serve as a model for dealing with other such unfinished works in cinema history.25 There is certainly an audience interested in such works. The premiere itself was a major event, with long lines 14

INTRODUCTION

of hopeful cinephiles winding around the theater—an overcapacity crowd for a rediscovered, incomplete film.

In general, incompletion has imposed similar lacunae for author studies and national or cultural histories in other fields. Rather than encompassing the revisionary impulse of creative enterprise, or the open-ended, collaborative nature of both creative and scholarly endeavor, these fields have often similarly privileged a select group of works, the end result, and the closure and stasis of a definitive text engendered by the foresight and will of an artist. More recently, certain cases however have helped to rebalance that bias. For instance, in literary studies, scholars have foregrounded the fact of Raymond Carver’s creative relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish, thus attending to Lish’s impact on some of Carver’s most canonical work and shedding light on the importance of revision, with shadows of earlier versions haunting the final product in interesting ways. More, the Carver/Lish relationship suggests the importance of thinking about a body of work as deriving from sources outside the author, and in a way that does not lead directly to the intentional fallacy. That is, in literary studies, a tradition of discouraging readings of an oeuvre per author-centric biography—for Carver, for instance, interpreting the work as marked by his alcoholism—has held sway such that many scholars steer away from the problem of deciding what influences what, inasmuch as it proves difficult to tell how the intentions of the author might accrete toward a specific text. However, in certain cases, opening up a text to its influences, variations, history, and parallel productions has led to a more inclusive approach. One of Deren’s artistic touchstones, the work of Ezra Pound, has enjoyed lively scholarly debate about such traces in the hopes they will make sense of a plurality of versions. Scholarship on The Cantos, for instance, has been marked by varying degrees of belief in the closure afforded by a sense of the definitive text versus openness in the sense described by Christine Froula in terms of the positive values of collaboration, error, and contingency.26 Studies of The Cantos, because of that work’s publication history, allusive nature, and Pound’s own complex promotion of the material, have prompted readings that arduously trace elusive and allusive references, its sources, and its drafts and revisions. As Leah Culligan Flack has pointed 15

INTRODUCTION

out, we should think of the difficulty inherent in these texts not as promoting a sense of the need for comprehensive knowledge (a facility with Greek, Provençal poetry, and/or Chinese ideograms) or for grappling with the text for fixed meanings, but as suggestive toward a way of reading in a manner that embraces obscurity, confusion, uncertainty and “a partial, incomplete or failing knowledge.” Doing so allows the student of what are usually considered “difficult” texts to value the “intellectual imaginative struggle,” rather than crash on their rocky boundaries, distracted and perplexed by their Siren song.27 This does not mean ignoring altogether the radiating meanings that derive from following Pound’s sources, but repositioning them as part of a process both for Pound’s generation of the text and the reader’s experience of it. As with Deren’s oeuvre, such a strategy opens up a space for dealing with an unwieldy, unclosed set of texts productively, neither overvaluing nor discounting the processes and influences that accompany creative output. As with those who study Pound, scholars of classical studies are likewise familiar with the equivocal value of considering “definitive” editions of texts, as they may derive from dubious sources, be merely a single sample from a richly varied oeuvre, or circulate in copies afforded by fallible scribes motivated by concerns beyond what may have produced the original texts.28 The works of Propertius, for example, are frequently contested concerning the transmission of each original text through translators, interpreters, and editors. Indeed, Pound too was drawn to Propertius, possibly because of the tradition of open interpretation to which the classical author had been so long subjected. Pound published his own long poem Homage to Sextus Propertius, thereby contributing one of the more influential perspectives shaping the reception of Propertius’s work: i.e., that in its idiosyncrasies and difficulty it bears kinship with the modernists.29 Such texts, undergoing varied channels of translation and interpretation, adumbrate related concerns for the incomplete in what gets lost between languages, with the stodgy exactitude of fidelity to the text versus fidelity to the spirit of its meaning or energy setting up twinned poles that must be navigated by the translator and, ideally, the reader. As the field of literary studies returns to a transnational, polyglot tendency in light of globalization, as it seeks to find practical ways of grappling with canonical, secondary, lost or potentially apocryphal sources, and as it turns to material culture to make tangible these sorts of influences, the openness of texts increasingly requires viable theoretical outlets. 16

INTRODUCTION

Other disciplines have dealt with incomplete texts and lost objects and histories, or have at their foundation a need to address incompletion or a lack of closure. Cinema studies clearly has need of such approaches, as the Welles example suggests and Deren’s work demands. Indeed, collaborative by its nature, replete with missing and destroyed components of its history, built in all but the most exceptional cases out of fragments pieced together to give the impression of a whole, incompletion underscores cinema at every level. Among the wide range of cases where rethinking the role of incompletion may be useful are examples like early South Asian fi lm, most of the material traces of which have been lost to flames and time, whose historiography must by necessity address such questions about the absence of definitive fi lm texts. Another case is how we might approach fi lms begun, only to be derailed and left in some state of less-thancompletion: von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly, Eisenstein’s Que Viva, Mexico, fi lms where a director or star died during production, or the many films dreamed of—possibly even labored on for years—but never filmed. Through a study that considers a range of influences and outcomes related to incompletion, a place opens up to include lost, abandoned, imagined projects in a way that is productive for cinema studies more generally.

Toward the end of her life, Deren was asked to consult with a group making a film about analog computers. In a lecture at Smith College (where she did her master’s degree), she explained to her audience that the computer allowed designers to project “a model situation,” to dream up an object that can then be put through practical tests before anyone might build it. Her reaction to the computer was that “this is a very primitive version of how the mind works. This is exactly the way the imagination does work, and this is its purpose. Imagine; if you had to actually go through everything without being able to imagine it first!”30 Relating that model to filming, she outlines a scenario of balance between control and accident, imagination and actuality that guides her own practice: You are going to hear a great deal about the improvised and the vigor of not knowing quite what is going to happen, and the vital accident, and so on. Well, there is a great deal in life that is uncontrollable . . . For that 17

INTRODUCTION

reason, I think we ought to control that part of it that we can. We can control it by imagining, selecting, and directing it. I feel that even if life is a little difficult, that doesn’t mean that we should succumb altogether, and not make any effort to control or direct it. These fi lms, let me say then, in their economy, require very careful planning, and are extremely economical in production.31

Deren’s simultaneous acknowledgment of the ubiquity of accident and the urge to control things—“that part of it that we can”—when so much is beyond our control summarizes her work ethic. Tireless planning, an effort to harness the contingencies of the complex world toward making art, and yet a recognition of “the vigor of not knowing quite what is going to happen” concatenate and vie for balance in the Deren oeuvre. She simultaneously acknowledges the life-giving force of accident and the need to assert what control we can over it. Indeed, Deren maintained both at once in her approach to documenting and transforming the world: “camera reality,” as she described it, uses the world before the camera as raw material for images wholly unique to cinema, through its flexible dimensions in  temporal and spatial relations. To mobilize such transformation of the world, the fi lmmaker must actively imagine how best to work with and shape the “infi nite receptivity and indiscriminate fidelity” of the camera.32 Part of the need for planning, as Deren indicates, is a practical matter necessitated by the poverty of her circumstances and the expense inherent in filmmaking of her (pre-digital) age: you have to plan ahead so that you don’t end up wasting expensive fi lm as you look for what you want. But it also underscores Deren’s respect for the idea that the balance between chaos and control makes up an important part of the purview of cinema as an art form: from the mass of details, the filmmaker directs attention toward that which is significant. She negotiates control and accident as part of her approach to her material. Working in the cinema, as Deren sees it, requires a series of open negotiations among such polarities. She aims to exercise control over her material through an exploitation of the tensions I’ve outlined, but also allows that material at key moments to resist her better efforts and wind up on her cutting-room floor (or, more likely, stashed away for possible further use in coffee cans). 18

INTRODUCTION

Several recurring objects and ideas give shape to these tensions. For instance, mirrors become virtually an emblem of her notion of relationship between incompletion and completion, control and letting go. Mirrors— both literal and figurative—appear in every one of her fi lm projects, simultaneously expressing a division between a subject and an other and their unity: the mirror projects a somewhat uncanny “other” self but never exists without reference to the subject’s body (and indeed is simply a projection of the subject’s body, rather than a “real” other). It expresses, for Deren, a non-dualistic dualism. The mirror also provides a gateway between the divine and human worlds, asserting a metaphysical bridge.33 In a draft for her book, Divine Horsemen, Deren notes: The mirror is the metaphor for the cosmography of Haitian myth. To see into it, is to see the metaphysical world, with vision which penetrates the most solid matter. The loa [Voudoun gods], the immortal mirror images of those who once lived, are summoned by an address to the mirrored surface. The song for the loa Legba says: “O Creole, Sonde miroi, O Legba.” They sing that the silver of the mirror breaks through rocks. For the vision into the metaphysical world transcends and penetrates matter.34

Mirroring links the concrete and abstract realms, and the loa oblige such a connection: “The God of the Cross-roads himself approaches the Crossroads, and already in the dark mirror of the nether regions appear the first dim outlines of his inverted reflection, as the sun, setting into dark waters, might there appear as a new darkly rising moon.”35 Meanwhile, mirroring also becomes a perfect articulation of the bond between the individual and communal impulses in Deren’s work. It mediates between the self and perceived other, holding them separate as two parts while at the same time asserting their similarity—even their sameness. Deren’s specific method of navigating tensions in order to maintain the energy of incompletion draws out questions that are important to our understanding of cinema. These include, What might it mean to privilege the making of work over the work itself? How does the artist exert a genuinely creative rather than mechanical impulse over the terms of reality if all you have to do to make a photograph is to point and shoot? What 19

INTRODUCTION

happens when the image’s contingent details hold sway over what the fi lmmaker wants an audience to focus on? These larger questions about the medium and method of cinema—as well as the philosophical, aesthetic, and historically driven foundations of those questions—find an exemplary case study through her work, which will be the primary focus of this book. Deren’s finished films by themselves both merit and are rewarded by close study as exemplary experimental films; the critical body of writing that accompanies them further enriches the discipline of cinema studies and several attendant fields, including dance, anthropology, philosophy, and literature. The relevance of Deren’s oeuvre is evidenced in the several works that have emerged on Deren in the years since her death.36 This book continues that trajectory of recognition for the importance of Deren’s work, but it also expands the territory under consideration to include— indeed, to privilege—the work Deren never completed as the foundation for understanding the undercurrents of all of her work. In the context of Deren’s entire cinematic output, the notion of incompletion emerges as indispensible, producing energies that paradoxically serve both to motivate her finished projects and thwart or redirect her progress in them. This paradox develops in multiple ways across Deren’s work, so that incompletion becomes simultaneously a theme, a method, and a result of her efforts. By thinking about incompletion as a strategy or motif for Deren’s work, we can make sense of what otherwise appears to be a bewildering difference between the first stages of Deren’s filmmaking practice (usually described as experimental) and her later foray into Haitian Voudoun rituals (usually described as ethnographic). Deren’s early statements disparaging documentary would appear to be missteps without the continuity of her sense of investigating and juggling opposing forces.37 Without accounting for a theory of incompletion in Deren’s work—a theory that allows for her specific productivity through a de-centering of the fi lm as finished product—the later period would wrongly seem to have driven that earlier work to an untimely end. Rather, it represents a complex way of rethinking the relationship of creativity and documentary. The notion that failure marks Deren’s oeuvre—with the early fi lms fulfilling her early promise as a fi lmmaker, only to be derailed by Haitian Voudoun—is surprisingly durable in accounts of her work. She made four 20

INTRODUCTION

trips to Haiti and filmed hours of rituals, but because the specific project Deren went there to work on never came to completion, her legacy has not completely been able to resist the sensational view that either she was herself cursed by Voudoun or in some way (less sensationally) got lost in its dynamics to the detriment of her creative work. This perspective may partly endure because Deren was not always successful in deterring the hyperbolic aspects of her participation in Voudoun, despite her sustained efforts to champion a dispassionate account of its rituals. While she campaigned for an understanding of the religious origins of Voudoun and consistently insisted on downplaying the popular stereotype that put “mumbo jumbo” aspects drawing on “the black magic of the grade C jungle movie” at the fore, there are aspects to her involvement that might strike an observer as less than dispassionate.38 Stan Brakhage’s oft-repeated, spectacular account of Deren throwing a refrigerator across the room; several friends recounting Deren’s fondness for “wild” dancing; her throwing of large parties dedicated to the god of the dead; her reported feeling of the “vibrations” of sacred objects; accounts of her own initiation into Voudoun; and the fact of her very untimely death have all contributed to speculation about Voudoun’s sensational aspects and, ultimately, its detrimental effects on Deren’s life and work. A palliative for this reading of Deren’s involvement with Voudoun comes in Kudláček’s In the Mirror of Maya Deren, which posits that Deren’s long-term malnourishment and dependence on unorthodox vitamin drugs that were actually uppers prescribed by her doctor led to her early death. Several scholars, including Catherine Russell and Annette Michelson, have similarly attempted by contextualizing Deren’s involvement with Haitian rituals to relieve Deren of some of the burden of this sensationalism. A look at the full range of her work and its dynamics goes a long way toward lifting that burden as well. Whatever the reasons Deren did not (was not able to, was not inclined to, etc.) finish the Haitian film, this study decidedly shifts the focus away from that film as a failure and toward the dynamic centered on the idea of incompletion. It attempts to fill in some of the gaps surrounding the Haitian work, of which only a sampling of what she accomplished is currently available to someone outside of the archives.39 The following chapters validate the Haitian work and attempt to restore it to a position of value for 21

INTRODUCTION

understanding Deren’s work more generally. Deren herself was ambivalent about finishing not just the Haitian fi lm but several other projects over the course of her career, and tended to turn her energies to other things as markers of her thinking about her creative process. For Haiti, those things include recording an album and writing a nonfiction book about the history, origins, and cultural/social impacts of Haitian Voudoun. Negotiating binary relationships like completion/incompletion supplies the motivation driving Deren’s work. According to her method, work in the cinema may be expressed as a problematic between aesthetic and documentary concerns. The tension between creative impulse and documentary intractability is central to the concept of the image in Deren’s work. Her experimental films illustrate her ability to control, subjectivize, and create unique images; the Haitian footage illustrates her reticence in doing so. That is, the documentary nature of the Haitian footage made it “more resistant than granite”40 to Deren’s initial urge toward creative manipulation. In the space of the difference, there lies a strong sense of Deren’s expanding notion about the image and its simultaneous navigation of reality and creativity. Her idea develops specifically in relation to the ritualized, collective impulses she encountered as a way of life in Haiti that are not centered in a single consciousness. Thus the experimental and the documentary impulses in Deren’s work are not opposed but inextricably interdependent upon one another. While offering a comprehensive reading of the oeuvre and figure of Deren—as filmmaker, amateur ethnographer, photographer, musical producer, lecturer, writer, theorist, and advocate for the artistic avant-garde— this project also demonstrates how the notion of incompletion has implications that outstrip her example. It invites comprehension of the positive attributes of incompletion within a fi lmmaker’s legacy. A pointed connection in this regard is Deren’s relationship to Marcel Duchamp, who appeared in Deren’s incomplete film Witch ’s Cradle (1943) and influenced Deren’s thinking at an early point in her career. Duchamp’s career motivates reflection on the artist’s relationship to incompletion: for example, he privately labored on his Etant Données during the twenty years following his claim to have abandoned art in favor of playing chess. He blurred the boundaries between artistic and nonartistic activity, so that chess became his creative work; meanwhile, like Welles with Quixote, he tinkered 22

INTRODUCTION

with an ongoing project the parameters of which remained a secret to the art world.41 As such, his work provides an example of a productive push and pull between planning and play that Deren adopted as part of her own ethos as early as 1943. This book raises the question of what one might do with work that has disappeared, been set aside, or enjoyed the first flicker of a great idea but never found itself fanned into full flame. Simultaneously it demands rethinking work whose primary structural, thematic, and/or aesthetic mode may not be based on closure, completion, or control. It takes seriously Deren’s formulation of a “vertical” cinema that stops to dwell on resonances and layers of meaning rather than only rushing onward toward the finish. By examining the range of Deren’s theoretical and creative work— fi nished and unfinished—this project provides a study of her whole oeuvre. As Deren pleaded in a note to editors at CBS who were preparing a reel of her Haitian footage for a television program: “PLEASE DO NOT DESTROY OR THROW AWAY ANY OF THIS FOOTAGE. SAVE ALL THE PIECES, EVEN THE SHORTEST TRIMS.”42 Deren’s archive most transparently indicates her tendency to save everything herself because it all might come in handy one day. Her keeping of all the parts of the process available to her evinces the notion that the stray bits, the shortest trims, the fragments cast to the cutting-room floor all matter to her work. This book explicates that case. Incompletion guides her aesthetic and her work life from the very beginning; it accounts for the simultaneously most engaging, frustrating, and productive aspects of her films, writings, and other creative-critical projects. From the tension plateaus she builds through the navigation of binary relationships, to the emphasis on alternative forms that refuse to resolve into closure, to her fondness for thinking of even her most admired works as “abandoned” rather than finished, incompletion is Deren’s guiding star.

THE C HA PTER S

The sheer diversity of the accomplishments Deren managed in her short career is both cause for celebration—she has a finger in every artistic and intellectual pie she encountered—as well as for concern in any study that 23

INTRODUCTION

seeks to offer a totalizing account of her work. With that caution in mind, I embrace the diversity of Deren’s accomplishments and specifically seek to make sense of that diversity without sanitizing it. I follow the chronology of Deren’s work, starting in the years just prior to her making Meshes of the Afternoon and ending with projects she had begun or continued to work on until her death in 1961; along the way, I make note of the contexts in which she worked and how they coincide with her work. The course of this chronology focuses particularly on the development of Deren’s thought according to her shifting artistic output, a trajectory possible to trace because of her repeated publicizing efforts for screenings and her meticulously catalogued writings and notes now located in her archives. By dividing her work into four parts, two pre-Haiti (1947) and two during and post-Haiti, the book reexamines Deren’s contribution to cinema history by introducing the role of a preponderant amount of unfinished or in-process work against the backdrop of the more familiar story of her most accessible fi lms. It introduces these dynamics in the early flurry of films she made, one per year, from 1943 to 1946 (Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time), as well as in her writings from the same period, and it necessarily repositions the work according to the complicating factors of incompletion. The transitional year is 1946, when Deren was finishing Ritual in Transfigured Time and beginning to plan her first trip to Haiti. After that turning point, Deren finished just two other fi lms from 1947 until her untimely death in 1961: Meditation on Violence and Ensemble for Somnambulists/The Very Eye of Night. Meanwhile, the footage of Haiti continued to accumulate in coffee cans stashed in her closet, and she spent her time working over old and new projects with less frequent “results.” Moreover, inasmuch as it addresses this volatile fault line between documentary and creative interests, Deren’s experience in Haiti aligns her with a rich body of scholarship on ethnographic, documentary, and experimental approaches to fi lm subjects. Deren’s attraction to ritual form and her interest in the possibility of accessing spiritual states through art (poetry, dance, and especially cinema) become central preoccupations for her work, and inspire her to draw upon the work of her predecessors (including Katherine Dunham, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Joseph Campbell) who combined the fields of photography, anthropology, dance, 24

INTRODUCTION

and religious studies as they studied rituals from Haiti and elsewhere.43 She also provides an entry point into these fields for filmmakers who follow her—for example, Trinh T. Minh-Ha (in her cinematic explorations of creative documentary: Reassemblage in particular is guided by principles akin to those Deren intended for the Haitian and Balinese sections of her unfinished film). More generally, Deren’s wide-ranging intellect positions her work at an intersection among several fields, so that, taken together, it provides a point of interdisciplinarity within the humanities, arts, and social sciences. With these issues in mind, in chapter 1, “Done or Undone,” I consider the value of incompletion for even Deren’s most canonical work, her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). The chapter first explores that film and Deren’s interdisciplinary interests in dance, poetry, art, and photography that lead up to it and influence its shape. Her pre-cinematic career demonstrates Deren’s developing faith in the camera’s unique ability to create worlds and links her efforts to what she deemed her exigent artistic mission. Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren’s most-often studied fi lm, and one that is treated most often as a closed text—one that uses an experimental structure, to be sure, but that offers various satisfactions associated with being a model for the American fi lm avant-garde, with an exemplar’s attendant sense of closure—also involves absence, contingency, and incompletion, all of which are initialized within the film’s structure and thematic framework. Through its exploration of camera reality and its unorthodox take on subjectivity, the film derives its meaning by frustrating its own closure. In addition to Meshes’ openness and dependence on principles related to incompletion, after Deren’s move from California to New York in the summer of 1943, the specter of the unfinished appears in a more practical sense. Her next project, Witch’s Cradle, which Deren abandoned not long after beginning it, sounds a note of caution about Deren’s ability to maintain the utopian vision of what cinema can do that Meshes of the Afternoon seems to have heralded. The second part of chapter 1 introduces a sustained reading of Witch’s Cradle, Deren’s engagement with Duchamp’s work and aesthetic initiated through that film, and the theme of incompletion that characterizes both the film and the artist. Moreover, it charts Deren’s relationship to the art world, a crucial relationship that both informs and 25

INTRODUCTION

attenuates her ability to make a cinema-specific art. It considers how Deren developed a fascinating project that now exists only in fragments and notes, and it folds this work back into the grand design of Deren’s life work in film and art. The utopian thread of cinema’s potential resurfaces in the context of several of her fi lms in her early period of fi lmmaking, from 1943 to 1946, only with increasing complexity. Chapter 2, “Toward Completion and Control” addresses this period. During this time, Deren worked through her ideals in an intensive film practice, while learning the practical tools of the cinema for herself (her husband, accomplished filmmaker Alexander Hammid, had fi lmed all but a couple of moments in Meshes of the Afternoon). In her films At Land and Study in Choreography for Camera, the parameters of reality are shaped by the imagination of the fi lmmaker, such that “the relationships which can be expressed by such an emancipated treatment of time and space [ . . . ] are limitless.”44 Her films from this period experiment with these relationships, and their imagery is often compellingly impossible: a woman climbing a piece of drift wood at the beach completes her climb by emerging from beneath a dining room table at a large party, a man leaps across a forest, a bride becomes a widow through a shift to the negative image of the fi lm strip. The films (as well as Deren’s writings about the fi lms over these years) chart Deren’s increasingly complex ideas about how the tools of the camera may be used to expand our relationship to reality, mobilizing incomplete gestures toward an impression of wholeness. This period culminates with her fi lm Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), which she was finishing just as she began to plan for her travels to Haiti and which contributed to the development of ritual forms in her work—an impulse that led her more centrally to investigate collective energies. That film’s multiple options and outtakes serve too as an object lesson in Deren’s process—one that juggled possibility for as long as possible before fi xing on an ending and a degree of conditional closure to her plans. In fact, 1946 was a year of transitions for Deren, who determined to use her Guggenheim foundation grant first to finish Ritual in Transfigured Time and after that directed those funds in service of working on a creative film project in Haiti (although this was not part of her original application for the award). The third chapter, “Haiti,” addresses the challenge to Deren’s view of camera reality that Deren confronted with her first foray 26

INTRODUCTION

into what would become a more ethnographic project—the experience of Haitian Voudoun rituals. While the effects of her first trip were not apparent in that moment, all the signals of what would characterize Deren’s later film work are dimly perceptible in these years. It markedly shifts her allegiances toward documentary concerns in addition to creative ones—and toward a subject-less cinema. Thus her impulse to manipulate reality for the purposes of creating a new reality is significantly checked, and her energies are pushed outward, toward other kinds of non-cinematic projects. The chapter maps out Deren’s Haiti projects in terms of both creative and documentary outlets. It examines the book-length study of Voudoun, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, which Deren wrote with encouragement and support from Joseph Campbell; it considers the record Deren released of Haitian music, Voices of Haiti; it addresses the programs Deren planned for radio and television on Haiti; and it untangles the influence of her several trips to Haiti upon her conception of the original project she proposed for a film. This chapter provides crucial context for understanding Deren’s occasional flight from her cinematic orientation, which was inspired by her personal immersion in ritual. It also provides a sense of why the Haiti project is less a failure than a different kind of channelization of energy toward more open-ended concerns with the incomplete and infinite ritual process. The fourth and final chapter, “Full Circle,” charts the last decade and a half of Deren’s life and career. It demonstrates how Deren’s cinematic aesthetic found a new focus as a result of the pivotal years returning multiple times to Haiti and her attempts to parlay that experience into a new cinematic aesthetic. This chapter offers a sustained look at the two completed films—Meditation on Violence and The Very Eye of Night—from these later years, as well as unfinished projects from the period, especially her final project, Season of Strangers, and a rough cut of footage for a film on Medusa, both of which mirror some of her plans for the Haitian project. This culminating chapter proposes a reexamination of the earlier period based on a preponderance of evidence that Deren rethought her notion of camera reality to balance her notions about creativity and documentary, control and contingency, and openness and closure. Throughout these chapters, I repeatedly underscore Deren’s body of unfinished work to help us to comprehend both her own fi lms and the 27

INTRODUCTION

implications of a creative approach to elusive, passing states of perception and to the world more generally. Deren’s legacy comes more sharply into focus when considered through the work of fi lmmakers who have paid homage to or profited from her example, including Barbara Hammer (especially in her 2011 film, Maya Deren’s Sink). These inheritances are given consideration in the conclusion, as an extension of the uses of absence (e.g., Maya Deren’s Sink “ghosts” Deren herself in her apartment many years after her death) and the profitable collision of incomplete fragments with new work. The arc of the book covers Deren’s development as an artist, highlighting key moments of crisis in her sense of how to express life, movement, art, and reality, depending upon the project she undertook. It offers a comprehensive study of Deren’s films and maintains the importance of recalibrating her seemingly familiar work in consideration of the weight borne by the unfinished projects. Like the steps Deren’s protagonist takes in Meshes of the Afternoon, collapsing disparate spaces (beach, grass, sidewalk, living room) with the tools available to cinema, this book binds the triad of Deren’s investment in the creative arts, experimental cinema, and documentary across the space of many years of work. It links the incomplete works with an overall aesthetics of incompletion and shows Deren’s investment in the attempt to keep closure at bay both for the works themselves and for her approach to the work more generally.

28

FIGURE 1.1 Marcel Duchamp in studio with chess board (with rotoreliefs behind him). Photo: Sidney Waintrob, c. 1960. (Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art)

ONE

Done and Undone Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle

Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren’s earliest and best-known film, was made early in 1943 in collaboration with her then-newlywed husband, Alexander Hammid. A film that initiates Deren’s most substantive artistic interests translated into cinematic form, it was made in the first phase of Deren’s excitement about the qualities particular to the medium of fi lmmaking. Then and thereafter, in an auspicious beginning to a career as a fi lmmaker, Deren apprenticed herself to learn from Hammid, an already gifted filmmaker. Meshes is still one of the most recognizable touchstones of American experimental fi lm, and it has shaped cinema history’s sense of Deren’s mission and legacy, a position it fulfills in several ways.1 However, only months later, Deren began work on a project on her own, filming in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York, where Deren and Hammid moved shortly after finishing Meshes in their bungalow in the Hollywood hills. This second fi lm was never completed. Its status as unfinished in fact flags several issues that prove important for understanding Deren’s developing sense of a cinematic ethos. Indeed, the case of Witch’s Cradle alerts us to the fact that Meshes, too, a seemingly definitive building block toward the legacy of Maya Deren, draws on the incompletion/completion balance to which Deren’s work over the years becomes increasingly prone.

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This earliest period in Deren’s development as a filmmaker suggests that we should adopt a more nuanced view of the full range and trajectory of the completed films from 1943 to 1958, as well as a sense of how incomplete projects cast those films (including Meshes) into an altogether different relationship to each other and to experimental and documentary fi lm practices. As we see in these two early films, a shifting balance between key binaries—incompletion/completion, control/contingency, stasis/motion, objective/subjective, etc.—propels her fi lms. Deren’s work draws its vitality from negotiating these binaries without ever resolving them, drawing on the establishment of a “tension plateau” between elements.2 Thwarting traditional narrative resolution and valorizing the process at least as much as the final product, each of these early fi lms from 1943 to a greater or lesser degree owes its appeal and meaning to these negotiations, amounting to a not completely stabilized text and to varying degrees of success in the end.

M E S H E S OF THE A FTER N OON : HOLLY WOOD , 1 9 4 3

Featuring Deren and Hammid in the main roles, the loose narrative sense of Meshes is steeped in the logic of dreamscapes, where repetition (the manufacturing of multiple Derens, the key/knife game, etc.) delays forward movement. Because of the circumstances of its genesis, spectators have sometimes been predisposed to view it as a psychological snapshot of an artistically inclined couple’s honeymoon, or as a portrait of the complex inner workings of their relationship to each other and to art. In her publicity materials for the film, Deren called it “A film concerned with the inner realities of an individual and the way in which the subconscious will develop an apparently casual occurrence into a critical emotional experience.”3 Whatever else it may do or mean, Meshes establishes key themes and a formal schematic upon which Deren will build for the remainder of her career. As Wendy Haslem has noted, Meshes generates an understanding of its themes “in the doubling, tripling and quadrupling of its central character (played by Deren) and in its cyclic narrative, a structure that seems condemned to repetition.”4 The film begins to hint at how a sense of incom-

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pletion inflects her work as a productive force, here through the non-ending forms of recursion, reflection, and circles. A little history of Deren’s background leading up to the creation of her first fi lm will shed light on the artistic motivations she was attempting to satisfy in the making of Meshes. Up to this point in her life, Deren dabbled with artistic and intellectual interests in poetry, dance, literature, photography, philosophy, religion, politics, and anthropology. Several of these preoccupations are mobilized creatively in this film and are then rejected, reworked, or transformed within subsequent films; a sense of the web of contexts for her interests will therefore prove useful as a baseline for how incompletion comes to dominate her aesthetic.

S O M E A RTISTIC A N D IN TELLEC TUAL INF LUENCES

Poetry was an especially powerful influence on Deren’s aesthetic for Meshes, and served as an undercurrent in the development of her later work as well. From early amateur versifying for her school journal, where she first received encouragement for her poems (she wrote home from boarding school in Switzerland: “I am hailed by all the girls as a sure poet.”),5 through writing her master’s thesis on poetry at Smith College in 1938–39, and at least until Deren met Hammid in 1942, Deren was a selfproclaimed poet, claiming it as her artistic calling. Hammid later described the genesis of Meshes as deriving from Deren’s poetic sensibility combined with his own cinematic expertise; he recalled that she was at that time “writing poetry always. It was one of her main ambitions. So she started with poetic images on paper, and I was visualizing them.”6 Their collaboration charted the movement from imagination to image, a trajectory important to understanding Meshes in particular as well as Deren’s work more broadly. From the beginning of her work in fi lm, Deren thought of visual images from the vantage point of language. She sought the immediacy of expression that she had had difficulty finding in her poetry. The remedy arrived for her once she began to work in film. As she recollected the matter, when she began to learn the craft of making films, she was suddenly able to

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translate her experience with poetry into the more direct image-making vehicle of cinema: I was a poet before I was a fi lmmaker and I was a very poor poet because I thought in terms of images. What existed as essentially a visual experience in my mind . . . poetry was an effort to put it into verbal terms. When I got a camera in my hand, it was like coming home. It was like doing what I always wanted to do without the need to translate it into a verbal form.7

Whether in transcribing images from the imagination or, as she insists elsewhere, from reality itself,8 Deren eventually homes in on the idea of bringing nonverbal thoughts and perceptions—the domain of the imagination and image—more directly to the screen: “Fortunately, this is the way my mind works, and I could move directly from my imagination onto film.”9 Once she begins to identify as a filmmaker in earnest, poetry for Deren becomes a sort of poor man’s cinema. She had been trying to use poetry to accomplish what cinema is able to do naturally: build meaning through images (her faith in images may also explain the complete nonverbality of her films). In this formulation of the difference between poetic and cinematic media, Deren directs attention to the Imagist desire to offer direct access to the thing, a point of reference she knew well, having completed her master’s thesis at Smith College on “The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry.” As Renata Jackson has shown in detail, Deren read widely in French texts and in Anglo-American modern poetry and philosophy for her master’s thesis research and developed a number of her own ideas about the possibilities inherent in the cinema by applying principles first introduced to her in that reading.10 Significant here are both the Symbolists and the Imagists whom she places at the center of her study. Her notion of the image as a key to both poetic and filmic expression draws from these poets and thinkers. Deren’s interest in poetry also carries with it the torch of an earlier avant-garde movement based in the artistic environment in France. Though she laments the “apparent failure of the fi lm avant-garde of France” in the 1920s and 1930s, she inherits a great deal from their example, including the 34

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way in which she borrows from other art forms, especially poetry and dance, to think through cinema’s purview.11 The cross-medial fertilization of artistic endeavor rampant in France at that time—poets making movies, painters making books, etc.— would also trigger experimentation in the field of cinema as it redeveloped a provocative avant-garde beginning in the 1940s with Deren and her cohort.12 Deren’s work on the Symbolists and the Imagists focuses on how each group resolves the dilemma of how images generate ideas. Another parallel between these schools of thought and her films is their anti-Romanticism and call to return to formal demands.13 Although several critics of Deren’s films have described them as so focused on the self as to be narcissistic, her de-emphasis of the self even in her earliest fi lms prefigures her experiments with ritualistic forms. This leads her to label her films “classicist,” and develops in earnest later through her critical statements toward ritual forms—especially in her most detailed theoretical statement of fi lm theory, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, where she claims that by the time she made her fourth film she realized that all film form “should be ritualistic.”14 Ultimately, the integrity of the created whole bears the weight in Deren’s vision of the artwork—not the individual parts, not the artist’s intent, but a workable, flexible combination of the two bent toward formal concerns. In her thesis, Deren notes that the Imagists’ image is “a point of departure for mysterious distances.”15 The “suggestiveness” of images informs Deren’s sense of how to effect a dramatic impact not bound to the exigencies of narrative nor even bound to the object itself. The act of making the image suggests a relay or a leap—something “new,” “startling,” and at “mysterious distances” from the thing itself—in the space of which the constitutive, separable parts of object, image, artist, and spectator are bound together. Literalization of the idea of “mysterious distances” arrives in Deren’s film work in her many traversals of disparate spaces with a match on action: e.g., a man lifts a leg in a forest and lowers it in a living room, fusing those spaces together through the image of the unified body. The image corresponds directly to the world imaged for Deren: “Moreover, like the Symbolists, the Imagists rejected the conception of objective reality; they felt, instead, that the impression, or the Image, is not a symbol of reality but the reality itself, since one cannot distinguish between the 35

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object and its image.”16 The collapse between reality and the image, as we shall see, finds expression in Deren’s films and writings: she investigates the integrity of an image to see how far it will hold, interpreting the Imagist tenet “Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective” liberally. Her practice anticipates André Bazin’s 1945 formulation of the relationship of object to image: “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. [ . . . ] It shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.”17 For Deren the image is always both objective (it exists in reality) and subjective (it exists in a specific way for the creator and spectator). The translation of ideas in her head to images on fi lm depends upon the creative use of reality, to enact, in Bazin’s terms, an image’s “becoming.” Her chapters on the history and theories of the Symbolist and Imagist movements culminate in a final chapter on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, two poets who strongly condition her thinking.18 Deren was drawn to Pound’s insistence on directness and to his later upheaval of the Imagist credo through Vorticist forms in their emphasis on movement and collision. Her interpretation of Eliot fi xes on the relationship of Symbolist aesthetics and Classicism to his work. An interest in the “subjectivity” of an emotional response to art takes a prominent role here: Eliot-influenced subjectivity, to which Deren is drawn, retains the Imagists’ directness while representing subjectivity as a specific perspective on being in the world that may then serve as a relay from artist to audience. Deren sketches a movement from the personal to the (too-) objective and back to a place in the middle that balances both without losing either. This fulcrum point becomes the center of Deren’s cinematic subjectivity.19 Her stance in relation to these issues stems from her work on the theory and history of poetry. Deren also embarked on other writing projects in her pre-cinematic period, something she did not give up after turning to filmmaking. Her first husband, Gregory Bardacke, remembered her career goals just after they married in 1935 as being focused on writing: “Writing was her goal at that point. She was very serious about it. She would do anything at all—almost anything at all to promote her career.”20 During this period, Deren wrote a wide range of journalism, attempted several short stories, and penned at least one detective novel, as well as planning other creative and 36

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collaborative projects. The journalism in particular provides a background for Deren’s persistence in placing articles on the cinema in magazines and journals, as well as her ability to make connections. She tended to reach out to those who could teach her something or otherwise assist her in her pursuits. For instance, in the few years leading up to her meeting and marrying Hammid, from late 1940 until January of 1942, she introduced herself to Katherine Dunham and convinced her to let her serve as her secretary while touring a production of Cabin in the Sky. In this capacity, Deren discovered that she was a fitting pupil for Dunham’s interests in ethnographic and terpsichorean pursuits, which would have profound impacts on her own travels to Haiti later in the decade. When she first began making films, Deren made use of her connection to the world of professional dancers to solicit actors for her “dance” fi lms: e.g., Study in Choreography for Camera is a collaboration with Tally Beatty, a member of the Dunham troupe; Ritual in Transfigured Time features Dunham dancer Rita Christiani; for The Very Eye of Night, Deren received financial support from John Latouche, a lyricist for Cabin in the Sky, and through these connections obtained an introduction to Antony Tudor, who collaborated on the film. Later, when she planned her Haiti trip, Deren called upon Dunham’s advice, expertise, and connections to assist her through the inroads Dunham had already established there. Dance and its relationship with anthropological pursuits occupied a central position in Deren’s ambitious career path early on, which she initially fostered through her relationship with Dunham. Dunham, who had traveled to Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, and Haiti to study dance, wrote her graduate thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago, which was entitled “Dances of Haiti, Their Social Organization, Classification, Form and Function” (1939). Deren, nurturing her interests in anthropology and dance, wrote an essay in 1942 entitled “Religious Possession in Dancing,” which she published over three issues of Educational Dance. She also aspired to writing a children’s book on “primitive dancing” with Dunham. In her self-generated letter of introduction to Dunham, Deren proposes that the approach for such a book “would be anthropological but not academic. Its purpose would be to tell the origin and meaning of dancemotion in a very simple, anthropological way.”21 Deren further links the 37

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strategy of this creative endeavor to her interest and facility in poetry, as she would for several fi lm projects in her near future: “The text, as I see it, should be a sort of poem; the illustrations—simple drawings of the poetry of motion.”22 A cross-medial aesthetic developed naturally out of Deren’s broad and restless interests in a range of art forms and the expressive techniques belonging to specific media. And we know that it is only a few years after her work for Dunham that Deren goes to Haiti herself to make a film that would “unify cinematically anthropologic equivalents”: she had in mind a film that would compare the rituals of children’s games, Balinese rituals, and Voudoun dances, all of which involved “displacement of [the] performer’s identity,” a conceit she drew from several of her interests.23 Deren’s investments in a range of arts proliferated in the years leading up to and through 1943. Alongside poetry and dance, Deren took interest in the art world, possibly inspired by her strong personal connection with Galka Scheyer, the art dealer and collector who introduced and promoted the “Blue Four” (Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, and Jawlensky) in the United States. Scheyer’s connections led Deren straight into the heart of the exile postwar art community when she and Hammid relocated to New York in 1943, just after making Meshes of the Afternoon in California, where Scheyer was living at the time. Moreover, around this time Deren produced several photographic series, some solo and some in collaboration with Hammid. For example, she made a series she entitled “L.A. Reportage” (people/places around Los Angeles), collaborated with Hammid in the realm of “Experimental Portraiture” (featuring mannequin parts strewn around rooms), and in 1945 documented Duchamp’s and André Breton’s controversial window display “Lazy Hardware” (first at Brentano’s and then, after complaints about its decency, at Gotham Book Mart). For years she took portraits and series in still photography; in this early period, she was also beginning to develop the tools necessary toward making it part of the basis of her experimental cinema. Photography provided a foundation for the mechanics of cinema and allowed her to apply herself to issues of composition, framing, and thematic motifs (circles, water, reflections, etc.) related to her ongoing concerns. It also demonstrates that Deren was already interested in dual approaches to image-making, the one documentary (dependent upon the depiction of the world for its meaning) and the other more explicitly cre38

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ative (dependent upon the artist’s shaping of an idea for its meaning). As Judith Mayne has put it in terms of Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s work, Deren merges the bifurcated branches of a “primitive” cinema that locates the conventional origins of documentary and fiction films in the figures of Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers.24 Neither of these branches is mutually exclusive for Deren. To illustrate, a couple of Deren’s photographs from 1941–42 pointedly engage Deren’s recurring motif of reflection (fig. 1.2). Deren has slightly different purposes in mind for each, even though they share that common foundation. The first, from “Experimental Portraiture,” features a mannequin and Deren sitting before a three-way mirror. Whether there is one mannequin that makes two reflections, or there are two mannequins, one of which may not be seen outside of its reflection in the three-way mirror, it is difficult to tell, and the sleight of eye involved underlines one of Deren’s fascinations with reflection: that it creates unpredictable, uncertain variations on original objects via images. It anticipates the doubling and tripling of Deren’s image in Meshes of the Afternoon; tellingly, it also features (as does Meshes in the opening shots) a mannequin in the place of the woman’s image. At play here are issues of women and auto-image-making. Deren mirrors the mannequin not just through the properties of the mirror but through her actions: she adopts a mannequin-like mask so that the subjectivity of the subject is less important than how the parts of the image function together. She is less reflecting on her own image within the photograph than letting these issues reflect through her body and its double. The unpredictability of how the image is generated (what its source in the real world is) underscores its production, a concept at the foreground of the photograph’s meaning. In the second image, from “L.A. Reportage,” Deren presents a dancing couple reflected in a mirror along a wall. The “real” image of them is sharply focused while the mirror reflection blurs their lines. Among the ways of reading this photo—as comment on romantic coupling, as document of Los Angeles’s varied social scenes, as a further experiment in portraiture sans mannequins—Deren suggests another merger between the documentary and the creative. The blur is effected through focus—a manipulation of the camera’s devices for a specific impact—and it structures our reading of the doubled images of the couple. To varying degrees, image-making is 39

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itself part of the meaning that unfolds from engagement with both images. The two photographs balance valences of documentary impulse with creative manipulation; Deren explores the expressive capacities of both impulses, separately and together, within a single still image. Among the many ways Deren’s actively exploratory artistic and intellectual life informed her work, she built her films around her background in philosophical, spiritual, and psychological motivations, a strategy she in part inherited from people very close to her. Perhaps most important was her father, Solomon Derenowsky (shortened to Deren in the United States), who emigrated with the family from Kiev to New York in 1922, when Deren was five years old. The family moved to Syracuse, where Deren père earned his American medical degree and practiced child psychology as well as teaching mental hygiene. Deren dedicated her essay “Cinema as an Art Form” to him in the following words: “To my father, who, when I was a child, once spoke to me of life as an unstable equilibrium.”25 The idea with which he first sparked her imagination as a child receives reflection in the essay and functions as a baseline for her thinking about the relationship of the whole to its parts—parts constantly in motion as they seek to stabilize their equilibrium—a notion that influenced her negotiation of binaries in her work. Coincidentally, his death also provided her with the means to buy her first camera.26 Across her career, Deren nurtured relationships with ambitious, competent practitioners of their fields of endeavor, drawing on their expertise in those fields as inspiration for her creative projects. She established contacts with important figures as part of her pursuit for excellence in the many disciplines that interested her in their own right or that might serve her art.

GE NE S I S O F FILM A RT IN MESHES O F T H E AF T ERNOON

The interests of her early adult life naturally though circuitously led Deren toward the cinema. Meshes of the Afternoon refocused these interests in a FIGURES 1.2a and 1.2b Photographs from Deren’s series “L.A. Reportage” and “Ex-

perimental Portraiture,” c. 1942. (Courtesy Boston University Howard Gotlieb Special Collections)

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cinematic idiom, through Hammid’s collaboration and guidance and through the assemblage of passions driving the development of Deren’s artistic persona. It was begun in the spring of 1943, shortly after the couple moved together into the apartment on Kings Road in Hollywood. Hammid called Meshes “kind of a home movie,”27—and like a home movie its makers played the main roles. Moreover, it was filmed in their home in a short period of time (just over two weeks), was shot on 16mm (one of the amateur filmmaker’s likeliest options in 1943), and required a minimal cost (according to Hammid, around $260 total).28 However, it is unlike most home movies in almost every other way. Its collapsing and expanding of time and space, meticulous structure, mysterious symbology and imagery, and recursive, poetic logic proclaim its status as art: Deren discovered in making the film a point of origin for a newfound vocation. Meshes does not depend upon a story, but neither does it forswear narrative gestures. Instead of a causal logic, it focuses on an everyday incident, and then alters it in multiple ways. The incident itself is not the stuff of drama, but Deren and Hammid’s manipulations of it build in suspense throughout the course of the fi lm. A woman picks up a flower on her way home. She sees someone walking down the sidewalk just as she is about to turn to go up the path to her own house. She ascends the steps, knocks on the door, tries the handle, then reaches in her handbag for the key. She drops the key on the threshold, and it bounces down the steps. After running down to pick up it again, she unlocks the door and enters. Inside, she observes an untidy room. A bowl and a loaf of bread sit on the table; in the bread a knife is wedged, which as the camera approaches falls out of the loaf and onto the table. On the interior steps to the upstairs, a phone is off the hook; the woman replaces the receiver and goes upstairs. The window in the bedroom is open and the curtains billow into the room. Next to the bed, a phonograph plays; she turns it off. Back down the steps, she observes a comfortable, flower-printed armchair; sitting down in it, she apparently falls asleep (close-ups of her eye and a special funnel-effect signal as much). There ends the first incident. Thereafter, while the woman continues to slumber in the chair, she “sees” herself repeat these actions three times, with alterations—e.g., she pursues the enigmatic figure that had been walking ahead of her, or the knife in the bread relocates itself to elsewhere in the house, etc.—until four Derens have 42

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accumulated in the house. Three of them sit down for a conference and determine by a ritual similar to drawing lots who among them will murder the sleeping Deren. Just at the moment the knife is raised above the sleeping Deren, she wakes: a man (Hammid) appears there in place of the murderous Deren. He takes her upstairs, and she lies down on the bed. A knife appears beside her, and she flings it at the man, whose face, now a mirror, shatters. Behind it an image of the sea appears; the smashed mirror fragments fall onto the beach and the waves wash over the pieces. In a sort of coda, or as Deren called it, a “double ending,” the man walks up the path and goes into the house. Inside, he finds seaweed and smashed mirror pieces on the floor, their trail leading to Deren, dead in the armchair. The significant variations lead with baleful intent toward the violent ending. The eerie but benign mirror face of the cloaked figure that is revealed when Deren #2 starts her frustrated pursuit becomes threatening. Mirroring communicates a set of interlocking functions throughout: the mirror reflects the image of the Deren figure back upon herself (without looking, thus not adopting a perspective of its own) just as the multiplying Derens do; what happens with the mirror face also foretells the protagonist’s demise by smashing that reflection to bits, both because it casts the reflection of the Deren figure into the disarray of shattered fragments and because the shards of glass reflect/multiply and cut/fragment. Other objects that circulate in the film signify in similar ways across the variations, moving elliptically and resonantly rather than linearly. The phone off the hook, the phonograph, the flower, and the knife all move to other places in the house, disrupting order and hinting at impending disaster. For instance, the phonograph appears at first downstairs; later it appears near the bed, marking different spaces as sites for communication or the failure to communicate. Indeed, in the second iteration of the woman’s entry into the house, the knife sits in the phone’s original location, suggesting through association a truly deleterious communication. The four Derens similarly represent an array of roles. Deren #1 serves as a norm against which the others vary. Deren #2 introduces the pursuit of the cloaked figure only glimpsed in the first sequence. She also grants the first full view of her face—a view denied us in the first sequence. We gain access to a provisional subjectivity as a result, an effect again multiplied by doubling and tripling her figure in the next variations of the initiating 43

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sequence. Deren #2’s trouble in movement comes from a sort of stickiness at the ceiling: she seems to be falling up, disconcerting the stability of framing offered in the first sequence. Deren #3 extends that trouble in her difficulty ascending the stairs. But she also alleviates it by then just popping magically up and down the staircase. The beginning of the third variation introduces the cloaked figure into the house, an enigmatic prowler who ascends the stairs and leaves the (fake) flower on the bed—where, as we know from the second variation, it will turn into a knife. Deren #4 arrives with said knife, and she initiates the ritual cleromancy that will determine the fate of them all. And so forth, before the proliferation of Derens is cut short by an act of violence. The lack of closure—and the threat of multiplication without end—cannot be resolved within the structure of the film: it requires a coda that will death-deal with the excess Derens. Coupled with these doubling effects, the recursive nature of the film’s structure points to Deren’s passion for circles and transformations. All of Deren’s ways of presenting modes of incompletion, noncausality, and unresolving arcs are in evidence in the fi lm: themes, characters, and objects circulate through the film rather than lead linearly toward a conclusion. It takes two conclusions to give the film even a limited sense of closure. Preferring doubles and fragments, the fi lm effects a strange math that adds up to an unexpected whole.

BODY PA RTS, FEMA LE SUBJECT IVIT Y

One of the most noticeable fragmentations of the fi lm centers on the female body. The opening sequence of Meshes of the Afternoon depicts parts and shadows of Deren’s body, but neither her face nor her full figure for some time. P. Adams Sitney identifies this feature to describe what he calls “synecdochic framing,” using fragments of the body shown to stand in both for the rest of the body as well as for larger actions of that body.29 The suggestion suffices, and the spectator fi lls in the missing parts, completing the body only partly presented while reading significance into the chosen incomplete part—the eye, for instance, as synecdoche for vision, visibility, and thought. In this way, Deren’s film toes the line between presence and absence, consciously constructing a space to keep them in tension. 44

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Lauren Rabinovitz interprets the fi lm’s fragmentation of the body as a sign of how Deren depicted the “objectified” body of woman in a way familiar to feminist film theory of the 1970s. It marks the body’s “to-be-lookedat-ness,” with the female body’s divisibility enabling its fetishization for the male subject whose gaze controls her image.30 Rabinovitz describes Deren’s film as being “a woman’s discourse that rewrites Hollywood’s objectification of women by addressing a female subject who must contend with her own objectification.”31 Her reading of the film provides a powerful corrective to interpretations that dismiss it as being self-involved and begins to suggest how the fi lm simultaneously presents women as subject and object. When Catherine Soussloff argues that Deren “sets into play a crisis in subjectivity in film criticism and practice,” she is mostly concerned, like Rabinovitz, with the recuperation of Deren in the 1970s by those interested in establishing a feminist discourse that postdates Deren’s work.32 The establishment of a viable cinematic format for a specifically female subjectivity—contra the hegemony of male subjectivity (and hence power) outlined by Laura Mulvey and others in the first wave of feminist film criticism—remains a worthwhile aspect of study relative to Deren’s work.33 As we have seen in Deren’s interest in Eliot and Hulme, she however held a view that subjectivity and how one experiences the world are inextricably wrapped up with the structures of social life, artistic creation, and the vicissitudes of perception. Deren in fact collapses the distinction between subject/object in her presentation of the body. She operates on both sides of the camera, both creatively manufacturing her image and serving as its basis in reality. First this image is partial and suggested. Later it displays its excessive qualities by multiplying four times before violently reducing in number (the violence is both enacted and suffered by that “same,” quadrupled body). Meshes of the Afternoon’s presentation of incomplete parts of its “subject” represents female subjectivity as an open field for the exploration of perception. Like the photograph of Deren with the mannequin before the mirror (fig.1.2), the film provides a foundation in reality that allows exploration of surfaces derived from that reality, with thematic resonance for female subjectivity, being, and agency.34 The enigmatic first shot—the mannequin hand lowering a fake poppy to the sidewalk then disappearing—is followed by a second shot that includes 45

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just the shadow of a person, followed by a third shot where a fragment of the body (the arm) meets up with the shadow, followed at last by a fourth shot of just the real (but still fragmented) person without an emphasized shadow. Fake person, shadow person, part of a person: all of these images examine the substance of an image of the body and move incrementally from unreal to real. The sequence highlights the way cinema draws on reality to delineate space and along the way hints at the unknown just out of our range of vision. Further, it articulates a tension between the seen and unseen mobilized by framing choices. Here, the spectator comes to understand an experience specifically through the way the character sees the world. In a program note for Meshes two years after its completion, Deren described its main objective as follows: “to put on fi lm the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to accurately record the incident.”35 Issues of subjective experience (“the feeling which a human being experiences”) are paramount, and the means by which that experience is expressed draw upon the realm of the imagination, rather than, but also in reference to, an experiential “accuracy.” The way experience is presented in Meshes provides a key for understanding Deren’s sense of cinematic subjectivity and its capacities and limits for complex, creative expression of interior states—as well as for expressing more universal frameworks for being in the world.36 Deren describes the first series of shots in Meshes as “a subjective camera sequence in which only the feet and shadow of the girl are visible.”37 In these shots, the woman’s legs represent the actual (imaged) body of the protagonist, but they operate on the level of object in their asseveration from the whole body (enacted through framing). That is, these legs both do (as synecdoche) and do not (as fragmented objects) stand for the motivations of the woman who walks with them. Part of the work of Meshes of the Afternoon is to bring animation to such objects in relation to the protagonist’s subjectivity (in Deren’s description: “cinematic techniques are employed to give a malevolent vitality to inanimate objects”),38 and the film at first carves out an incomplete space—a void—through these objects for subjectivity to enter; it solicits the viewer’s desire for such subjectivity. There are no fewer than thirty-seven shots before Deren employs a series of shots typical of continuity editing for establishing subjectivity: that is, the protagonist’s face followed by shots of what she sees. Before that 46

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point, our perspective floats unmoored among objects and fleeting glimpses of fragments and shadows of the subject. The tension generated by withholding the full view of its protagonist characterizes Meshes and offers a key to the way it builds meaning in the context of its loose narrative and medium-specific intertexts. The film prefers meanings drawn from connotative sources (the symbolic, the metaphorical, the associational structure), and the narrative sense of the fi lm builds upon a dream-logic. If there is character motivation here (one of the main factors in establishing a traditional dramatic arc), it is steeped in that dream-logic. When we finally reach the thirty-seventh shot—the first time we see the whole of the woman’s face and ought thereby to have more direct access to her motivations, thoughts, or feelings—our view of the protagonist occurs through the highly mediated fi lter of dream, illusion, and ritual. Besides the fact that it must be read in context of the dream of the “real” protagonist in the armchair, the woman retains a blankness of features that underlines Deren’s interest in ritual. The strangeness of several details, both in the shots described and in those that follow, also point to a depersonalization of the figure of Deren. As Deren protested in a letter to the editor following James Agee’s review of a screening of three of her films (Meshes, At Land, and A Study in Choreography for Camera), which criticized Deren’s acting, “acting” has little to do with what she is up to as an artist: An analysis of the “acting” in these fi lms, would reveal, actually, almost no “acting” at all. [ . . . ] The emotional impact, such as it is, derives from the sum total of the visual image—[ . . . ] The burden of projection does not, as in the theater, or in theatrically derived fi lms, rest upon the capacity of the actor to simulate an emotion.39

Because Deren renounces the usual emotive capacities of acting (a feature over which she has nearly complete control as both actor and conceiver of the sequence), Meshes is better able to explore the impact of the entire “visual image” and its place within the context of the series of shots, which together build from fragments to generate an effect.40 Importantly, this effect depends upon a lack of emphasis on intents and motivations; the ritualistic, dream-oriented, repetitious form of the film recompenses this lack. 47

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Meshes for so long denies the spectator the fulfillment of the usual expectations of film identification so that it might instead allow images to crystallize complex ideas unavailable through expository language, adopting a similar type of meaning-making as poetry. Meanwhile, the apparent shunting aside of subjectivity (the blankness of her features denying access to her inner subjectivity) actually represents deliberate exploration of the broader nature of subjectivity. That is, Meshes refuses to settle the question of subjectivity as simply a point of view, which is appropriate for a fi lmmaker who adamantly opposed the idea that Meshes was simply autobiographical. Instead, it embraces a more comprehensive view of subjectivity, extending beyond the individual and into the structure of communal experience. This sense of “subjectivity,” then, is quite different from the classical mode in cinema: it encompasses the possibility of collective consciousness, signaled by the tenuous division between subject and object of the look as well as between the reality and the image. As Maureen Turim has argued, Deren arranges the force of experience into a form that evokes connections to shared cultural experience, to the inheritance that is the legacy of ritual. [  .  .  . ] The autobiographical elements of  .  .  . Meshes are never simply presented as experiences or even stories with which we are immediately asked to identify. Here structuration is crucial, as form dissociates embodiment from the natural.41

Turim further argues that the mission to combine ritual form with an individual protagonist’s quest points to the nature of several of the energies harnessed in Meshes of the Afternoon (violence and death, for example). It might also suggest an alternative to ways we have traditionally processed the role of women’s bodies and subjectivities. Indeed, the way the film is structured according to a poetic form, dependent on association and a rich set of images and symbols, indicates a positive attitude about the ritual and impersonal energies it harnesses. Recurrence, circularity, reflection, and doubling constitute its method and mood: it would rather remain upon the precarious fulcrum balancing the tensions it creates than, like most narrative fi lm, resolve those tensions 48

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with all the dissatisfactions such resolutions involve for an artist with the temperament Deren possessed. Meshes welcomes irresolution in the face of open-ended questions like, What are dreams? From what sources comes violence? What is the status of human consciousness in death? The fi lm addresses these concerns by sustaining the openness of these questions through legerdemain available to cinema.

CON TR OL A N D C A MER A REALIT Y

In the fi rst sequence of the fi lm, as we have seen, four shots outline the relationship of reality and image similar to the photograph of mannequins at the mirror. Deren and Hammid trick the viewer’s sense of what is real and what is image by developing a complicated sequence based on varying shades of substantiality. The mannequin arm descends into the frame to set a flower on the sidewalk, before disappearing instantly; these shots therefore have a status outside of the rest of the fi lm’s initial incident. Deren #1 comes upon a flower, which appears not exactly from nowhere because the first shot identifies where it has come from. But what a strange revelation about its origin. We would take it as more normal if Deren #1 had just found it on the sidewalk: the kind of coincidence cinema habitually depicts. The opening shots reveal the hand of the author of the incident, but simultaneously reveal that hand as phony: an object and not a subject. The nature of the incident, then, which builds in mystery as each new Deren figure encounters it and repeats it, is initiated by no less enigmatic a source. Because it doesn’t belong to the rest of the fi lm’s depiction (such as it is) of agency, we may at first not know what to do with it in relation to the images that follow. Deren’s film acknowledges cinema’s precarious position on the threshold between the realms of the image versus the real, which closely relates to how the subject positions are navigated across the course of the fi lm’s development. Like the mannequin, the flower that appears in all of the shots is a fake. It binds the variations on imaged personhood and objecthood by its consistent presence across shots. Its fakeness in the midst of a fi lm that is itself intensely interested in the real vs. the created is pertinent, as is the evident effort at control over the fi lm’s mise-en-scène through it.42 In the second 49

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shot, the shadow woman is at first alone in the mobile frame, but shortly comes up upon the flower, signaling offscreen presence abetted by the camera movement (the camera moves with her shadow movement to find that which is not on screen). In four short shots, Deren—marshaling the near-magical powers of cinema to make objects appear and disappear, creatively mobilizing framing and editing, and using the cut to elaborate variations on the theme of the real—adumbrates a specifically cinematic hierarchy ranging from substitution-illusion-possibility to substantialityreality-actuality. She hints at that which may come into being and that which already is, the actual and the almost. Elaboration of these issues occurs in an exchange between Deren and James Laughlin at New Directions that commences in the summer of 1943, just after Deren completes Meshes of the Afternoon and just before she begins to fi lm Witch’s Cradle. This exchange sheds light on Deren’s thoughts about the process of making Meshes and her motivations for undertaking her next film, which will significantly complicate Deren’s sense of how to create meaning in cinema and with what materials. Of these interests, the way the camera addresses “reality” is the central preoccupation. First, she considers the question of “staging” documentary events vs. “news-reel methods,” arguing that a reality effect is “often better achieved” by the former and that “manipulation of reality” is essential for achieving aesthetic unity for documentary fi lm. Deren thus maintains that reality should be presented through conscious management of the image.43 This aesthetic purpose is such that Deren continues her letter to Laughlin by proposing a piece that would examine the role of creativity and contingency in still photography. She suggests that both in the darkroom and in the field, photographers fi xate on the “fetish” of the photograph; Deren warns against such “formalistic gibberish” and advocates instead for using that tremendous vocabulary [of the infinite mechanical possibilities of the camera and the darkroom] as a means for creative expression. It seems to me that the answer here is that the creative process always involves the personal imagination as the point of origin. In photography this imagination should be imposed upon reality, which involves a maximum of control over reality; and the fascinating thing is that in a photograph, regardless of the fact that the thing photographed has been 50

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imaginatively created, it becomes a reality at the moment of being photographed—the simple, hard reality which anyone means when they say “Let’s see it.”44

Deren here robustly advocates for the “hard reality” of the image, which is in fact simultaneously created, new, and real. The camera creates this unique reality at the moment it commits something to film. Importantly, this new reality derives from the imagination of the person behind the camera in conjunction with the world in front of the camera. It might not necessarily exist in the world. Even as something created, it can take on a weight of reality all its own. For Deren, the thing made real by dint of the artist’s force of creativity invokes the power of magic. She claims that the possibilities available to cinema “partake of the quality of magic, too.”45 As with the idea of a “malevolent vitality [brought] to inanimate objects” which as we have seen she uses to describe the energies animating Meshes, Deren is invested in the seemingly magical power of the cinema to transform time and space into a new reality. The article that eventually results from her epistolary exchange with Laughlin, “Cinema as an Art Form,” underlines the possibilities of a reality engendered by the creativity of a conscientious artist wielding a camera. Here, Deren concentrates the strands of cinema reality more rangingly explored in her letter into succinct statements, for example: “Cinema . . . is a time-space art with a unique capacity for creating new temporal-spatial relationships and projecting them with an incontrovertible impact of reality—the reality of show-it-to-me.”46 Her aesthetic is equally bound to the terms of imagination and reality: seeing is believing, is being. In the first shots of Meshes of the Afternoon, the manipulation and investigation of reality vis-à-vis the camera is already elaborated, foregrounding the cinema’s creation of a new reality, at some remove from the thing it depicts. The film elaborates this investigation from a variety of angles and using a variety of means. The doubling of Derens is only one of the more obvious examples of this creation of a new, otherwise impossible reality. The mannequin arm in the first shot, the shift in types of camera subjectivity, and the depersonalized acting all represent more subtle variations of and multiple levels of engagement with reality that cinema offers. The real power of 51

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cinema, Deren suggests, and Meshes bears out, is that the spectator actually herself experiences a new reality. In notes, Deren explains: Art is distinguished from all other means of human expression not by the nature of the ideas or emotions with which it is concerned, but by the fact that these are projected in a consciously controlled form designed not to reproduce the facts of natural reality, but to give intelligence to it, to create and constitute that relationship between man and reality which is experience.47

While Deren denigrated artists that would use the tricks of the camera to showcase virtuosity, she mobilized the same tricks of the camera for another design: to produce new experiences of a camera-specific reality for the spectator.

ON B A LA N C E One might say, in terms of sociological structure, that the purpose of the frustration of climaxes is the channelization of energy which would, in climactic activity, be spent and really dissipated in conclusive exhaustion— that it is converted into a tension plateau which serves the continuity both of personal and communal relations.48

The reality effects that preoccupy Deren’s cinematic aesthetic often draw on her generation of a “tension plateau,” where the spectator fi lls in blanks left tantalizingly open or suffers through a kind of open-endedness that drives the fi lm forward reluctantly, through the devices of frustration. The spectator must wait until the off-balance returns to equilibrium, or until the stray strand comes back to where it began. Deren strives to make that equilibrium a newly calibrated form of experiential reality: space and time are furnished with flexible dimensions and can expand or condense places and moments. The repetitive narrative structure in Meshes derives from the logic of ritual as well. Meshes mobilizes an expansive sense of the subject position, so that spectators may occupy the apparent interior landscape of the protagonist as well as the vastly exterior landscape attrib52

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uted to ritual (the any time/any place of ritual), and everything in-between. The reality generated by the camera in Meshes possesses the heft of experience at the same time that it engages and has been engaged by the imagination. It ruminates upon an incident with obsessive force, moving forward but always circling back to the beginning, lest the initiating incident disappear. In generating this balance between reality and image, Deren turns again and again to mirroring of the body as a reflection of real bodies. Mirrors for Deren thus work along the lines of managing binary relationships, the most prominent of which is self/other. The tension between these is most ably expressed through the film’s murderous desire to eliminate the divide between self and other, or rather, to eliminate the other, which is also the self as depicted here. The mirror face of the figure running ahead of Deren offers and shuns her recognition; the mirror reflects fragments of the body but leads to a shattering death, the self’s ultimate end.49 The knife, too, offers shots in which the protagonist’s eyes appear reflected: here the subjectivity established so painstakingly by the sequence at the beginning implies potential violence, to the eyes or vision no less. Further, multiple Derens give substance to the otherness of a mirror reflection, although, when they become too many, annihilation trumps duplication. The aggressive, gargantuan Deren who rises above the others, with knife raised and wearing mirrored goggles, appears otherworldly and bespeaks blinding, internalized reflection: the goggles effectively eliminate the look while emphasizing the murderous gaze of the one hidden by them. They reflect the world, but they then also seek to destroy that faux reality (a reflected reality) before them (fig. 1.3). Structurally, the film is balanced by freighting forward movement with hesitation. Instead of moving swift ly toward resolution, Deren marks out a meandering, repeating, and circular logic. Until the coda of the film, which suggests a “real” action outside of the interior subjectivity of the protagonist (where Hammid returns home and fi nds Deren dead and covered in ensnaring seaweed), the end of Meshes looks very much like its beginning. Its circular structure enacts meaning through recursion rather than resolution. Deren’s objective of maintaining a tension plateau—with a sense of notyet-finished business prevailing everywhere—provides a key to reading 53

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FIGURE 1.3 Reflecting goggles in Meshes of the Afternoon. (Courtesy Anthology

Film Archives)

Meshes, which is a closed text neither in its own structural dynamics, nor in its position in Deren’s work. It served as a touchstone for Deren’s mapping out of her cinematic ambitions, and she described it in different ways across her career. She marketed it to potential viewers and investors in ways that directed its meanings, enveloping the film in deliberate, evocative contexts for its reception. For instance, she gave titles to her screenings, mounted campaigns guiding viewers (including in program notes for screenings and, later, a sound recording of her voice to introduce screenings), and gave a series of lectures and interviews herself (often in conjunction with a screening of her films) in which she described the films’ overt and covert deployment of cinematic experimentation.50 The film’s pliability suited Deren’s insistence on the openness of the fi lm as a text. She famously disparaged critics who tried to pigeonhole the fi lm according to Freudian, Surrealist, and other interpretations, upholding the slipperiness of its signifying apparatus. Perhaps this explains how it has so suitably served as a multipurpose touchstone for shifting feminist, avant-garde, and/or cinema historical interests for those who have analyzed its systems 54

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of meaning. Even as it maintained its original parameters, it resisted fi xity in its meanings. But after all, the film did not maintain its original parameters; Deren commissioned Teiji Ito (her third husband) to write music for Meshes and added his composition to the film some fifteen years later (1959). Adding sound after the film was first released, Deren oppugned its solidity as a “complete” artwork, imposing a new layer of meaning to it and adding another register of signification, or as Elinor Cleghorn has put it, another “perceptual dimension.”51 Certain moods and rhythms once suggested in the visual realm become emphasized in the soundtrack. She and Ito agreed that the addition of his music could help to thwart the fi lm’s tendency toward personal, symbolic, Freudian interpretation. As Deren described it in one of her lectures: “it is the extraordinary, archaic, and dramatic objectivity of this music which does not so much change this film as makes it impossible to misunderstand it. I think pretty impossible; I mean one can still try, but . . .”52 In line with Deren’s deliberate shaping of the film’s reception throughout the 1940s and ’50s, Ito later concurred, recollecting: “The music was composed in order to set things straight . . . and not leave room for misunderstanding.”53 The attempt to close off its potential misreadings interestingly illustrates Deren’s continuing negotiation of control and openness in her work, her desire to alter its parameters but for the purpose of making it less supple, years after she had deemed it complete. This aspect of the sound version of Meshes reconfigures its “original” terms. If Deren could call into question the integrity of the finished version in such a radical manner, we might wonder what the fi lm would look like now had Deren lived another fifteen years. Was it not always potentially a work in progress, along the lines of how Deren viewed the process of work more generally—abandoned for a time, rather than essentially complete? Meshes attends to the unique qualities of cinema’s exploration of perception and subjectivity, its merger between the ephemeral and the seemingly tangible present, and its formal facility with multiple modes of expression (documentary, experimental, narrative), sometimes all in one fell swoop. It also marks the point of departure for Deren’s burgeoning cinematic aesthetics: she and Hammid would move (back for Deren) to New York just months after completing Meshes, and Deren was keen to 55

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continue to tap into the excitement she had discovered in filmmaking. Her next project, which she planned to complete at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, forced her to reflect in significant ways on the recurring issues of incompletion that would inflect the entirety of her career.

I NC O MPLETION : TR OU BLE IN CAM ERA REALIT Y

In the summer of 1943, Hammid was offered a position as film director at the Office of War Information in New York. He and Deren packed up in California and moved at once. After sorting out living arrangements, they settled into an apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village, a home Deren would inhabit for the rest of her life. While Hammid worked in his new position, Deren took on photographic work and wrote articles as she sought a new film project. The project she selected, after seeking counsel from Marcel Duchamp, was to be entitled Witch’s Cradle, and she worked on it in August and September of 1943. Featuring Duchamp and artist Anne Matta Clark, the fi lm represents an important stage in Deren’s career: first because she undertook it as a solo effort, with advice from but not collaboration with Hammid; second because it adumbrates Deren’s connections with and ambitions to the art world; and third because it is the first as well as one of the most important of her several unfinished fi lm projects.54 Witch’s Cradle was never finished, and although Anthology Film Archives houses the outtakes for the fi lm, some of it may be lost.55 What survives are several semi-edited sequences from the film—at least one of which was engineered in postproduction to play backwards (effecting the magical trick of the woman summoning a garment from the floor to her hand). There is very little plot to speak of, but many of the sequences feature ruminations on a series of ideas or themes as outlined in the shooting script for the film. Mainly, it features a woman (played by Matta Clark) moving around the gallery space and interacting with the artworks as well as with significant objects like a mirror, runes, string that has been set up to traverse the gallery, and a beating heart. The remnants of the project exemplify the way in which Deren’s mind sought connections among art forms (and more literally, with the wall-to-wall string, connections among artworks). 56

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Witch’s Cradle provides a curious case study not only for Deren’s attempt to navigate multiple media, but for how experimental cinema and the wider art world maintain a sometimes uneasy relationship. Although Deren’s legacy centers on her making of and advocacy for experimental film, she was also immersed in the art world beyond the parameters of the cinema, to which the circumstances surrounding the making of Witch’s Cradle attest. Deren’s explorations of several media coincided with the tendencies of many artists who descended upon New York during the years leading up to and through the Second World War, several of whom Deren knew and used in her films. She and Hammid (both of whom were part of that often émigré culture) became part of the larger art scene, and they hosted or attended informal, salon-like evenings, where ideas about art, culture, and politics were exchanged. Deren invested in connections to the broader world of the arts throughout her career, striving to work with professionals in other fields.56 She used her formidable contacts to film at Peggy Guggenheim’s recently opened gallery (it had just finished a successful first season), asserting her comprehension of the world of avantgarde art and the current trends within it. Witch’s Cradle served as Deren’s first foray into calling herself a fi lmmaker in her own right and as an attempt to put to work some of her reflections on cinema’s unique attributes first discovered in making Meshes of the Afternoon. In “Cinema as an Art Form,” written the same year, she reckoned with the need for a “formal idiom” developed “as independent of other art forms as they are of each other.”57 She expressed the need to articulate an ineluctable relationship between the artwork’s form and content, a quality held in common with all of the “legitimate” arts. She participated in reestablishing dictates of the modernist moment, pushing an art form as far as possible from its supposed center, to see how far that center would hold.58 However, if Meshes of the Afternoon heralded a utopian vision of what cinema can do—e.g., negotiate the nuances of subjective and objective states, express the interiority of its protagonists, collapse and expand spatial and temporal dimensions, and affirm a symbolic shorthand that nevertheless does not reduce objects to abstractions—Witch’s Cradle requires a recalibration of that utopia’s terms. In this pivotal moment in her aesthetic development, Deren abrogates her approach to film as “art” when 57

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it has to do with the claims of the gallery world rather than the exigencies of film. Witch’s Cradle deals with a preconstituted subject that already held interest without the camera: Peggy Guggenheim’s innovative Art of Th is Century gallery in New York City. Divided into a series of thematic spaces and threaded throughout with display features intended to make the art quite literally come off the walls, Art of This Century’s space was created by the visionary architect and designer Frederick Kiesler.59 Occupying the entirety of the seventh floor (two adjoining commercial spaces) of a midtown arts district building, the four galleries—Surrealist, Abstract, Kinetic, and Daylight, the last of which also featured a library—boasted one of the most impressive collections of modern art at the time, displayed in a dynamic atmosphere. For instance, at certain intervals the Surrealist gallery room would go dark, a train whistle would blow ominously, and a bright light would come up on the opposite wall. The space itself was equally dynamic. Kiesler’s curved walls amended the usual system of staid display in contemporary galleries, effectively enveloping its patrons. Suspension systems for the paintings in the middle of the room allowed the gallery’s visitors a more animated interaction with the artworks. In the Kinetic Gallery, the visitor spun a device resembling a great ship’s wheel to rotate replicas and artworks into view through a peephole.60 Further, the whole gallery featured an array of innovative modernist artworks in several media, including work by Duchamp, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Antoine Pevsner, Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, and the first works of Jackson Pollock. In order to activate their meanings, these works demanded an engaged spectator. The gallery and its works were invested in revolutionizing the experience of art. Guggenheim was a preeminent champion of modern art, supporting its makers both financially and through exposure in her gallery. Deren utilized the gallery’s terrain as the backdrop for the fi lm, exploring what she called the “magical qualities” both of the artworks and of the space itself. For Deren, if the camera wants to escape censure as a merely mechanical reproduction of reality, then the person who wields it must both use her own mind and the camera’s expressive qualities (its photographic basis and its ability to be edited).61 With these directives in mind, Deren began 58

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work on Witch’s Cradle, hitching it to the star of modern art through its setting in a gallery, its artist-actors, and its fi xation on valued art objects, as well as through its avant-garde camera work and mise-en-scène. With the overall aim of claiming cinema’s individuality as a visual, creative medium founded in—but also generating its own—reality, Deren assays the gallery’s potential for constructing a self bounded by and associated with modern artifacts: the “cabalistic signs and objects of our century.” The “Art of This Century” should remind us of the claim frequently asserted during the first cinematic avant-garde that cinema was the art of the twentieth century.62 In Witch’s Cradle, Deren manipulates reality in the name of creating new realities as she did in Meshes of the Afternoon, but unlike Meshes, it stumbles in balancing the two by attempting to fashion a reality out of already compelling, independently creative art products. Witch’s Cradle’s incompletion ultimately suggests that Deren pledges medial allegiance to cinema’s transcendence of normal space-time boundaries and its capacity for a complex visual language rather than its affinities with the art world.

THE IDEA OF A FIL M

Deren’s records attest to a detailed plan bringing together several interests she had been pursuing up until the time of making Witch’s Cradle. The most salient of these interests for the development of subsequent films are her investigations of magic, symbols, and modern art within the context of a formal cinematic language. In brief, Deren intended the film to follow six sequences, each of which would contain segments to illustrate an overarching concept related to magic and the camera. She organized the segments according to symbols, locations, or movements that allowed the expression of that magic. The titles of each segment are brief and descriptive. Part one, “Brevoort and Terrace,” situates the film at the Café Brevoort (it was located at Fift h Avenue between 8th and 9th Streets); the second segment, “Alive String,” features just that: an auto-mobile string (with a somewhat malevolent consciousness). The third, “String Travel,” extends the second segment, moving through the gallery space like a tourist. The fourth, “Plunge and Animation,” 59

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is a short, dynamic section featuring extreme camera movement developed in relation to the already established string theme. The fifth, “Idol Sequence,” most closely relates to the title of the film and serves as the center of the protagonist’s emotional and psychological trauma; it focuses on the effect of symbols and artworks on the woman featured in the film. And finally, the longest and last section, “Balloon, Birds, Eye,” may be as long as it is (forty-one shots out of a total of seventy-three in the whole fi lm) because it reiterates many of the stray ideas introduced in the first five segments. The film’s logic depends upon associations between symbols and the artworks, as well as overarching themes of circularity and incompletion. Incompletion as a theme develops in both small and large ways across each section. Paradoxically, incompletion is expressed in terms of how it might restrict movement (incompletion as a stopping of work) and how it might augur unending, never-resting movement (incompletion as infinite, not-ever-to-be-completed work). It contains the binary of openness and closure, expressed in several ways. A web of string crisscrossing the gallery retards forward movement even while it articulates and multiplies connections; a circle with words printed around it (“THE BEGINNING IS THE END IS . . .”) never quite gets anywhere but never quite stops, either: it begins, ends, and re-begins, threatening never to resolve. Deren’s work is predicated on this paradoxical quality, developed here relative to objects. As Susan Stewart claims in relation to the souvenir and the collection, both serve to mediate spatial and temporal experience: the first in its singularity and the second in its propensity for categorization. Specifically they inspire a sense of turning “inward” (toward the discrete past, toward a sense of the self and all that is contained within it as already experienced) even while portending the possibility for a turning “outward” (toward the uncontained, the infinite, and the future).63 For Deren, the art collection in Witch’s Cradle betokens a similar relationship. In addition to the circle motif, a mirror also both offers a mise-en-abîme of potentially infinite depth in both directions (a theme we shall see developed in Deren’s interest in Haitian vevers in chapter 3) and the containment of whatever it reflects as an image. A shot from Witch’s Cradle, with Matta Clark’s chin touching the mirror, reflecting her face in close-up, suggests such boundaries, with the surface of the mirror itself as fulcrum between balanced worlds of self/other, subject/object (fig. 1.4). 60

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FIGURE 1.4 Anne Matta Clark, reflected, in Witch’s Cradle.

The aspects of Witch’s Cradle that fi x on circularity, recursion, and frustration reflect the film’s own incomplete status as a whole. Most of the shots in the shooting script have been checked off, indicating that they have been filmed, and indeed most (though not all) of these shots exist in the outtakes.64 The pieces are at times intentionally put together, but most of them are not in any particular order, and none are edited according to the outline in the shooting script. It is a project that Deren at some point simply abandoned. The editors of The Legend of Maya Deren suggest that the film was never finished because Deren must have surmised that it did not or would not be successful at some point in the production. Adhering to Hammid’s assessment of the fi lm, the editors deem it “too literal, or literary,” and discount it as something that “reveals her first awkward steps in making the transition from a literary to a filmic language.”65 Beyond the film’s existing footage, The Legend editors cite her notes and drawings for the film as rudimentary. They sketch a teleological argument about Deren’s 61

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development as a film artist: this fi lm was a snag at this early stage of her career, a snag that will be resolved by her next fi lms, At Land, Study in Choreography for Cinema, and Ritual in Transfigured Time, a successful series that capably expresses her vision of film art. Witch’s Cradle therefore marks the moment, for them, when Deren doesn’t quite yet know what she is doing. I would propose we instead think of the incompleteness of Witch’s Cradle as galvanizing for Deren’s refinement of certain principles in her aesthetic as well as a theme and method in its own right. To build her ideas through the film, Deren ruminated on them and then redirected her energies that would have been “spent,” but were instead “converted into a tension plateau which serves the continuity both of personal and communal relations.”66

I NC O M PLETEN ESS: DER EN ’ S ARS RE INF ECTA

The shooting script for Witch’s Cradle proposes actions and situations that further Deren’s themes of frustration, incompleteness, absence, abandonment, and circularity. Frustration is especially in evidence: for example, shot 37, which describes a moment when the camera will “pull back to reveal her hair entwined in Giacometti,” or shot 54, which calls for a similar delay: “Tries to get past Calder but it sort of tangles her for awhile.”67 Both of these directions mesh together images of the woman’s hair, string, and the mobile artworks in the gallery, suspended on wires in the middle of the room so as to seem to float among the gallery patrons touring the exhibition. Matta Clark is unable to traverse the space because the artworks themselves thwart her progress. None of the outtakes for the fi lm depict this entanglement of hair called for in the script, but a feature of the space itself introduces a hirsute-like encumbrance: the semi-tensile string webbed throughout the gallery. The

FIGURE 1.5a Installation view of exhibition “First Papers of Surrealism,” showing

Duchamp’s “Sixteen Miles of String.” Photo: John D. Schiff, 1942. (Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art) FIGURE 1.5b “First Papers” exhibition reinstalled for Witch’s Cradle.

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design of the space and the use of string further the metaphorical entanglement Deren’s shooting script would occasion. It came about as a feature of the film through Deren’s reinstallation of Duchamp’s contribution to the French Relief Society’s First Papers of Surrealism exhibit (at the Whitelaw Reid mansion on Madison Avenue, made just the year before, 1942). Duchamp’s piece, sometimes titled “Sixteen Miles of String,” stretched string across the walls of the ornate space, attenuating the view of several works of Duchamp’s contemporaries, and obstructing movement throughout the exhibition on the part of those who attended it (fig. 1.5). The string reinstalled in the Kiesler galleries also breaks up the apparent plenitude of space, introducing a thicket of string in which the viewer may be ensnared; importantly, it also operates according to the principles of play offered in the space’s original design that would encourage participation and (literally) bind spectator and artwork together.68 T. J. Demos has argued for reading an important difference between Kiesler’s spatial arrangements in Guggenheim’s gallery—whose purpose was to “negate any nonaesthetic barriers between viewer and work of art, or rather to render those barriers aesthetic”—and Duchamp’s piece at the Reid mansion, which “acted as the maximal obstacle between paintings and viewing space.”69 Noting that Duchamp’s exhibit calls attention to the act of making meaning rather than providing space for reflection, Demos describes it as a representation of “a shift from an artistic model based on artisanal creativity and authorial expression to one that focuses on its own institutional determination by offering a frame for analysis rather than an object for aesthetic contemplation.”70 Ideally, Deren’s piece would have enacted a similar sort of work, though the fi lm seems unable to decide how to incorporate the artworks into the schema of “performing” rather than “contemplating” art. Duchamp’s reinstalled string, which trammels the Art of This Century gallery’s open design, fundamentally changed the dynamic of artworks as sites of interpretation. It inspires a shift in emphasis from the artwork proper (as a “complete” work) to the act of making art from things that don’t look like art (string, chess, experimental cinema) and the act of interpreting and experiencing art. Most of the pieces from the gallery were removed for the filming (Deren worked between the first and second seasons for the gallery), so the ones that remain must be read in terms of a 64

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reappropriation schema outside of Kiesler’s and Guggenheim’s architectural/collection design. They fit into an alternate vision of what art is: not product and collection, but process and accumulation. The viewer that Kiesler’s design courted is here at the center of a maze that both invites exploration with new eyes and slows progress toward that exploration. What lies at the center of the journey depends on how one navigates it and how far one is willing to venture to get there. Thus the string functions as both barrier and a guide through the space and offers a comment upon the ways we navigate meaning in art. The spectator has a thread to follow, to be guided through the gallery space, but she is equally restricted by the knotty, indirect path to certain unexpected spaces and perspectives on what she views. Tom Gunning, in a lecture on the use of the labyrinth in avant-garde film, emphasizes that Witch’s Cradle’s string game draws upon the concept of the labyrinth as a formal principle, an idea frequented by the modern artists of “This Century.” In recognizing the pathway/obstruction dichotomy that the fi lm embraces, Gunning argues: “This ambivalence [between “paths” and “barriers”] draws on the labyrinth’s ambiguous energy, its simultaneous sense of passageway and imprisonment.”71 The labyrinth is a fine metaphor for the work Witch’s Cradle effects. As Gunning notes, “If the classical story follows a straight line that incorporates occasional detours, the labyrinth represents a different journey.” That journey is in fact the trajectory of the film: a nonlinear, even circular pathway that promises transformation even while it threatens the opposite. Moreover, in its reference to the labyrinth, Witch’s Cradle’s string suggests a threat beyond the fear of stasis—at the center of the labyrinth, the Minotaur waits. The film’s suppressed violence draws on this mythical allusion, familiar in the zeitgeist of modernist movements represented by many of the artists who contributed to Guggenheim’s gallery collection (including Duchamp as well as by Anne Matta Clark and her husband, Roberto Matta). Besides the journal entitled Minotaure from this period, the issue of View magazine from September 1943 (exactly when Deren was making the film) featured an advertisement for Picasso’s exhibition at the Matisse gallery, with his Le Minotaure (1935) as its calling card.72 For several artists, the journey inspired by an artwork was already intertwined through the model of the labyrinth with its threatening beast at the center. 65

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As Michael Leja has noted, “Theseus’ journey to that center [where the Minotaur serves as “the strange, bestial core”] and his ultimate reemergence symbolized the process by which the consciousness achieved selfknowledge.”73 Similarly, mystical journeys such as that related by William Seabrook, whose Haitian writings Deren studied, focused on the fraught navigation through a maze that might just as easily lead to self-immolation as to self-discovery.74 Deren’s plan for Witch’s Cradle draws on these sources of violence and self-discovery. The string in Deren’s film takes on multiple other functions through the film: while it serves as both blockage for movement and as a guide through the space, it also appears as child’s game (cat’s cradle), as connective thread (stitching for part of the gallery’s backdrops), and as a vital force (when it moves of its own accord), emphasizing its suggestive, allusive, shape-shifting powers. Duchamp, who would have been associated with that scandalous use of string at the Whitelaw Reid mansion only the year before, often sits at the core of its use. At one point in the fi lm’s outtakes, the string draws a noose around the artist, which slowly binds and arrests him, threatening to constrict vital energies. It is one of those malevolent forces with which Deren was concerned in the making of the film. In fact, the energy of violence and threat overflows into the other objects of the gallery space, corroborated by Anne Matta Clark’s terrified reaction shots. The string is associated as well with sources of violence similar to those found in Meshes of the Afternoon (both films, for instance, feature the implication of strangulation: by seaweed or string). The threat of violence relates to the strong subjective position of a female gaze—the “witch” invoked in the fi lm’s title both wielding an excess of power and yet always in danger of punishment for her brazen independence. Both fear and impudence are evident in several shots: Matta Clark at one point looks directly into the camera, confronting the spectator’s gaze with a defiant stare. Such looks raise the specter of a willful female subject attempting to move among male persecutors; interestingly, here those persecutors are also the artworks that snarl her in her progress, most made by the predominant (male) powers in the art world, even if (female) Guggenheim plays the powerful role of their patroness.75 These aspects of the string as a symbol and object in the film anticipate the issues

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of play, vision, frustration, and subjectivity that Deren’s oeuvre will work through both here and in the future.

DU C HA MP

Deren associated directly with Duchamp for the brief time she worked on Witch’s Cradle.76 They came to their vocations from similar perspectives, including having kindred ideas about the essential nature of art and its relation to the commercial; each also responded with some suspicion to the Surrealist artworks of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. Most importantly, the idea of incompletion famously characterized Duchamp’s artistic output, just as it would Deren’s. They may have been predisposed to a sympathy of perspectives, or possibly Deren derived some of her thinking on these matters from Duchamp. In either case, Witch’s Cradle’s incompletion marks common ground for their views about the nature of art production. The mode of ars re infecta at the center of Deren’s aesthetic finds a strong parallel in this celebrated figure’s work. In the mid-teens, Duchamp abandoned painting; in the early 1920s, he claimed to have given up art altogether for chess, although in retrospect we know he was still working in private on several artworks until his death. The idea of play, of art as a witty, personal, open process rather than art as a serious, commercial, definitive product, came to dominate Duchamp’s approach.77 Failure, as such, for Duchamp means something different than a lack of success or nonperformance of a task: instead, it prompts play, process, a push-pull between artistic invention and reinvention. (Think of Samuel Beckett’s quip in Worstward Ho [1983]: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Fail again. Fail better.”) In short, “failure” positively promotes a kind of incompletion very similar to the sort Deren adopts as her artistic modus operandi. Duchamp’s adoption of an aesthetics undergirded by incompletion illuminates Deren’s trials and successes, though her approach is less blithe. While there is no indication that the two artists enjoyed a particularly close or long-term friendship, there is a kinship in their methods and motivations that proves revealing to Deren’s developing fi lm practice. For both, incompletion is not so much a demon to a fruitful art practice as

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it is a way of expressing the essential nature of art itself. Circularity, recursion, open-endedness, and entanglement in the distracting detours of process are this model’s means. For Deren and Duchamp alike, this leads to testing the boundaries of what can be considered the proper expression of the medium in question. Can the cinema be marshaled to explore aesthetic truths? Can a bike wheel be art? What contexts suit artistic products and processes? While Duchamp seems more tickled than troubled by what emerges as porosity within his art form, and consequently pushes art’s boundaries to the extremes of exhilarated titillation, Deren is dead serious in her investigation of cinema’s limits. Perhaps the difference in their sense of medial possibility derives from the difference in art forms: the staid institutions of the art world were (in Duchamp’s view) begging to be blasted apart by innovations on traditional themes and methods while the cinema was still seeking a way of asserting itself as an art form at all, particularly in the American context. Duchamp’s artworks, his participation in the film, and the details of his working life (especially his apparent renunciation of art) nevertheless inform Deren’s project. Having sought his advice and participation for Witch’s Cradle before she began to work on it, Deren found that Duchamp’s professional abilities as well as his notoriety and charisma stimulated her burgeoning aesthetic. Undoubtedly, the diversion of his career as an artist into becoming something else (a master chess player), the withholding of his progress on projects for decades, and his contention that art ought to focus on the active participation of its beholder are strategies that have an immediate impact upon or resonance with Deren’s work both here and later.78 One of the works Deren shoots in the gallery is a large ship’s wheel that rotated to reveal replications of works by Duchamp. The device, a well-advertised feature of the Kinetic Gallery, highlighted the participation of the viewer: she had to look through a peephole apparatus and manipulate the wheel to see the works within. The constant rotation of the wheel matches Deren’s circle on Matta Clark’s forehead (also filmed in rotation); these in turn connect to the spinning of the reel of film, as well as drawing on the kinds of spinning inherent in Duchamp’s earlier fi lm project, Anémic Cinéma (1926). The connection to Duchamp incites Deren to explore such motifs.

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There are clear parallels in Deren’s developing passions and symbology with Duchamp’s artistic preoccupations. Duchamp’s obsession with chess and circularity leads to imagery that finds its way into Deren’s next film. At Land (1944) features chess pieces circulating among the multiplying images of Derens (multiplications that are similar to Meshes). She attempts to steal and hide those pieces, witnesses a game of chess on the beach, and chases one of the chess pieces that tumbles down in falling water before she circles back again to revisit where she has been since she started. The final images find reiteration in a fi lm Duchamp was again involved in over a decade later, Hans Richter’s 8x8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957). Duchamp was also involved in Richter’s earlier film, Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), a project for which Deren claimed excerpts of Meshes of the Afternoon were to be included, although they did not appear in the final product.79 And of course, Duchamp’s own fi lm, Anémic Cinéma, features several of his Rotoreliefs, which articulate the notion of circularity in the extreme. Anémic Cinéma may have been a model for Deren’s use of circularity in her own film. The film alternates two kinds of rotating images. First, it begins with the Rotoreliefs, spinning in a slow, mesmerizing way, as if to induce trance. These are comprised of multiple circles, often with a still circular center around which other circles rotate. The circles nested in circles seem to telescope in an effect of depth: they give the illusion of making three-dimensional cones. Alternating these sets of rotating circles with other, single discs on which phrases are printed, spinning, the fi lm demands an act of reading that unspools the words and follows them toward the center of the circle. While the first kind of circular movement allows the perception of depth, the second kind also allows the perception of a hidden depth in their playful doubleness: the content of the phrases is rhythmic, punning, and humorous, allowing two or more meanings to coexist at once. Deren’s spinning disc—“THE BEGINNING IS THE END IS . . .”—obliquely adopts Duchamp’s method, but in a different register. Like the title of Anémic Cinéma, it enacts palindromic play, moving forward and back along the circle through language. But it emphasizes the mystical quality of the limitlessness of the phrase more so than a repartee of words.

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The documentary qualities of the art object expressed in Duchamp’s work (urinal, bicycle wheel, string, etc.), the exhibition of his works within Kiesler’s gallery, the reinstallation of his string exhibit in a modified context, and his willing participation in Deren’s project speak to correspondences in their thinking about art. Duchamp’s artistic interests are represented in the film, but the film simultaneously seeks to take his power away from him. In the script, Deren describes the “Alive String”: it moves from Duchamp playing cat’s cradle to the string coming to life to loop around and knot slowly at the back of his neck. As such, it traces a trajectory from Duchamp as master of the game to victim. Indeed, the witch’s cradle of the title may refer to a form of torture device Deren derived from her knowledge of William Seabrook’s work on witchcraft.80 Seabrook recounts the use of a device that placed an effigy of a person on a network of latticed rope below, while the person himself was caged above. The effigy would be tortured and the effects were to be felt by the victim who observed it from overhead; of course, this overhead position belongs in the fi lm to the camera, the subject position of this film. From the witch’s cradle, we can trace a similar set of rituals in voodoo dolls or the puppet master, trafficking in surreptitious and minatory intent. Duchamp may not initially be depicted as an aggressor, but he does pull the strings until, in the third section, the camera turns upside down to observe him looking up at it from below, with a string from above stretching down to his throat: the camera as hangman. Meanwhile, Matta Clark (also an artist) wanders around the gallery, summoning objects to her—the artist as conjurer, as witch. While Duchamp is responsible for the presence of string in the first place, the control afforded the artist is called into question. Connections made literal via the string allow Deren to destroy the illusion of immersion in the artwork in favor of establishing a framework for viewing the art. Rather than elicit a contemplative space, the room of string allows a labyrinthine commentary on the role of the artist. The fourth and fift h sections of the shooting script further outline the interaction between the artist and the artwork as a relationship of power. The balance of dominance shifts throughout the fi lm. The man is “holding strings like reins between fingers,” suggesting his guidance of the work like a rider of a horse—an image of control—and then, in what Deren calls a “reversal,” the “lines of hand animate and follow up pulse.” 81 The net70

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work of veins and arteries in effect are subjected to the control of the artworks. In Deren’s shooting script, terror mounts in “the girl” as she becomes ensnared in the artworks: Deren films her in close-up, with her “face in greater agony” as the shots progress. Getting into the thick of the artworks may have been precisely what caused Deren herself to falter with the project, in the end. They came already possessed of their own agency, their own life. The camera’s role suggests that power runs in both directions in this film, as a relay between the artist, the tools of art, and the artwork proper.

S Y MBOLS: C IR C LE, MIR R OR, LINE  .  .  . Or would you draw a circle and say— This is the first, the whole, the beginning82 — M AYA D E R E N

I have a very great respect for humour, it’s a protection that allows one to pass through all the mirrors.83 — M A R C E L D U C HA M P

For someone who railed against symbolic interpretations as adamantly as Deren did, both Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle make abundant use of objects that have long histories as symbols: the knife, the key, the heart, the maze, the amulet to ward off evil, and so forth. Witch’s Cradle takes as its central subject matter an examination of the significance of material objects and especially the more figurative domains of circles, mirrors, and lines. How these motifs find expression in Witch’s Cradle comes to the fore more strongly than anywhere else in her oeuvre, and they represent aspects of the film’s sense of incompletion. Together with the camera’s particular way of depicting them, this unfinished fi lm’s collection of symbols provides a foundation for its constantly shift ing interpretive landscape. Deren’s work makes room for stretches of imagery that do not resolve and which may unfold in the manner of a poem through juxtaposition or 71

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metaphor. The symbology of Witch’s Cradle in particular, with its emphasis on magic, mirrors, circles, and unending, moving lines, points toward irresolvability as much as the fi lm’s status as unfinished does. Stamped on Anne Matta Clark’s forehead are the words “THE BEGINNING IS THE END IS . . .” printed in a circle, read so that when you get to the end of the phrase, you begin it again (fig. 1.6). Tom Gunning has noted that “Deren’s climax fuses the pentagram bearing this motto with the mirror, by repeatedly showing it as a reversed mirror image, demanding the viewer read it backwards to decode its meaning.” 84 He links this demand to the Rotoreliefs made by Duchamp. Gunning argues that because the motto itself at one point rotates in Deren’s fi lm, just as in Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, it “expresses an endless cycle of reversals: The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning is the end . . .” 85 When these words appear divorced from the body of Matta Clark, they can be read unencumbered, endlessly around in a circle as Gunning suggests; however, when they appear printed on her forehead, on the contrary, only one half of the phrase is written to be read straight on, while the other half of it must be reflected in a mirror to be read properly. It is itself a mirror reflecting an original body: one half is mirror writing while the other remains straight. The infinite circle yields only one portion of its meaning (either “the beginning” or “is the end is” reads unmirrored) at a time, whether we confront it directly or indirectly (through mirroring). The shot does not generate clever angles of refracted imagery; it depends instead both on straight-forward reading and on the deflection of meaning, preferring to maintain the tension between the two.86 Many of the film’s objects are reflected or mirrored. Matta Clark’s mirrored positions are described in cumbersome ways in the shooting script, underlining Deren’s sense of the relationship between subject and image. For instance, the following instructions describe shot 56: “Interior window 3/4 from behind her looking out of window at extreme left frame. As she looks her self comes towards window. She moves out of frame to left. Herself passes out of window to R. A moment later she goes past window right.” 87 Matta Clark’s look is directed at “herself.” The sentence that

FIGURE 1.6 Witch’s Cradle’s circular mirror writing: The End Is the Beginning Is the . . .

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begins with “She . . .” indicates the difficult division between self as subject and self as object: is this “she” the observer or the observed? The simultaneous displacement of the self and the self-recognition that comes of traversing the maze of string in the gallery becomes one of Witch’s Cradle’s chief trajectories, clearly emphasized here as a kind of mirroring of subject and object. Figurative uses of mirroring are also present. During Deren’s fi lming at Guggenheim’s gallery, the current issue of View magazine (June 1943) featured no fewer than three articles on Narcissus, about half of its overall content.88 Reflection serves as a stock modernist symbol that Deren and the gallery’s artists engaged, expressing both the narcissist leitmotif in evidence in View and the urge genuinely to understand/reflect upon and regather the self when that self has been fundamentally fragmented by the modernist experience. Deren certainly drew upon this trope, bringing mirrors into the gallery space and asking Matta Clark to reflect things with them. At one point, she sits before the mirror, with the mobile string running out from her extended fingers. The lines of her hands become the lines reflected back to her: her fate, life, and love lines, perhaps, extending out over the surface of the mirror. As with most of Witch’s Cradle’s strategies, multiple symbols (lines, circles, mirrors) merge here to suggest transformative effects without a narrative arc to restrict their possibilities for making meaning. Lines also play an important symbolic and thematic role, a role intimately related to Duchamp. In his book Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, Herbert Molderings considers the importance of the line in describing the work Duchamp accomplished on 3 Standard Stoppages and The Large Glass.89 The 3 Standard Stoppages piece, often seen as a customary example of the use of chance as a component of art, was created by taking three meter-long strings, holding them a meter from the canvas, dropping them, and securing them with vinyl however they fell to the canvas. The three resulting pieces, while using the backdrop of art—a framed canvas—as its context, nonetheless exposes that same context in three important ways. First, by putting the frame around it, the piece foregrounds the defining of art from both the artist’s and audience’s perspective (it is art because I framed it; it is art because it is in a frame). Second, by importing a piece of the material world to the canvas (not unlike the Cubists, 74

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working at the same moment, displacing tidbits of newspaper or other materials from their contexts and mounting them directly onto the artwork), it repositions the role of reality in representation. No longer simply how alike or how unlike in reality an image may be, now the representation actually is a kind of reality (and a utilitarian one at that: string). Third, it calls into question the role of the line more generally in fashioning that reality. The line, so important to painting, is literalized, and suggests some of the meanings we have observed in Duchamp’s very different mobilization of string at the Whitelaw Reid mansion and again in Witch’s Cradle. Molderings describes the result of 3 Standard Stoppages as “the deformation of an ideal straight, one meter long, under the influence of gravity.”90 He outlines how chance, time, a sense of humor, and three one-meter strings conspire to generate an artwork. The string that appears in Witch’s Cradle similarly has to do with chance, and it imports several of the aspects of Duchamp’s multiple uses of string as art material. However, as we have seen, the string also takes on less playful meanings. It obstructs movement and threatens violence upon the body of Duchamp. In its movement in a line up and down his pant leg, jacket sleeve, and shoe, it exerts uncanny agency, seeming to follow a path marked out for it by an insidious, clandestine force. Nevertheless, the string here recalls the 3 Standard Stoppages and others of Duchamp’s pieces not just through the commonality of their materials. In Deren’s outtakes, the device of movement is laid bare through the presentation of the string. Against the dark suit Duchamp is wearing, a darker, second string pulls the white string. That string points us toward the making of images as surely as the issue of reflection does throughout the film: a shadow self of the auto-mobile string, it belies that mobility and points to the legerdemain of the artist at work: a position that challenges the classical model of the erasure of the artist’s hand in the making of art. In that mode of self-awareness, the fi lm pointedly mobilizes circularity. Images are repeated, often several times—not moving forward but circling backward—emphasizing instead the connection between objects. Often, too, the actual image of the circle appears. That image is associated directly with magical powers; for instance, in one segment of the film, Deren’s script calls for a “Magic circle [that] flickers in sky,” which Deren ends up transforming into rune figures, a slippage between magical types. Magic 75

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as presented via circles and runic figures also draws upon Deren’s interest in T. S. Eliot’s themes and imagery. In no film more so than Witch’s Cradle, Deren draws from the energies motivating Eliot’s work. In Eliot’s Four Quartets, the last of which (“Little Gidding”) was published in 1942, just prior to Deren’s beginning of work in film, the concept of the reversibility and circularity of time is expressed in very similar terms as those taken up by Deren’s film: What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. [ . . . ]  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Both Deren and Eliot expressed interest in Eastern religions, articulated for instance in their shared use of “The beginning is the end is the beginning . . .”91 Eliot’s arrival at the “end” of exploration (both a temporal end and the terminus of a route’s end) significantly reveals anew the places and times one has already been. Here the dictate of Eliot’s contemporaries to “make it new” involves sorting out the modernist moment’s relationship with tradition and the past. Moreover, like the labyrinth imagery mentioned above, the journey back to the beginning represents a movement toward understanding, a journey of self-discovery. Both Eliot and Deren privileged circularity, recursion, and a sense of exploration over resolution— the journey over the destination—conveyed within this concept. Fitting then that this film without an end should adopt such a maxim at its center.

WHAT N EED OF N EW REALIT Y ?

While the symbols in Witch’s Cradle are resonant with several of the issues Deren would explore for many years thereafter, they never blossomed into a complete realization of her themes. Deren’s inability in the film to parlay 76

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one art form’s magic into another’s embodies her struggle with the conscious manipulation of subject matter in order to create new experience and new realities for the spectator. Witch’s Cradle marks a transition that ends in a greater degree of creatively generated realities. The filming of the gallery in the Art of This Century space shows that Deren has not mitigated the danger that threatens her treatment of a subject already possessed of its own completeness and closure. Two planned sequences (only one of which seems to have been filmed) transcend an otherwise overprevalent spectator position. The first likens the lines in a painting by Max Ernst to quick movement by the camera along the lines of string. After first observing the painting, Deren abstracts its lines and links them to Duchamp’s strings through movement. It makes the movement itself the key feature that builds meaning, a strategy she will repeat in her next three films. In the other example, not filmed, Deren intercuts balloons and birds to bring an artwork to life through specifically cinematic devices: (Shot) 32: 33: 34: 35: 36:

CU Balloon bursting, Slow Motion Short swing pan up Brancusi’s bird. Sharp swing pan into sky, birds rising—(possibly repeat balloon)— Sharp swing pan down, blood spilling on floor, eye floating in it. Closer shot of eye in darkness, looking around, travel towards eye until out of focus, fade in eye at slight distance looking around, travel until out of focus…repeat three times. Fade out.92

Brancusi’s bird takes flight through what Deren elsewhere described as the “impossible, ideal” form of cinematic reality. Only in the cinema can Brancusi’s sculpture actually fly. That in the process it does violence to the spectating eye (which floats in blood on the floor) calls to mind Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou, which Deren knew, where the cutting of the eye is necessary to refocus the vision to the realms of possibility available to cinema. Deren hoped in 1943 to create a new experience of the world, a transformative experience. Around the same time, possibly in research for her 77

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article on religious possession published the year before, Deren records an account of the Hindu initiation ritual for Brahmin, and the view of the divine in this context: “He is not on earth, nor in the water, nor in the sky, nor even in the father and mother, He is the End ever sought, but ever beyond reach. [ . . . ] Therefore . . . go from door to door and say to each person—‘I stand like a mirror before you. Have you your perfection to reflect in it?’ And this is the aim of your life, to be a living mirror before every face that comes near you. Now forswear all and go begging and be a mirror before the world”—93

Deren sought in the cinema an outlet for just such a quest. However, the focus necessary for it comes at a certain cost: when fixated on the trajectory of a circle, other ends might never be reached. Whether because she did not have sufficient time, help, or vision for this particular project, or whether its incomplete form was simply sufficient for Deren’s needs at the time, Deren left it behind her. Certainly she had problems with some of the practical matters of filming. For instance, the gallery’s lighting, which was dim to the point of frustration, posed particular problems. Indeed, much of the footage appears underexposed, a fact underlined by Deren’s statements of frustration with Guggenheim, who didn’t understand why she would need more than a few days to take her footage in the gallery space.94 Also, as Matta Clark recalled, Deren was setting up each shot by herself, leading to long delays between shooting.95 Witch’s Cradle represents the steep part of Deren’s learning curve, but the experience proved helpful toward discovering the parameters of her aesthetic, with success to come in the years following. It is impossible to tell exactly what Deren hoped for from Witch’s Cradle, despite the shooting script, the surviving outtakes, and a few images she retained as stills, but several details point toward its examination of how the unfinished and the circular work in tension with a desire for the finished and for closure (and they point to future projects’ similar tensions, such as the Haiti project). The project of Witch’s Cradle, abandoned by Deren only a couple of months after beginning it, allows reflection on several of the ways incompletion works in her oeuvre; it fuses interests in cir78

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cularity, repetition, mirroring, and impediments against progress on all of its levels, often mobilized within the terms broached by scrutiny of magical properties within the mise-en-scène and editing of the material. Deren’s attempt to merge the interests inhering in Witch’s Cradle’s gallery art with her own interests exposes a boundary to one side of which Deren’s work will forever after remain (cinema’s side). In fact, the same kind of magic that worked so well to delineate a camera reality in Meshes of the Afternoon is nowhere found in her cinematic approach to the “cabbalistic signs of the century.” Her rough-hewn plan for the fi lm compared with the fragments of it she filmed then abandoned together reveal the limits of Deren’s proposed merger between art, reality, impulse, and accident. Through its emphasis on the unresolved, the unfinished, and the merely suggested, Deren’s work from 1943 points out the value of such qualities for the creative process of making new experiences through cinema. The string that crosses the gallery space in Witch’s Cradle possesses its own life force; the knife that appears in place of a key does, too. Both are given it by the cinema. In both fi lms, Deren makes manifest the invisible lines of her aesthetic investigations.

79

TWO

Toward Completion and Control At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time This board is alive with light; these pieces are living in form, Their moves break and reform the pattern. — E Z R A P O U N D , F R O M “ G A M E O F C H E S S ” (1 9 1 5 )

Maya Deren’s active years of filmmaking lasted from 1943 until her death in 1961—a total of eighteen years. During that time she finished six films, four of which she made during a concentrated, robust period of work from 1943 to 1946. With the exception of the incomplete Witch’s Cradle project, these early years bore abundant fruit: Deren completed a fi lm per year and at the same time wrote several of the theoretical texts most associated with her legacy. In September of 1947, however, Deren took the first of several trips to Haiti; after that point, it would take her fourteen years to finish just two more fi lms that are often considered (if they are considered at all) to be lesser versions or reiterations of the work she had already accomplished. While her first films are typically most central to her legacy and stand on their own as creative, experimental work, they also function as harbingers of the later films, which in fact embrace not dissimilar concerns. The three films that follow Meshes of the Afternoon from 1944 to 1946 affirm that Deren was seeking her own style separate from her collaboration

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with Alexander Hammid, working out her own concerns, and moving slowly but irrevocably toward aims she would articulate in several writings, among them her most developed statement of film theory, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film, published as a chapbook by Alicat Bookshop Press in 1946. Meshes of the Afternoon heralded a cycle that the three films considered in this chapter—At Land, Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time—consummate. All four films possess a strong sense of formal rigor and closure, and each in its own way develops concepts and methods discussed in the first chapter, including the camera’s relationship to “reality,” the use of cinematic techniques to generate new landscapes and experiences, the reiteration of certain symbols like mirrors and circles, and most importantly and related to all of these, the maintenance of tension between completion and incompletion. During this early period, Deren’s fi lmmaking and writings consistently explored these ideas, so that a strong alliance is forged between Deren’s sense of purpose in her writings and fi lms. Because these years have most strongly conditioned the reception of Deren’s work, the following chapter confirms their importance to understanding that work and particularizes their attraction in accounts of her legacy. However, a reading of Deren’s oeuvre that fi xates too narrowly on these works and their relative successes would account for only part of the early work’s substance, and would fail entirely to provide the foundation for a reckoning of the larger trajectory of Deren’s career. Repositioning these early films as comprising part of the gesamtkunstwerk of Deren’s professional life demonstrates the consistency of Deren’s aesthetic pursuits and a rapport among the many strands of her work both finished and unfinished that in fact precludes neither her early dabbling with poetry and photography nor her later forays into anthropological investigation. The films and writings from 1943–1946 contain signs that help to account for the apparent collapse in Deren’s productivity circa 1947: they may be folded together as representing states of productively suspended, unresolved contradictions. Tensions between competing impulses in these films— subject/object, control/contingency, completion/incompletion—bind early and late work. Deren’s nurturing of these tensions at times becomes tantamount to valorizing paradox. But, to modify Walt Whitman’s phrasing for the purpose, if she contradicts herself, very well then—it is only be82

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cause she wishes both to reflect and create a world that in fact contains multitudes. Deren’s refusal to resolve tensions consists of holding opposites in the “unstable equilibrium,” which for her father described how life works.1 As an artistic strategy, it allows her films to generate different kinds of nonnarrative, nonlinear meanings—not unlike those generated through poetry, which as we have seen remained one of Deren’s primary artistic touchstones. She emphasized poetry’s ability to express “an ever increasingly complicated communication . . . an idea and a crowd of its effects, atmospheres, contradictions,” and like poetry, her fi lms aim to build meaning through obliquity and suggestion.2 The kinds of meanings accessed depend on juxtapositions, accumulation, associations, and emotion, rather than psychologically motivated causality and the closure of narrative. T. S. Eliot, whose embrace of classicism was of particular and gradually increasing interest for Deren during this period, insisted on the negotiation of contradictions in order to produce experience, as would Deren. He argued that the “balance of contrasted emotion” results in what he termed a “structural emotion,” a composite further supplemented by “a number of floating feelings” from outside the poet. The contrasts generate qualitatively new experience: a new emotional complex.3 Deren considered one of the primary tensions of poetry as well as filmmaking to be the division between the agency of its creator and accidents deriving from external forces—a tension between control and contingency. Indeed, it would be preferable in both Eliot’s and Deren’s view that the experience created would not derive from the “personal emotion” of the poet. For Eliot, the conscious fact of writing poetry is balanced by the quality of escape that lies outside the agency of its creator; as such, creating poetry embraces contradiction: [Poetry] is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. [ . . . ] Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. [ . . . ] Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of 83

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course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.4

The simultaneous effacement of the individual and the assertion of creative agency drives Eliot’s and Deren’s work alike.5 Eliot’s ideas become important both for understanding the tensions Deren negotiates and for providing an insight about her constant redefinition of the terms that defined her work. In October 1946, after completing Ritual in Transfigured Time, Deren organized a program of her fi lms (for the third time) at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. What she had previously screened under the banner of “Three Abandoned Films” become “Films in the Classicist Tradition.” The renaming recasts her oeuvre in light of the new work accomplished by Ritual. As “classicist” texts, they affirm new purpose in their mobilizing of tensions between agency and depersonalization. Under the rubric of classicism, Deren accounted for her film practice in the moment prior to her first voyage to Haiti. Through publicity materials she distributed at the film screenings, Deren attempted to help spectators appreciate this complex agenda. In a note she included with her fi lms, given to all of her exhibition venues, she strived to shape reception after discovering that some venues had recently used program titles that, for her way of thinking, wrongly interpreted the films: The difficulty of finding a program title for these fi lms has always been apparent, since they do not seem to belong in any of the usual categories. . . [But] under no conditions are these films to be announced or publicized as Surrealist or Freudian. This is not only a serious misrepresentation of the fi lms, but also confuses the audience by inspiring a false interpretation of the fi lms according to systems to which they bear no relation. The preoccupation with conscious control of form which is involved in the making of these films is obviously at variance with the Surrealist esthetic of spontaneity, and Freudianism is, at most and best, a method of analysis which can be applied to personality.6

Like Eliot, Deren argues for conscious control but nonpersonal expression. Her assertion of the film’s motives in her writing furthers this balance 84

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from a position outside the films as well. As she writes in the publicity materials for the October screening, “[The term classicist] is advanced precisely because it does not define according to the elements of the content— factual, fictional, abstract or psychological. It is a concept of method: a controlled manipulation of any of all elements into a form which will transcend and so transfigure them.”7 While Deren asserted her presence and creative agenda (by writing and lecturing, by shaping her publicity materials and interviews, and by directing and appearing in her own fi lms), she nonetheless, in advocating for the classicist tradition, became the escapee par excellence of personality. Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time, for all their attention to Deren’s figure, increasingly de-emphasize the self. By the end of this period, Deren would no longer appear in any of her films but would focus her attention on the ultimate deference of personality in possessed states of being. Even so, Deren emphasized that her films do not efface the creator of the work: the employment of the classicist mode is still “a controlled manipulation,”8 devoted to the creation of form. It requires a creator, a mind behind the manipulation. Absence and presence, as well as control and release, must work together in this tradition. Her notion of ritual developed more fully as she discovered the parameters of this tension in her works, culminating in her depiction of ritual in Ritual in Transfigured Time: “A ritual is classicist in nature. Its elements are so related and so combined as to act dynamically upon each other towards the creation of a form which, in turn, re-creates, re-defines, and re-evaluates the elements.”9 By 1947, in time for her to make her first trip to Haiti where she would investigate these ideas in a confrontation with ritual, these thoughts led Deren to conclude that not resolving tensions serves a purpose for the artwork: “the frustration of climaxes,” we recall, is “converted into a tension plateau which serves the continuity both of personal and communal relations.”10 Maintaining such tensions, then—keeping all boundaries open without entirely eschewing them—serves as the key to understanding Deren’s work in this period and beyond it. This approach appears in her writings as well as her films, most notably in the form of the Anagram, whose poetic structure de-emphasizes but still incorporates the more traditional logic of an analytical argument. The set of Deren’s early fi lms addressed in this and the first chapter are rife with such contradictions as a way of exploring 85

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complex concepts. For example, as we have seen in Meshes of the Afternoon, elements of ritual (a depersonalizing emphasis) threaten to undermine that film’s depiction of subjective states. In At Land, a roving game of chess highlights a double-bind between chance and mastery. Ritual in Transfigured Time collapses the terms of subject and object by configuring a continuum of relationships between Deren’s and Rita Christiani’s characters. And so forth. Among the important types of paradox engendered by Deren’s work, we discover in these years the ways in which the relationship between completion and incompletion begins to shape her projects. It will all but take over the work that follows 1946, and it will gradually come to serve as the tie that binds other kinds of tensions in her work. Deren’s grappling with this tension is couched within investigations of circularity, irresolution, mirroring, and repetition, all of which find complex representation in the early films, tending eventually toward an interest in ritual forms and the possibility of evincing collective experience creatively. In these and the later films, this tension becomes the force that both compels and impedes the control Deren exerted toward the fi lms’ completion. Notwithstanding impediments, and sometimes even because of them, incompletion becomes a productive force, both within the films’ form and in the circumstances surrounding their making. Each of the fi lms from 1943–1946 moves Deren toward the next phase of her career, a phase characterized by these new concerns, or rather, the old concerns amended in rather familiar ways toward new interests, first fully observable in her work in Haiti post-1946. These tensions appear in both early and late films, though they are taken up in different ways. For example, Deren’s belief in the need to harmonize internal and external experience gains emphasis and clarity as her career progresses.11 That is, the work shifts from its interest in cinematic subjectivity relative to the objective world toward what the cinematic apparatus can do to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity, heightening Deren’s sense of artistic agency in relation to accident. Even so, both ends of the spectrum are present in her thinking from the beginning. For these years of Deren’s work, a model negotiating completion and incompletion allows us not to bypass but to de-emphasize accounts of biographical problems as foremost for understanding the rupture between 86

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Deren’s finished and unfinished films. While such biographical explanations are compelling and certainly may have contributed to her difficulties with completing projects, they tend to downplay the way in which Deren crafted her work and found inspiration for it through ideas of incompletion. Restoring the importance of incompletion to Deren’s work reveals how formative it was for the duration of her working life and method; it compels us to think of her practice and theory as inextricable; and it demonstrates why Haiti is a natural outlet for her interests rather than a drain for her energy that amounts to nothing.

AT LA N D: N EG OTIATIN G TENS IONS

After Deren’s success with Meshes of the Afternoon and immediately following her decision not to complete Witch’s Cradle, she sought a new project of her own. By the summer of 1944, she had developed a plan for a fi lm she entitled At Land. Hammid, at this point, had to invest significant time in his new position working for the Office of War Information; he joined Deren for the weekends while she began to film At Land near Port Jefferson on the northern coast of Long Island. Sequences were also planned and shot in Manhattan, both at their Morton Street apartment (the sheeted furniture scene) and at the Great Northern Hotel (the banquet scene). Although Hammid assisted in some of the fi lming of At Land, and appears in one of its scenes, Deren actively wanted it to be her own film and spurned the same kind of “perfect collaboration” she agreed inspired the genesis of Meshes of the Afternoon. Instead (and for the practical reason that Hammid was otherwise occupied), Deren invited Hella Heyman to be the camerawoman under her direction. Heyman was the daughter of one of Galka Scheyer’s friends and an aspiring still photographer herself, and she proved willing simply to run the camera while letting Deren run the show.12 By Deren’s own account, it took six months (three times as long as Meshes of the Afternoon, but a reasonable time frame) and $415.65 to make At Land.13 The film unfolds by following a young woman (Deren) through a series of diverse locations. The discontinuity among places is intentional, and the logic of her journey is mapped by the strange geography the fi lm traverses. 87

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The first shots show Deren’s body washed ashore; from the beach, she awakes and climbs an apparently gigantic, gnarled piece of drift wood before improbably emerging at a banquet table occupied by a convivial, fashionable crowd (fig. 2.1). While none of the people at the table seem to notice her, Deren climbs up onto the table, crawls along it, and comes to its head, where a man (the designer Alvin Lustig) plays a game of chess. After watching him play for a moment, Deren steals one of the pawns. However, she drops it and it tumbles from the table, continuing down a rock formation to the beach below (suggesting contiguity between the beach and the banquet hall). Deren pursues the chess piece, and at the end of her chase emerges on a country lane, down which she strolls alongside a man. He confusingly becomes several different men each time she looks up, as they walk along the stretch of grassy pathway.14 She and the final iteration of this man (played by Hammid) arrive at a shack at the end of the lane. He goes ahead of her and enters through the door. Deren follows, but by climbing into an opening at the base of the shack. She emerges in a room whose furniture is covered by white sheets. A different man lies on a divan in the middle of the room, a sheet pulled up to his chin. Deren and the man observe each other. She turns to go and tries several doors before she finds one that opens onto a position high up on a rock formation overlooking the beach. She climbs down and crosses some dunes before coming out at the shore, where she begins to gather rocks. Something offscreen catches her attention; she drops the rocks she has gathered to go see. She discovers a blonde and a brunette woman playing a game of chess on the beach and stops to watch them. The women come to the same side of the board and play without looking while Deren stands behind them and caresses their hair; suddenly Deren steals one of the chess pieces and runs off along the shore. Finally, in the closing sequence of shots, Deren runs through each of the places she has traversed since the beginning of the film, observing her several doubles from earlier moments in these spaces before finally running away from the camera down the shoreline. The film’s mapping of this implausible terrain, its connection of spaces never meant to be so close to each other, and its movement forward and backward across these spaces, lends At Land the same principles of repetition and same preference for resonances/echoes rather than resolutions of both her earlier and later films. It is the inheritor of Meshes of the After88

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FIGURE 2.1 At Land, Deren emerging from beach to banquet hall, 1944.

noon’s doubling and redoubling nature as well as a precursor to the forward/backward movement made explicit in Meditation on Violence some years later. In addition, and intimately connected to these spatial concerns, At Land expatiates on the possibilities available to the temporal realm in cinema. On the most basic level, the sharp disparities in spatial locations also belie temporal continuity, calling attention to the fact that a film’s feeling of unity and cohesion develops despite the need to splice shots together from different moments and multiple camera setups. The spectator reads connection—in fact, enables connection—amidst disparities between shots. Not surprisingly, in drawing attention to temporality in the fi lm, Deren also examines time’s nature on a figurative level. For example, when she crawls across the banquet table, the sequence is intercut with images of her crawling through jungle-like greenery, suggesting temporal discontinuities (they are clearly two shots taken at different times and in different 89

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places) even while it underscores thematic, emotional, and subjective conditions related to two different times presented at once. The long table dwarfs Deren so that she appears like a child at the table of adults (she is child and adult at once, feeling the insecurity of being ignored, as if and literally out in the wilderness).15 The film balances both of these dimensions—time’s steadying continuity and its tendency to lead like a wormhole to another time—and puts in telltale proximity distant spatial and temporal planes such that they are simultaneously maintained and collapsed, their individual integrity both confi rmed and called into question. Keeping them in this tension asserts the capacity of cinematic manipulation to present a subjective state (insecurity in the midst of social ritual) and an objective state (the concrete presentation of spaces as if naturally continuous) at once. On display in At Land are many such antipodal tensions, which Deren maintains rather than resolves. The next sections will outline several of these tensions. First, a desire to control the mise-en-scène coupled with Deren’s realization of the impossibility of completely doing so generates unique effects in the film. Second, an account of the protagonist’s interior realms in relation to “reality” puts pressure on the subjective/objective division. Next, movement forward/backward, up/down, and ahead in time/ back in the past pulls the heroine and director in every possible direction, dramatizing action and inaction. The pull on both ends of the spectrum from progress to pause or regression illustrates the matter of a film’s “verticality” vs. “horizontality,” in Deren’s phrase.16 Finally, developed as an overall structural and thematic motif in the film, the film puts incompletion in tension with completion. Observing these tensions, one discovers that they take the place of the linearity of narrative and drive the film to different ends. In her treatment of each tension, Deren elaborates an atmosphere of expansive contradiction that contains multitudes.

Control vs. Chance

The vicissitudes of contingency played a necessary part in Deren’s production of the film, even while she advanced the creative control she craved, separate from Hammid. Aspects of the tension between control and chance 90

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are also reflected in the production circumstances for the film, which illuminate how Deren worked to marshal the forces of agency and accident. For example, Deren’s work with Heyman in fi lming At Land was often arduous, requiring them to work among rocks along the beach and dunes. The spot Deren chose for her film, locally known as Mount Misery Point (!), posed several difficulties for the fi lmmaker, not the least of which was that it was only accessible by rowing out to it by boat with all the film equipment.17 Weather was problematic as well, with the Great Atlantic Hurricane being only the most dramatic of several obstacles to their filming.18 When they returned at the end of the season to complete some scenes, a key piece of scenery (the massive, gnarled drift wood log) had been washed away and the whole beach looked different.19 Even in interior sequences, they encountered unusual problems: the Great Northern hotel’s circuitry, for instance, could not withstand the electrical demand required for sufficient lighting to film the ballroom scene (and Deren did not possess the means to light it otherwise). As a result, Deren bought an oversupply of fuses and filmed in the brief intervals between one after the next blowing out. Moreover, for the first time, Deren was responsible for coming up with practical ways of manifesting the images she envisioned through cinematic tools without Hammid’s help on location. For one scene in her apartment, her collaborators noted that Deren required an excess of takes because she wanted to get a shimmering, dappled lighting effect on her character’s face, which she eventually achieved by standing over a pan of water while Heyman shone a flashlight at the water.20 Deren did consult with Hammid, but for the most part, she learned as she fi lmed to get the shots she desired. She negotiated her rapidly developing mastery of making a film with the often distracting chance circumstances of the production to create a relay between active manipulation of material and the (pro-fi lmic) material itself. It proved all the more daunting a task in that she was creating essentially new types of images, not dependent on the example of mainstream moviemaking. Deren simultaneously came to the project with detailed outlines of what she wanted to fi lm, depended on discovering the kinds of images she wanted by chance, and made do (or even made lemonade of lemons) with the circumstances. In preparation for the filming, Deren prepared the “At Land Scenario,” which provides an overall plan for her intended structure 91

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and scenes of the film. Much of the film follows this general map of the scenario; however, it also features details that were never shot and others that come about but through clever substitutions. For one case in point, a sequence was never filmed that Deren labeled “Sequence E.” It was sketched out to take place in between the scene with “the dying man in the room” (i.e., the sheeted man in the shack) and the scene of her descent from a height down to the beach: The Mirrors She enters the bathroom. She looks at herself in the mirror and then notices the other side reflection of herself. She moves the mirrors back and forth, looking, looking, creating new images of herself. Then she tires of this and turns to open a door, but there are several. She tries first one and then the other. They make an intricate pattern. Finally, she opens the one she came in from, steps to the ledge and looks down.21

The last moments of this sequence do appear in the film: Deren makes the intricate patterns with doors, moving through light and dark as she opens several of them before finding one that opens out onto the top of one of the rocks. But the section with the mirrors does not occur. The exclusion of this scene may have been due to the excess time required to get the shots Deren wanted for other parts of the film, although it should have been a shot she could have filmed fairly easily, even at home, and certainly without depending on the vicissitudes of the ever-changing beach landscape. The sequence’s omission feels like an opportunity missed, in that one could imagine a visual echo (a “mirror”) between the doors and the actual mirrors being open and shut again. The proposed sequence’s absence is also strange because it would have reckoned with one of Deren’s favorite symbols and would have correlated image-making devices (camera, mirror) with the subject/object divide. Perhaps Deren recalled that she had already successfully manufactured such an image, as we’ve seen in her mannequin in the mirror photo discussed in chapter 1. Visually, it depicts a strikingly similar image, albeit abetted in its articulation of tensions between subject/object and real/image by the presence of the mannequin (recall fig. 1.2). No matter the reason for Deren’s abandoning of this part of the original plan, the disparity between the scenario’s plan and the finished film evi92

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dences some of the oscillation between plan and improvisation in the execution of At Land: it shows the consistencies in Deren’s artistic agenda matched against what she succeeded in accomplishing, demonstrates the way Deren’s work contended with the fluidity of chance while she worked, and testifies to her willingness to reconcile her plans with chance encounters. Chess, literally invoked in a few sequences of At Land, likewise serves as a figure for the balance of control and contingency in the fi lm. The game of chess epitomizes the relationship of mastery with the openness of play/ chance that Deren employs in the fi lm. Lucy Fischer has pointed out a relationship between Meshes of the Afternoon’s “mirror-faced specter” and Ingmar Bergman’s chess master Death; the connection resonates in At Land ’s chess game on the beach as well, an avant la lettre version of Ingmar Bergman’s depiction of the same in The Seventh Seal (1957).22 At Land makes the stakes nearly as weighty as those in The Seventh Seal, even if Deren’s stakes are more playfully evoked. For Bergman’s fi lm, the knight may continue to live so long as he engages Death in the game; it ends with Death’s victory, although the knight, too, profits by having played the game: he accomplishes what he calls his “one meaningful deed” by distracting Death from the young family traveling with his entourage. Deren’s film seems to adopt the same principle, calling attention to the importance of the act of playing of the game, and staving off its resolution as long as possible. She takes this principle even further because, unlike Death’s victory and the resulting closure of The Seventh Seal, At Land remains openended by her character’s absconding with the queen and running off down the beach apparently ad infinitum. The process and its duration, not the finite result, matters most for Deren’s aesthetic. Duchamp, as we have seen in the last chapter, similarly espoused chess as the aesthetic act par excellence: the game itself—the playing of it—maps out the creative impulse as a navigation of mastery and chance, of problems that resolve and renew as one plays. As Duchamp wondered: “why . . . isn’t my chess playing an art activity? A chess game is very plastic. You construct it. It’s mechanical sculpture and with chess one creates beautiful problems and that beauty is made with the head and hands.”23 Chance and active construction collude for the development of an act of art. A chess game occurs in another of the film’s settings, too: at the end of the banquet table in the ballroom scene, to which Deren crawls before 93

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taking a piece from the board. She interrupts the game of chess twice in the film, resetting the terms of play. Chess also provides a through-line in the film as Deren chases the chess piece from one location to another. The geography of the film, though mysterious in general, is circumscribed by chess—the division of settings in At Land is mitigated by the traffic of the chess piece among those settings, connecting them through the moves made in a grand design for an extradiegetic game of chess. On the beach, the game ensues between a dark- and a light-haired woman (correlating their hair color with their pieces on the chess board—light hair plays white, dark hair plays black—as if they are extensions of the game); Deren’s character then also moves among these spaces, often doubling herself (as in Meshes, in order to observe herself). She is simultaneously the master of the chess game and a piece played at the will of that master. She is inside the game and outside it, watching over it carefully if not yet fully in control of it. As such, in addition to articulating tensions between control and contingency in the creation of art, Deren’s game of chess leads to reflections about the nature of occupying a subject or object position (or, as here, both at once) in the film.

Subject vs. Object

Deren frequently expressed her interest in a state that would accommodate being simultaneously inside and outside of a situation, signaling her desire for both the immediacy of direct experience and the distance required for seeing it as part of a larger pattern or system. Placement such as being both pawn and master of the game of chess—at once inside and outside—announces At Land ’s investigation of subjective vs. objective positions. It is underscored by some of the fi lm’s turbulent thematic undercurrents: for instance, like Meshes of the Afternoon, it depicts several manifestations of an individual contending with her own fragmentation. The disimbrication of the protagonist’s experience across spaces and times begins to betray the stirrings of a ritualistic model that would become of vital importance for Deren’s aesthetic. Without a central subjectivity to contain them, the perspectives embodied by At Land compound toward a model of multiplicity and collective consciousness. 94

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The looking relationships generated by Deren’s character—as well as the way her body operates as both agent and object—shape how images connect to one another and mark the loose division of subject and object. The first shots of the fi lm depict the open sea, its waves rolling toward the camera. The camera pans over to the beach, where Deren’s body is thrashed by waves. Next, everything forward-moving is counteracted: the camera observes the sea rolling backwards and away, in reverse motion. Deren’s face, in close-up, provides the anchor for what is observed: this is what she is looking at. While we grant the first sea shots the logic of the world we know, simply observed—waves rolling forward in time and space—the second sea shots bespeak manipulation of that world (waves rolling backward in time and space). The estranging effect of the backward-rolling waves leaves the sequence in tension between Deren-as-character’s observation of the scene (following subjective conventions of cinema) and Derenas-director’s manipulation of the scene (from outside the diegesis of the film, as agent of that image). This sequence suggests a floating-camera sensibility that transcends the looking/looked-at sequencing of dramatic information. It corroborates the notion of a consciousness—a deliberate agent of control—in a realm apart from the film’s diegesis. The signals leading to the outside of the film happen even while Deren’s look correlates so strongly to what she sees (a hallmark of subjective-type shots in conventional cinematic patterns). Reverting once more to traditional subjective shots so as both to solidify and modify such patterns, Deren provides another close-up of her face looking toward the waves before shifting that look upward to the sky, cutting to shots of birds flying overhead. The angle and juxtaposition of the shots, joined by shots of Deren looking, make this looking relationship clear, causal, and linear. Things run forward again in this series of paired shots—sky (birds flying in forward motion), close-up of the face, sky (birds again), close-up of the face—and bind the look with the looking/looked-at pattern within a subjective series, before the protagonist turns her body to signal a new surprise: the presence of the drift wood log, which she will climb from beach to banquet. Several times in the course of the film the same pattern is repeated. The look foregrounds a shift in attention, movement, or direction—often revealing an unexpected, impossible element just offscreen. That look establishes the basis for tension between agency 95

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inside the fi lm and outside it, drawing attention to the cut and the way the sequence was put together, even as it provides a motivation for it. Looking relationships in cinema have often been equated with positions of power, both within (a male character’s look at the female body, for example) and outside of the film’s diegesis (apparatus theory, the spectator’s adoption of the camera’s gaze). Deren’s films, especially At Land and the other films within this period from 1943–1946, turn these positions inside out. The pattern established in this opening series fluctuates between alternations of shots that are conventional for subjective looks and surprises that are wholly unconventional within the context of those patterns. There is nothing unusual about a close-up of a face looking upward followed by an image of the sky; we encounter this sort of pattern in many films, usually in service of anchoring the dramatic action in the psychology of the characters depicted. As Robert Bresson has put it, fi lms are “made of inner movements which are seen.”24 We believe we have privileged access to characters’ inner lives: what they see, what they dream, and how they react, here made evident by the pattern of back-and-forth between the face and the thing seen. However, after this mini-sequence, looking relationships instead come to designate the control Deren as director exerts over the film. This control is foregrounded by constant peripeteia in both the assemblage of the shots and the shifting elements of their miseen-scène. For instance, Deren cuts to a full view of a beach, her protagonist lying unencumbered by any scenery beyond the sand and water, but in the next shot, a large prop appears where it was not evident before, and it leads to where we least expect it to lead: a ballroom. Conventional patterns work only because they simultaneously render invisible their necessary discontinuities. Deren makes those discontinuities highly visible; the action is predicated on their disconcerting revelation. Through these patterns, she represents the tension between subjective and objective experience in cinematic terms through ruptures in the continuity of the depicted experience. This pattern’s movement from shot to shot evidences discontinuity even while it follows the conventions that should render it fluid and continuous. At Land is less engaged with illusions of reality or even illusions of the mind and instead uses the realism of the world it fi lms specifically as the building blocks of play. That is, it uses the world to create a new experiential reality, by navigating documentary and creative interests in ways that 96

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will prove fundamental to Deren’s ethos. As Deren puts it, “When we agree that a work of art is, first of all, creative, we actually mean it creates a reality and itself constitutes an experience.”25 Nowhere more than here did she depend so profoundly on the natural world and its heft as a tactile, observable, and knowable entity with specific relationships to space and time, in order to fashion a new reality specific to the creative parameters of cinema. In At Land, a girl disappears over a dune and reemerges farther away than expected. Deren described this scene by invoking the way poetry constitutes meaningful ideas in similar ways: “To the form as a whole, such techniques contribute an economy of statement comparable to poetry, where the inspired juxtaposition of a few words can create a complex which far transcends them.”26 To achieve the effect, Deren had Heyman stop the camera momentarily after she disappeared behind a dune, then Deren covered more ground than would be possible given her pace (the opposite of the distended walk of the mirror-faced figure pursued by Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon). The parts—as combined by the filmmaker— create a whole that is different from what those parts anticipate. An idea, emotion, or other intangibility emerges from the parts of the film put in felicitous arrangements, rather than being visibly, tangibly manifested within it. Writing about the film, Deren notes that objective and subjective realms merge as a result of cinema’s flexibility in shifting between photography’s realism and editing’s ability to undercut that reality, held in relationship to each other through a unifying, observing body: Since we identify, as the same person (because of the compulsive reality of photograph [sic]) the girl who reaches upwards on the beach and the one who is immediately afterwards shown rising at the edge of the banquet table, the two places—although separate in actuality—become continuous both in space and time, without any lapse understood. The form as a whole of this film—a volatile variety of space and time united into a continuity by their consistent relationship to a central character identity—is at the same time its ideological theme: the elements of reality become a meaningful pattern not in terms of themselves but in reference to an individual identity.27 97

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The discontinuous and continuous are bound as parts of a whole through identification with an integrated body appearing in multiple places. In Francesco Casetti’s Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, he proposes that emphasis like this on the simultaneous invocation of opposites held in tension is typical of a modern cinema, and although he does not specifically include Deren in this tradition, she clearly belongs in it.28 Rather than choosing immersion in the film or critical distance from it, Deren’s cinema proffers the ability to experience both at once. That experience, above all, marks the flexibility of cinema in its creative rendering of a world: dependent on the tension produced by simultaneously being in it and outside of it.

Forward vs. Backward, Up vs. Down, This Way vs. That Way The concept of absolute, intrinsic values, whose stability must be maintained, gives way to the concept of relationships which ceaselessly are created, dissolved and recreated and which bestow value upon the part according to its functional relation to the whole. We face the problem of maintaining an unstable equilibrium.29

The pressure to resolve opposites throughout At Land helps to drive the film toward its conclusion, which metes out obsessive recursions to territory already covered, enacted in reverse order. The backward/forward movement of the film strongly corroborates the play of opposites it invokes and its tugof-war between binary notions. The tension between backward/forward movements is foregrounded in the opening sequence of shots in which Deren’s character is being washed ashore, shots that reverse the terms of reality governing the world. It continues by articulating a number of opposite directions in the film’s sequences and culminates with the unwinding of the directions traversed throughout the film in its final minute-and-a-half. Up and down are emphasized, for instance, throughout the film. Ascent is accomplished by Deren’s climb up the drift wood log from beach to ballroom, as well as by her clambering through the hole in the base of the little house at the end of the country path. When she emerges in the house’s interior, she rises from behind a small chair, before asserting her height in the room as against the horizontal, reclining sheeted man. When she exits 98

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the house, she surveys the landscape from up high. These shots are partnered with images of descent, traced through the whole fi lm by following the chess piece down the waterfall. The most dramatic descent is a set of “falling” shots, starting with one of her arms stretched out before her, plummeting forward in slight slow motion. Her face slides roughly against the rocks as she falls, as if the power of down (of gravity, but also of the camera direction) is too much to withstand. Often the protagonist disappears out the bottom of the frame entirely. These up/down trajectories are echoed by camera angles and movement, which depict objects worthy of attention often from extreme high- or low-angle shots. For instance, the camera tilts upward to take in the whole of a wooden structure on the beach. A swing pan drops the view abruptly back down to Deren’s character, who has turned to walk away up the dunes. Or, when she exits the house, the camera rises to look over the edge of the bluff, where it observes the Deren very small below, gathering stones. Horizontal movement is also expressed against the verticality of these examples. The camera tracks a while alongside Deren’s character as she gathers stones; the walking sequence travels along a path. Just as for the emphasis on the vertical, these horizontal shots are marked by complementary camera movements. Further, the horizontal axis counterbalances the vertical, and at times they are presented in direct contrast: Hammid’s character enters the small house regularly, walking through the door while Deren has to crawl under and climb upwards into the place. The film also embodies a plenitude of potential directionality through its games of chess. The movement on the chessboard, the movement of the pieces off the board, and the players’ following all these directions echoes these tensions among possible ways to move. Although this multidirectionality invokes a strong sense of disorientation, disruption, and tension in At Land, the themes and mood are positive in nature. The threat of violence that drives the machinery of Meshes of the Afternoon is diminished here: in its place is an emphasis on sorority (instead of male/female struggle), astonishment (instead of anxiety), and an overall emphasis on play (possibly inherited from Duchamp’s recent role in Deren’s emerging sense of the possibilities of art). All of these aspects point directly or obliquely to Deren’s interest in an aesthetic that maintains tensions rather than resolving the suspense they generate. 99

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Completion vs. Incompletion Simplicity is not the achievement of subtractions. It is a synthesis of complexities.30

Rather than negating her practice, Deren’s embrace of incompletion in fact synthesizes the complex investigation of time and territory enabled by At Land. The film negotiates control with contingency, here with there, past with present, rising with falling, movement with stasis, and completion with incompletion. Its success as a film derives from the simultaneity, coexistence, and/or shifting valences of these binaries. The depiction of the women playing chess on the beach demonstrates as much. The two players begin in opposition (sitting opposite each other as adversaries) before moving to the same side of the chessboard (sitting as  cooperating equals). Deren referred to them as “the black” and “the white,” emphasizing their opposition, but before long they chat without looking at the board at all and Deren looms over them, happily stroking their hair—competition wanes. In the end, the women’s connection, Deren’s delight in discovering them there at the beach, and the process and the pleasure of play presented by the scene underline Deren’s negotiation of opposites. Within these contexts, At Land begins work to reconfigure social rituals, which will become the primary mode of her work after the 1947 shift. Issues of incompletion arise on a practical level, when we recall that after abandoning Witch’s Cradle, Deren had yet to complete a project of her own volition. At Land could easily have gone the same way as that abandoned film. It posed several setbacks to Deren’s progress as an aspiring filmmaker (the changing beach landscape, the fuse problem in the ballroom, the hauling of equipment over rough terrain, the desire for a watery shot that took hours to figure out, etc.). But despite the range of difficulties, unforeseen setbacks, and the sharp learning curve she experienced as a neophyte solo director, Deren completed At Land in just a few months’ time during the summer of 1944.31 The circumstances surrounding the production of the film consequently prompt reflection on incompletion in Deren’s work. While it may be tempting to account for the period of multiple undone projects characterizing Deren’s later years of fi lmmaking by 100

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citing personal or professional difficulties, it is important to note that difficulties of many kinds accompanied the span of her career, even when it most thrived. Although the later work often seems to suggest that it does, not finishing the work need not be the end result of Deren’s various moments of tribulation: At Land ’s difficulties did not prevent its being finished swift ly. At Land mobilizes questions of incompletion even while it ultimately stands as a model of completion, a success under the terms of the aesthetic by which Deren worked. Tension between incompletion and completion finds articulation in the structure and themes of At Land as well. Specifically, the types of magical thinking and imagery engendered by the relationship between the miseen-scène and editing of the film draw on the kinds of tension between completion and incompletion that drive Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle. The primary motifs of At Land—e.g., connection of disparate spaces and times through the movement of a body—depend upon fragments of bodies, objects, and places in various framings (i.e., to render a close-up, one must cut off other parts of the body), as well as upon the incomplete pieces of moments, movements and gestures fi lmed at different times, joined somewhat uneasily as if continuous through editing. These related types of incompletion were manifest in the experimental topos of Meshes of the Afternoon (best illustrated in the five steps the murderous Deren takes on the way to kill her sleeping self); they are further elaborated in At Land. The shots of Deren’s character moving up a piece of driftwood like climbing a ladder from beach to ballroom, depend on a body that connects unconnected spaces. Far from being incidental, these incomplete components (beach, ballroom) function as the material for Deren’s architectonic system, a way of binding interior and exterior spaces and disparate moments in time. The editing, mise-en-scène, and the body’s unity make these shots cohere. None of these aspects are unimportant to the development of the space-time art Deren creates via “reality effects.” What is especially interesting about shot patterns like the beach/banquet movement is how they underscore both completion and incompletion at once. Spaces so incongruous—dining room and beach/rock formation, social/interior and natural/exterior—fi nd congruity in being spliced together, an act that renders them harmonious, even dependent on each other. Deren as director takes great pains to mobilize the conventions of 101

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continuity editing to connect spaces: the expectation generated by her look upward combined with the camera’s movement and the cut on action produce the irreducible sense of continuity, howsoever in a landscape made strange by the discontinuities deriving from connection of disparate types of spaces. Deren’s character moves between these two spaces fluidly, making them part of the connected geography of the film. And she employs just a minimum of narrative logic—e.g., a motivation like the chasing after a chess piece that has fallen—to make the strange paths smooth and comprehensible enough to be believed. In Deren’s films, the body in movement binds fragments—as Pound remarked, “Gestures serve up to a point.” The body, which is more often than not fragmented for closer views in a movie, becomes the foundation for connecting, for making complete, incongruous spaces. Fragments are cut together to create a new world that exists only on fi lm, which contrives a space that, because it uses pieces of the world as its foundation and yet links them in estranging ways, has both the practicality of its power to “show-it-to-me” and the impractical magic of impossibility. Not insignificantly, it is both the body before and behind the camera (here, and elsewhere in Deren’s work, her own body) that fuses incomplete parts into an unsunderable whole. This fusion need not be seen as a reversal of the fragmenting effects on the body so keenly belabored in Meshes of the Afternoon. The act of negotiating unclaimed fragments in various aggregate forms epitomizes Deren’s relationship to the world of the film. This represents a negotiation between accident and assertion of control, drawing equally on what she deemed the reality of the world imaged and the assertion of artistic agency by the image’s creator. At Land demonstrates Deren’s arbitration of cinematic reality. The doubling and tripling of Deren’s body, an impossibility, becomes possible via conventions surrounding a subjective perspective in cinema. Deren’s character looks offscreen, and we wonder: at what? The next shot shows us another, differently poised Deren. The same figure is made separate from itself by the splice, and by the look from one shot seemingly into the next. Separate bodies, incongruous spaces, and discontinuous pieces act as fragments that demand cohesion and completion. These aspects of the film create meaning by devising at least provisional conclusions out of

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inconclusive bits, a sense of community through individuality, and a version of completion cobbled together from incomplete parts.

A S T U DY I N C HOR EOG R A PHY : G EST URAL AES T H ET ICS And in Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera a dancer lifts his leg in the woods and puts it down in a private room, thereby becoming part of a scenery whose unreal changes recall the intangible transitions of dream images.32

Immediately following her work on At Land, in 1945 Deren began to work on her shortest film (about three minutes in duration), entitled A Study in Choreography for Camera (hereafter, Study). As Siegfried Kracauer noted, in this deft, deliberate fi lm, Deren emphasizes the dreamlike transportation across space and time she explored in her first fi lms, here enlarging its modes of movement—both formal and informal rhythms, dance gestures— into the architecture of the film. It depicts a dancer whose movements are coordinated with the camera’s movements to generate a cinematic dance. Unlike Meshes and At Land, Deren does not play a character in the fi lm: she is behind the camera, not in front of it. She documents and creates the dance at once. Beginning in the woods, Study moves to an apartment setting, crosses into a museum gallery, and ends up back outdoors. In its subject and theme, Study embraces dance methods. When Deren devised plans for the film, she turned to Katherine Dunham’s professional troupe for a collaborator. She intended to make it an equal partnership between camera and the dancer she chose to portray the main figure in the film (Talley Beatty, who had appeared in Dunham’s Cabin in the Sky). Deren shared credit with him for the film.33 Just as she had for Witch’s Cradle and At Land, Deren sought collaboration with rising stars in the arts scene.34 At times Deren referred to the film as Pas de Deux, denoting the specific sort of dance she envisioned it depicting: one between the camera and Beatty. A pas de deux unfolds through conventional variations: a dance of partners together, a brief solo for each dancer (usually the male dancer,

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followed by the ballerina), and then a return to a partnership between dancers: couple, solo, solo, couple. This symmetry may have appealed to Deren: the film’s overall sense of rhythms is studied and balanced. However, instead of keeping the movements distinct, Deren intertwines them so that the roles of the camera and dancer are inseparable. Wedding the subject to the instrument of its mediation is in keeping with Deren’s stance on form/content—it would have been antithetical to her philosophy of cinema to permit either the camera or Beatty to operate in isolation from the other. One could imagine sheer, dancerly movement of the camera, but that would amount to experimental abstraction. Deren is clear on the problems with this type of project: [The direction of cinema] does not consist in making things appear or disappear, go fast or slow, backwards or forwards, just because a camera can do that. This results in merely a sensationalist, virtuoso exercise of skills and techniques. Cinematic form is more profound than that. It is a concept of the integration of techniques, a search for the meaning of a skill.35

Alternately, one could imagine allowing the dancer to dance while the camera merely registers his movement, but that would amount to what Deren deemed a “theatrical” version of filmed dance, the static norm of most dance on film. Indeed, in the aftermath of disparaging such productions (just prior to conceiving Study), Deren declared an alternative: “There is a potential filmic dance form, in which the choreography and movements would be designed, precisely, for the mobility and other attributes of the camera . . .”36 This form became the model for Deren’s design of Study: she presents Beatty’s and the camera’s movements as symbiotic. In describing the film’s purpose, Deren wrote: “I intend for this film mainly to be a sample of fi lm-dance; that is, a dance so related to the camera and cutting that it cannot be ‘performed’ as a unit anywhere but in this particular fi lm.”37 Study reflects on these formal concerns directly. The film combines such concerns while engaging the spheres of dance, poetry (especially in its use of metaphor), painting, and sculptural art. These broad aspirations to the world of the established arts will be terra cognita to those familiar with Deren’s projects to this point; they nourish the fi lm’s rhetoric and 104

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expansive notion of “choreography.” Beyond the obvious dance choreography that motivates the film’s action, Deren’s choreography here signifies creative impulses tempered by critical structuration and the boundaries of each medium. A fi lm predicated on dance and movement is intensified by the energies of being in mid-gesture, in process, and in motion: it lasts while these states are sustained; it comes to a close when they cease their process of becoming. While Deren’s combination of art forms in Study points to an urge to make a condensed but universal declaration about art, the title underlines the slighter ambitions that drive the piece: it comprises a study rather than a comprehensive statement. That Deren also included it in her program of “abandoned films” (it was not until her completion of this film that she programmed screenings under that title) further suggests that she considered it instructive and part of her process rather than definitive for her oeuvre. Indeed, she would translate several of the features of Study into the looser and more ranging interests of Ritual in Transfigured Time the following year and into the formally compact meronymy of Meditation on Violence after that. Study encompasses the incompletion mode of Deren’s cinematic sensibilities both in its approach to its material and in this sense of slightness, of being a step toward the authoritative version rather than that version itself. And yet, it effectively has it both ways. Deren’s process-oriented work ethic in Study is not tentative, and the fi lm balances completion (in its being finished and distributed, in its remaining ever after in the same state) with incompletion (in its working methods, in its position within the overall arc of Deren’s work). It balances the two impulses: one tending toward chaos and open ends, the other toward exacting structure and closure. Deren conceives of the dance as neither preformed nor independent of the camera. Instead, it emerges out of movements made in partnership. She attempts to retain the qualities of each medium by unfi xing the camera, “making it dance” along with the dancer.38 Further, by focusing on the ephemerality of the gesture, Deren creates a hybrid medium akin to dance performance, where presence and the moment are absolute and intense, but fleeting. As Erin Brannigan has put it, the “dancefi lm” posited by Deren’s film practice is marked by “mobile and ambiguous sources of agency and desire,” a constantly transforming—in terms of both space and time—depiction of dance.39 The union of camera and dancer defines the 105

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film: it is, in Brannigan’s words, “a cinema of movement where the dance and film elements become indistinguishable.”40 Emphasizing fluctuation and the re-creation of the image through shifts in temporal and spatial relationships, Deren outstrips the expectations of dance-film and creates a film that addresses her cine-theoretical concerns.

A Study

The first two sequences of the fi lm demonstrate Deren’s development of the material for a filmed dance as a way of exercising cinema’s capacities: The space of the field, the ritual temple and the theater stage have been, historically, a place within which dancers moved, creating, in terms of their own capacities and human limitations, the physical patterns of emotions and ideas. But cinema provides a different order of space, is able to create a different kind of time, can even cause the human body to perform inhuman movement.41

The film opens in a small plot of birch woods, within which the camera pans to the left, eventually coming across the dancer, who lifts his arms and spins slowly, in a long shot. The camera passes the dancer, only to rediscover him a little ways further to the left, not once but three times in (apparently) one long panning shot, accomplished by having stopped the camera while the dancer repositioned himself outside of the frame. The result is a set of magical reappearances that grants the dancer the power to be many places at once, and that serves as a variation on the doubling and tripling of Derens in Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land. The camera discovers Talley Beatty’s dancing figure several times within the same “shot,” which is always at first devoid of human presence. Even before the dancer appears, the camera moves to meet him frame left: in this way, the camera seems to initiate the dance. Each time Beatty disappears, or more precisely, each time he passes out of the mobile frame, the camera first finds an empty frame once more; after an invisible cut, he reappears. In this way, Deren subtly affirms the camera’s independence and agency: it doesn’t require Beatty’s presence to validate its 106

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own presence. Beatty appears in a slightly closer framing with each invisible cut, spinning slowly (as slowly as the camera pans) and raising his arms skyward, until he appears in the last shot of the series in somewhat surprising close-up, still lifting an arm, before he lowers himself and his head sinks out of the frame. The steady movement of the camera along with the dancer’s movement redefines the nature of the dance space, rendered contiguous and impossibly panoramic through the camera’s legerdemain. Deren describes the opening shots of the fi lm as “progressive stages of a continuous awakening movement”: Beatty is the dreamer come to wake (the dancer as dreamer will be developed explicitly in Deren’s Ensemble for Somnambulists). Elsewhere, Deren claimed of her “choreographies for camera” (including Study), “The central character of these fi lms moved in a universe which was not governed by the material, geographical laws of here and there as distant places, mutually accessible only by considerable travel. Rather, he moved in a world of imagination in which, as in our day or night dreams, a person is first one place and then another without traveling between them.”42 Defying spatial expectations (and by implication, temporal ones), the opening sequence of the film shows us Beatty everywhere in the woods at the same time. His continuous dancerly movement, accompanied by the shifts in perspective (an analysis of Beatty’s figure in long shot, medium long shot, and close-up) puts moments and spaces into uneasy continuity. The analysis of Beatty’s body in different framings within these shots simultaneously utilizes disjunction (creating surprise through the discovery of Beatty’s figure closer, farther, or sooner than we expected) and integration (parts of the body and of the woods are fi lmed separately but thrown together in an implied continuity). As we have seen, Deren often conjoins disparate points in time and space in her films; in linking up these distinct places through camera movement and cutting, the film creates temporal eddies, slowing or stymieing the flow of narrative logic in preference for a space where times and places demand connection and contemplation, a semi-Deleuzian cinematic space available for thought, or in Deren’s terms a “vertical” investigation rife with possibility.43 Deren prefers to shoot Beatty in his first three appearances in long shot, partly to maintain the integrity of his body as dancer. For Deren, the whole body of the dancer stands as part of the “real” evidence of his continued presence in time. Deren binds ectopic parts 107

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through the movement of the dancer in conjunction with the movement of the camera (both apparent onscreen camera movement, and movement behind what is seen). After this opening set of shots, the fi ft h shot completes the fourth shot’s action (lowering a leg) to maintain continuity before generating the chasm-wide leap across locations and times, a gap bridged only by Beatty’s (albeit strong) leg and the (even stronger) assumption of continuity of movement in a camera’s match-on-action. That assumption is the flexible but formidable connective principle of the film. The transformations possible in the first section are understated next to the disjunction of moving from this to the second sequence in the fi lm. To make the transition, Deren begins with a slight low angle shot depicting Beatty in long shot on a small hill in the same woods. He bends down, then lifts his left leg high into the air and stretches his whole body backward. The movement is fluid and continuous as he begins to lower his left leg. After a cut, a closer shot depicts his left leg still lowering, only now he is in a small living area (Deren’s Morton Street aerie) among domestic comforts: a fireplace with mantelpiece; a small table covered with a menagerie of knickknacks; a desk, chairs, ottoman; lamps and abundant light from the windows; art, books, and tchotchkes everywhere. Within the domestic atmosphere, there is magic: Beatty’s leg lifted in one space now lowers in an entirely other space, connecting them. Deren plotted this continuity carefully in her plan for the film, citing its important implication: “No break in rhythm of movement since it must hold exterior and interior together across the cut.”44 Countering expectations, just out of the frame (hard by your living room, perhaps) lies immediate passage to a small wood. The second sequence then depicts Beatty’s movements within this new, interior space. First, in a long shot, Beatty continues his leg-lowering movement and allows it to carry him into the room; the wave of movement begun by his leg is completed by his body, and he draws his right arm across his torso to usher himself into the center of the room. The camera remains still, but Beatty’s movement is complemented by a quick rhythm between cuts. While the first shots keep his whole body intact, the next ones render him in a series of fragments. The wave of Beatty’s body begun back in the small woods then culminates by his folding forward and compacting his body to fit the available frame space; his right leg lifts and his 108

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head lowers, as if to meet the expectation generated by the framing (he brings the salient, moving features of his dancer’s body to bear upon the smaller space given him in the closer shot). Meanwhile, the camera’s movement matches the wave of Beatty’s body. It ends with Beatty disappearing below the frame line, deliberately marking the parameters of framing in relation to his body. The next shots fluctuate between medium long and long shots of Beatty: he spins around the room, exploring the parameters of the space. While it is not the unbounded out of doors, the apartment location is equally a far cry from the conventions of dance on a stage. Within this space, Deren suggests continuity through movement (a series of half turns). Indeed, the feeling of continuity persists despite the fact that the location itself also subtly shifts within the sequence to another apartment.45 Originally, Deren meant to film this sequence using three separate domestic spaces. Thus the apparently continuous movement takes place across similar types of spaces some blocks or miles apart.46 Domestic space is connected by its alikeness as an image, interchangeable wheresoever it pops up. These aspects of the sequence hold continuity and discontinuity in balance. Deren engages the similarities among the places and employs matches-on-action to dispel discontinuity, keeping the camera’s focus in relation to Beatty’s body and exploring his movement. But she asserts discontinuity by filming fragments of his body moving through similar but ultimately quite different spaces as if they were the same (but they are not). In these opening two sequences, Deren has moved the dance away from the stage and begun to explore the mobile interaction of dancer, camera, and cutting. If the camera is not moving within the shot, Deren tends to cut quickly, adding the animation of editing to her tools of movement in this dynamic sequence. This second sequence also manifests some of the key imagery that underlines the balance of tensions she maintains. For instance, it depicts Beatty both “in person” and in a mirror, redoubling the camera’s imagemaking operations in relation to his body. The mirror draws attention to the fact that the man we are seeing “in person” is at the same time also an image.47 This fact is further accentuated by the play of Beatty’s shadow on the wall behind him, as well as by the presence of the painting in the room—all of these reflect the image of the dancer. Against his shadow, the 109

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FIGURE 2.2 Mirroring in A Study in Choreography for Camera, 1945.

painting, and the mirror, Beatty has a dancing partner in addition to his partnership with the camera itself (fig. 2.2). For Deren “the nature of the image is to vibrate with suggestion and association.”48 Through these associated images (painting, shadow, mirror), the body of the man is both grounded as himself and resonant with meanings outside of himself: he is himself (“in person”), an imaged self (via Deren), a representation (the painting suggests as much), and an image of himself (in the mirror image), all at once. Study’s first sequences introduce complex terrain that keeps reality and imagination in strange balance: e.g., someone can spin in one place and wind up quite elsewhere. Counterpoised to the intimacy of domestic space, the next sequence takes place in a monumental, hallowed, historical, and public space—the Egyptian Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—within which Beatty engages more overtly with the metaphorical features present but latent in the first sections. The sequence begins with 110

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another match on action, shifting the scene without warning from Beatty’s spin in the living room area to a shot of his legs completing that spin on a new surface. He runs gracefully away from the camera in what is revealed to be (as the camera tilts up) a long gallery. When he reaches the end of the room, he turns and retraces his steps, returning to a position closer to the camera and the same framing of his legs. Deren masks the discontinuity between the apartment and museum spaces by beginning with a close view without contextualizing details, so we don’t immediately know he is in a new location.49 The space is further made strange and disjunctive by Deren’s use of a wide-angle lens, making the hall appear longer than it is. As Deren asserts, this perspective, “by causing him to diminish in size very rapidly, makes it seem as if he had covered a tremendous distance in a relatively short time.”50 The close-up of Beatty’s feet used as transition enlists synecdoche alongside the fragmentation necessary to generate close-up framing. Here, the feet are all: they stand (so to speak) for the dancer. The next shot underscores this synecdoche by placing the dancer’s body in the gallery among the art within which he is immersed both literally (he dances in a hall full of art pieces, most of them humanlike figures in sundry states of fragmentation) and figuratively (he serves as a figure for the art Deren is creating). Multiplying the metaphorical relationships, Deren cuts to a medium close-up of Beatty’s head and shoulders, with a Bodhisattva head and shoulders also in medium close-up behind him. Another sequence, comparing Beatty to another statue, was rejected probably because it limited the suggestive possibilities of the statue sequence that remains in the film (fig. 2.3). Beatty begins to spin, mimicking the statue. Like the Bodhisattva’s head, Beatty also occupies the vantage point of multiple directions, especially when the spin accelerates and his head becomes blurry. P. Adams Sitney has noted that this framing brings the two figures together to evince a metaphorical relationship: “The implied metaphor identifies the dancer, whose twirling head seems to face all directions at the same time.” Sitney deems this a “compositional” metaphor, “one made by framing rather than by interrupting the action/image with superimposition or intercutting.”51 Deren doesn’t underline the metaphor in the same way that cutting between the statue and Beatty’s spin would: instead, the context of the shot (the museum) provides a justification for the juxtaposition. 111

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The relative stasis of the statue draws attention to the difference cinema makes (motion) as an art form (sculpture finds other means to represent motion). The Bodhisattva head also likens Beatty to divinity: he is the dancing figure Hevajra who occupies all directions, sees everywhere at once, a model for simultaneity and the long view. Deren collapses time and space: Beatty faces all directions at once, a modern, technologically supported, cross-medial expression of omniscience. This section extends the mirror/man relationship, developing resonances related to several categories: to the multiplicity of the self, to the accumulation and similarity of sequential fi lm images, to art more generally, and even to humankind fashioned as divinity. Deren adds medial concerns to the balancing act, including variations on speed (slow and fast motion) made possible equally through Beatty’s movement and the camera’s creative tools. The third part ends with the start of a leap that carries Beatty impossibly to yet another space and the final section of the film, a return to the woods. To transition, Deren first cuts to Beatty’s feet again, now spinning on ornate mosaic tile before pressing down slightly, to spring upwards.

Impossible & Experience

The final segment of the fi lm enacts an incredible leap across time and space, which Deren depicts in fragments across seven brief shots. In the first, Beatty seems to leap powerfully, high into the air. Actually he is falling, but Deren photographs him in reverse, to accentuate the sense of his defiance of gravity. She wanted Beatty’s movement to “[explode] upwards (not pushing up from gravity as in a leap, but rather the release of a balloon) into a high, floating leap.”52 Each of the subsequent shots traces his progress through air in a nearly abstract background; in the final, seventh shot, he lands, bending into a deep, splayed-leg plié, his back to us and the horizon line just below him. Through the shorthand of this handful of shots, Deren creates a sequence of fragments that accumulate toward a whole that cannot exist otherwise: “The leap is sustained for almost a half-minute, a FIGURE 2.3 Outtake from A Study in Choreography for Camera, 1945. (Courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

113

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much longer period than is humanly possible. [ . . . ] Here on fi lm is the idealized floating leap.”53 By cutting across many shots at various angles and from various distances, Deren creates a film that gives “special attention . . . to the creative possibilities of Time.”54 Blending times and spaces seamlessly generates the film’s effect. Like the slightly jostling sleight of location in the interior apartment settings, the final sequence resembles the first in its exterior, natural environs, but Deren again filmed in a new location, a private estate in the Palisades. Deren links fragmented space through an illusion of continuity, expanding the film’s imaginary terrain proposed by and yet pitted against reality. Through this composite imagery, she provides a more general investigation of the space the fi lm limns. Study also adumbrates on a more literal register Deren’s ideas about verticality and horizontality, which she would outline as part of her theory of fi lm. That is, in Deren’s formulation, viable structures for nonnarrative fi lms include those that focus less on narrative resolutions or linear story arcs (narrative thrust/horizontality) than on allowing time for reflective moments (poetic rumination/verticality). Such structures are more adept and efficacious in conveying the themes or issues experimental fi lms might choose to adopt. As she did with At Land ’s multidirectionality, Deren makes these vertical and horizontal investigations practical in the case of Study, with the dancer challenging gravity and creating balance among opposite directions and movements. All of the elements of the leap at the end of the film—e.g., the rising and falling body within and beyond the edges of the frames—emphasize the fi lm’s investigation of directions and boundaries. Limitless possibility with vectors of direction defying any set limits comes into playful tension with certain parameters, such that at times gravity becomes weightlessness or frame edges are less sturdy than they seem. Some of the filming she accomplished that did not make it into the fi lm extends the possibilities even further—Beatty recollected Deren’s plans in terms of the vertical dimension she was emphasizing in the fi lm from their shoot at a location somewhere in Brooklyn Heights. He recalled it being “way up at the top, in somebody’s penthouse. I don’t know how tall the buildings are! And she wanted me to stand on the balustrade, so that she could shoot between my legs, which I think I did . . .”55 The film maintains a dynamism by presenting different directions and movements in tension, 114

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exploring the nature of dance motion—itself predicated on the constraints of the human body in limiting or expanding space—and cinematic motion, together. In these ways, Study conveys the maintenance of tensions that underscores Deren’s film practice, with special emphasis on the incompletion/ completion binary effected through a gestural aesthetic. The final sequence taps into the longing to be freed from gravity, to master the vertical axis: depth and height. It addresses a movement impossible even for the dancer whose medium relates to that axis: with the collaboration of the camera Deren makes the impossible leap possible. Beatty described the extension of verticality within this final setting with a sense of incredulity about the extent to which Deren would go to achieve such effects: “This was for that landing, the leap. [ . . . ] And there was this drop. You know how high the Palisades are! And Maya wanted me to go into second position over [it]. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t mind going over there, but how am I going to get back?!’ ”56 Deren taps into the potential of using the vertical dimension in this final sequence, expanding the range of movement available to the dancer. Emphasizing verticality, Study provides a point of tension with the boundaries of the frame and of the dancer’s abilities. While keeping with the structure of the pas de deux, she introduces variations and even certain freedoms from a number of constraints. Describing the closing shot, Beatty continues, “All of a sudden the wind started blowing, and this thing was just thundering down. I could see this cloud, and I guess that motivated me to get off of there! By the time we got back to the car, it was a cloudburst. That was marvelous. I thought that was a great little touch. We were so pleased with that. [ . . . ] I thought Maya had planned that!”57 Accompanying the lengths (and depths) Deren would go to to extend the directions of the film, she and Beatty are both delighted by the accidental but appropriate backdrop for the final sequence. When the sequence ends with Beatty’s full re-grounding on earth, the film comes full circle—but the storm in the distance promises change (or at least unplanned contingencies) looming on the horizon. The film allows the experience of connection and closure even while it becomes available to more suggestive meanings. Recursive and linear, ruminative even while it runs forward, vertical as well as horizontal, the film’s images are composed to engage cinema’s creative possibilities. In 115

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transferring the filmed dance from a theatrical space to other settings, Deren generates a form for movement elicited in specifically cinematic terms; she claimed in doing so that “a whole new set of relationships between the dancer and space would be developed. Dance, which is to natural movement what poetry is to conversational prose, like poetry, should transcend pedestrian boundaries.”58 Just as dance gives shape and meaning to quotidian gestures, cinema crafts out of the world before the camera a transcendent, impossible reality. Not least of all, the types of spaces presented are put into relationship by Deren’s connecting them so closely: nature, the home, and the world of art become different facets of a unifying sensibility, one held together by the film and the filmmaker’s vision. Choosing an approach that highlights the camera’s role in the movement and communication of nonverbal ideas, Deren obviates the objection about filmed dance that the camera functions in service to the dance. At least until 1948, when she first developed a soundtrack for Meditation on Violence, Deren’s films were silent: her decision not to use a score for this dance film in the end allows her to deploy the visual logic of silent films, which mobilize gesture and/or cinematic language in place of verbal or textual language to communicate an idea. Deren expands the inherent flexibility of this visual language to bend the laws of time and space, communicating beyond the customs of silent film language, and even beyond the elevated form of expression of dance. Her imagery conveys complex ideas both through the body’s movement and the deployment of cinematic devices. Ultimately, Study employs a form of incompletion—an openness that does not demand closure—in its flexible implications and multiple resonances. This is a continuation with important variations on the kinds of incompletion we have seen in Meshes of the Afternoon, Witch’s Cradle, and At Land, with a similar way of treating suggestive meanings generated, for example, through metaphors and objects treated symbolically or allusively. For example, in Study, the figure of the Bodhisattva head mirrors Beatty’s dance and role as a component of the artwork. Collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this bust was reportedly found near the Gate of the Dead in the walled city of Jayavarman, part of present-day Cambodia. It is uncertain how much Deren knew about what the Bodhisattva Hevajra embodied, but it symbolizes concerns remarkably similar to her own. The late twelfth-century representation of the Hevajra that materializes in Deren’s 116

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film—the dancing figure with multiple heads and arms—articulates the Weltanschauung of Tantrism, a branch of Mahayana Buddhism: Tantrism, which originated in Hindu beliefs and practices, emphasizes magic and esoteric rituals. Beyond that it stresses the doctrine of non-dualism, a rejection of the notion that apparently contradictory elements—such as life and death, female and male, goodness and evil— are truly opposed to each other. 59

This notion embodies a perspective immersed in that same sense of the continuity of life and death that Deren identifies in her prospectus for an unfi lmed Egyptian project. The shape of the hall and its objects were also important to Deren’s conception of the fi lm. Indeed, her interest in Egyptian-related themes only increased afterward. Although the Hevajra is not itself an Egyptian work, it embodies the issues to which Deren was drawn, as evidenced in her plans for a fi lm about Egyptian material in the Metropolitan Museum just after finishing Study, including the following considerations: for the Egyptians, life and death are not (as they are for us) different states of being. There is a continuity between them, and the special ceremonials surrounding burial are motivated rather by the desire to assure that continuity, than to mark a separation and a distinction between life and death.60

Further, Study’s status as a study makes it play the part of an incomplete sketch for dance ideas she hoped to develop more completely elsewhere. She lamented: “In the short space of the film, limited by the financial problems of film production, I have been able only to suggest the potentialities of such a form.”61 Other details of the production demonstrate the role of chance in getting the images she wanted in a way similar to how At Land ’s production problems shaped that fi lm’s imagery. Deren claimed to have selected the Egyptian Hall location for its access to abundant natural light: that light source came from a glass dome in the ceiling, which was sufficiently bright only at certain times on a very sunny day. Further, Deren had to film only on Wednesdays, when the gallery was closed to the public. 117

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Finally, she had to work around Beatty’s schedule in a Broadway show to film the sequence. As she reports, “It took a month and a half before the three circumstances were coincident: a sunny Wednesday and Beatty free to perform.”62 In addition to continuing Deren’s modes of incompletion already explored, Study also develops these modes by putting greater emphasis on the tension among directions and through framing that denotes reliance on developing new medium-specific ways of treating themes. Study also looks ahead toward Deren’s next phase: it caches signs of the interests and aesthetic that will lead her to focus on ritual more specifically in her next film. She depicts actions that augur collective compulsions in tension with individual agency. As she noted that year: “Acting expression should be rather as if the dancer is acting under a larger compulsion, rather than as an extension of his own will. In this way the audience is identified with the actor against the compulsion; is sympathetic with him in his reactions to this outside force.”63 Both in Ritual in Transfigured Time, her next film, as well as the ones to follow, she would find room to expand on her study of these issues, though never by depending too much on the limited appeal of closure.

RI T U A L IN TR A N SFIG U R ED T IM E (1 9 4 6 )

The non-dualism incarnated in the Hevajra figure—its embodiment of “the logic of [its culture] in its own integrity,”64 its four-headed all-directionality, its status both as artifact (rooted in reality) and art (rooted in imagination), and its “[emphasis] on magic and esoteric rituals”—reflect issues of increasing interest to Deren, which would find fuller elaboration in her next film. First entitled Ritual and Ordeal and renamed Ritual in Transfigured Time (hereafter Ritual ), Deren takes the textual and extratextual meanings present within and posited in Study and brings them into full flower. Ritual is broken roughly into three segments—the overall arc charts a ritual of initiation for the protagonist, played by the dancer Rita Christiani (alternating with Deren, who plays her double). The film begins with a small group of women in an interior room, moves to a party in a space 118

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outside that room, and culminates in an outdoors scene before the coda plunges the protagonist into the sea. The first sequence begins with a scene of two women winding wool, eventually joined by a third who appears at the doorway.65 Played by Deren, Christiani, and writer Anaïs Nin, these women stand in as muses for their respective arts and at the same time allegorically represent the Fates: women spinning thread who preside over the thread of life, positioned beyond human control or even that of the gods. First seen winding the yarn without a visible partner, Deren appears to represent Clotho/Nona, the spinner; Christiani, who joins her shortly thereafter, plays a version of Lachesis/Decima, who measures the length of the life thread; and Nin takes the role of Atropos/Morta, who cuts the thread—also sometimes called the “unturnable.”66 Beyond her role in myth, as a Muse, each woman vicariously expresses aspects of creative activity through association with an art form. Together they serve as representatives for a range of traditional and new arts—dance (Christiani), literature (Nin), and now also cinema (Deren)—such that Deren initiates cinema into the realms governed by the Muses. Deren suggests that creativity in its unstinting flow need only seek an appropriate outlet. While as Muses, the women possess a limitless capacity for creation and re-creation, as Fates they measure and cut off, abiding by a limit (the thread representing the ultimate limit for a lifespan: death). The resonances elicited by each of these figurative meanings (Muses, Fates) again suggest binary relationships that the sequence navigates (limits/openness, creation/destruction). As we have seen in the introduction, this first sequence ends with the merging of the first two women, played by Deren and Christiani respectively, so that they never appear together again but rather come to act as parts of the same individual.67 In this way, they express and encompass opposite traits (black/white, widow/bride, etc.). When Christiani exits the room where they are spinning yarn, following Nin out into a party scene in the next room, she carries with her the traits of all the binary relationships established in the first sequence. They have become parts of the same character, played interchangeably, their individual identities absorbed into a collective dualism: two parts held together as one idea, one figure. The party sequence that follows features a roomful of men and women moving through the space exchanging handshakes, smiles, and intimate 119

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gestures before gliding toward a new person and doing the same. Christiani enters the room as if with no break from the spinning scene, now dressed in widow’s weeds and holding lilies. For the intricate sequence that follows, Deren claims to be “creating dance out of non-dancing elements” (i.e., the handshakes and gestures), in which “all the movements— stylized or casual, full-figured or detailed—are related to each other, both immediately and over the film as a whole, according to a choreographic concept.”68 She shot it several times to get it to look the way she wanted, and employed a metronome to make sure the rhythm was consistent. The party carefully choreographs the movements of those gathered there while Christiani moves among them in the widow’s costume. Her change in appearance and the new role she inhabits are unexpected within the measured routine around her. She eventually becomes initiated into her neighbors’ stylized movements, with increasing attention from Frank Westbrook, a dancer who from this point forward takes on a leading role. Following the interior party sequence, the fi lm moves to an exterior location, where Westbrook, in a sculpture garden, takes a series of women, spins and releases each of them in turn, and then stomps in an aggressive, full-body movement. Not unlike the drawing of lots game in Meshes of the Afternoon, the game is ritualistic and full of veiled threat (legible in Christiani’s visible apprehension). This section is also related metaphorically to the first sequence, through the act of spinning women, so to speak, though in the first the women are agents of spinning (and of death-dealing) and in the last the women are themselves spun by a seemingly malevolent force, manifested by the male dancer. Westbrook perches atop one of the statue pedestals, and at first he appears like a statue himself (both by stilling his own movement and then by the camera freezing the frame). Slowly, though, he gains mobility, frame by frame, while Christiani watches fearfully (part of her fear seems to come from the uncanny quality of the immobile betraying mobility). At last, he leaps from his pedestal to pursue her. Deren, taking her place, runs across the grass, down a hill toward the water away from him. She continues running under a pier, even into the water, until she is submerged; the positive film image then turns to a negative film image (dark turns light and vice versa), and she floats down, her veil floating around her, so that she appears to turn from widow into bride (fig. 2.4). 120

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FIGURE 2.4 Widow into Bride, Ritual in Transfigured Time, 1946. (Courtesy Anthology

Film Archives)

Ritual is the most complex of Deren’s fi lms—not least because the final product is a mere fragment of the overall plan she made for it. (Deren also filmed a great deal more footage than she used.) In August of 1945, she began the scenario for the film, some parts of which made it into the final version. But like the Hevajra figure, Deren was looking in multiple directions at this point in her career.69 She was in the process of assessing the direction of her intentions for the work she had already accomplished in her artistic trajectory, and she began to think about what she still wished to accomplish.70 At this time, she also commenced work on her longest, most detailed work of fi lm theory, the Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film. She began to identify as an experimental fi lmmaker, applying for funds from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations to continue her work.71 She proposed her Egyptian project (never taken up further) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she began to map out the project that 121

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she would eventually go to Haiti to work on. Her interest in social and cultural rites now found its natural level as Deren started to write and film Ritual. At this phase, the themes and methods of her earlier fi lms were being extended, particularly the treatment of binary relationships. However, these relationships also began to galvanize toward a new seriousness guiding her interest in non-dualistic states. A mode of incompletion—through which Deren elaborates and maintains dualisms (black/white, self/other, movement/stasis, and so forth) without closing off their relationship to each other, through which Deren maintains possibilities for as long as possible, and through which she allows contingency to shape the “final” film, such as it is—asserts its presence strongly here. Ultimately, Ritual mobilizes and sharply focuses the navigation of these binaries for a larger purpose: to mitigate between the individual and collective interests through ritual.

Dualities in Non-dualistic Nature

The urge to manipulate and reconfigure relationships among dualities manifests itself in several of Ritual ’s themes, medium-centric concerns, and ideas about race and ritual that Deren was beginning to develop. Several of these dualities—black/white, self/other, grief/hope, positive/negative, light/dark, and death/life—coexist within the same figures of the film. They are syncretized in the figure of the Widow-Bride, played by Deren and Christiani interchangeably. The Widow-Bride figure embodies versions of an idea of women in relation to men at two different moments. Those two roles are dispersed (divided between two actors) and compressed (packed into the short event–scape of the film and even depicted simultaneously in the final image). Deren conveyed to Westbrook that his role in the film functioned as a “priest-figure,” a “connecting figure between the widow and the bride.”72 Connection, merger, slippage, and substitution— and a sense of continuum across disparate categories—are important here: light and dark, self and other converge in the film’s images, perhaps nowhere more so than that image (in negative) of the bride who without any transition was an instant ago a widow descending, floating downward (is she drowning? is this a depiction of the passage from life into death?). 122

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Deren brings these dualities together as entangled threads of the same phenomenon, related to how she describes the Egyptian view of the inextricability of life and death, an idea she had pitched for the Egyptian fi lm project just three months prior to starting work on Ritual. While at times the dualities of the film are presented as if simultaneous or interchangeable (black into white, etc.), Deren also employs strategies to allay their intensity. For example, the motif of the passageway is depicted as a threshold between different states, employing the dualistic light/dark imagery to reflect that transitional state. People linger in the light-fi lled rectangles that are doorways surrounded otherwise by darkness. One reviewer of the film fi xated on the multiple transitional spaces depicted in the film as points of ritual initiation into a new state: “And the widow comes to a gate, another threshold to cross, another initiation.”73 When Christiani enters into and finally emerges from these doorways, she is transformed (girl into widow). The doorway sequence at the beginning, with its contrasts of light and dark and the wall that hides the passage between them, was important enough to Deren that she shot it twice in different locations to get it right.74 She described to a friend her memory as a child of liking to pass houses in which she could see “persons in windows talking to persons who were hidden between windows, and seeing people walking, appearing in one window after another, and sometimes disappearing in the space between, and you never knew what became of them!”75 Deren called “the central problem” of Ritual this revelation of things invisible or hidden: “If the function of the Artist-Magician is to make visibly manifest the laws of the invisible powers, that means that the underlying dramatic inevitability must manifest itself in terms of a visual inevitability.”76 People come into new being in the passage from hidden to evident, and they stand, Janus-faced, with Hevajra’s multidirectionality, on thresholds waiting to pass from one state to another. The doorways sequence functions as a visual correlative to the transitional state Deren wished to explore—from darkness into the light and back again, and transfigured by the experience. The relationship of black and white also finds merger through the racial aspects of Christiani and Deren doubling the protagonist’s role. Possibly Deren also meant to double the male antagonist role as well with a black and a white dancer: Talley Beatty (for whom she originally conceived the 123

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role) and Frank Westbrook (who ended up playing it).77 The cultural aspects of this intermixing of racial identities were plainly interesting to Deren, who was also in the midst of thinking through the implications of a cross-cultural analysis of ritual footage from the United States, Bali, and Haiti as inciting “racial memory.”78 Some of this interest is crystallized in the figure of Christiani, who came from Trinidad and was familiar with her native country’s West African–derived religion Obeah, with its set of rites and practices intimately related to Voudoun. That Deren swaps herself for Christiani and vice versa demonstrates a remarkably progressive attitude about intermingling of races that became evident as early as when Deren took up with Dunham’s troupe (an attitude not always shared even within her artistically inclined, left ist-tending peer group).79 Christiani recollected Deren’s attitude on this issue: “I don’t know where she got the idea from. I don’t know where she got the gall, as they used to say then. I don’t remember feeling any different at their house.” 80 In her logic of merger between dualities, whether visual, racial, thematic, or otherwise, Deren sustains relationships that acknowledge both similarity and difference. Even the self does not escape merger. As Deren noted, this synthesis is new to this film: “In the previous fi lms which I have made, I have been concerned, in part, with the relationship between a consistent identity— an individual—and an ever-shifting, unstable environment. The profound reality of our period is that everything is dynamic and changing.”81 In Ritual, individual identity is in constant flux, and belongs more properly to a collective, shared principle among others. The self is accordingly de-emphasized. In her program notes for the premiere of the film, Deren drew her audience’s attention to the importance of drawing the self into the community: “Communal ritual and individual ordeal attend all critical metamorphoses.” 82 The party sequence, while not portrayed wholly positively (Deren described it as provoking discomfiture in her protagonist), was meant to depict a social ritual that binds the group together, another rite through which Christiani must pass to come into herself, somewhat paradoxically by becoming part of the collective. Deren perceived that her ritualized movements held fragments of spaces and identities together, just as it had in Study, but for different ends: “These shots are held together not by the constant identity of an individual performer, but by the emotional in124

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tegrity of the movement itself, independent of its performer.” 83 The self becomes integrated as part of the larger logic. Those who were less charitable about the goals of the fi lm, including Nin, found the resulting depersonalization (de-individualization) quite alarming, railing against Deren’s mode in a Romanticist plaint. Nin considered the colorful array of “such varied personalities as those I described in the diary,” undone by Deren’s fi lm, so as to become “meaningless” as individuals: Maya did not seek to bring out their personalities. [ . . . ] The curious thing was that the unique qualities of my friends which Maya had been interested in—Pablo’s gaiety and sparkle, Gore’s poise, Steve’s beauty, Hoffman’s witty face, Frank’s dancing and intelligence—none of these were captured. They appeared diluted, watered-down.84

Ute Holl describes the feud initiated by Nin against Deren after filming Ritual as hinging on their different perspectives on identity formation, with Nin espousing a psychoanalytic perspective (focused on the individual and relatively fi xed) and Deren a psycho-neurological perspective (focused on social forces shaping the individual and subject to change).85 Despite Nin’s disparagements of Deren’s process and aims, she describes very well what Deren’s approach valorized when she recollected the process of filming the party scene: When we all became extremely tired, all our ‘poses,’ our attempts at acting, our self-consciousness disappeared. We let go. And the party Maya wanted materialized. She cheered. Go on, go on, go on. Exhausted, almost on the verge of hysteria, we danced, talked, held hands, or withdrew, or came back, wandered, looked for intimacy.86

The moment of Deren’s most complete satisfaction marks the nadir of Nin’s experience with the film. Nin faults the resulting “disconnected” feeling of the sequence with the loss of control she experienced in the exhaustion of filming the scene all day. She wondered: “How do you catch emptiness, or shallowness, ghostly figures who are erased on the screen as soon as they appear?”87 In fact, her question highlights enduring qualities of cinema 125

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perceived within responses to and formulations of it for decades—qualities that Deren most esteemed (its fluidity, flexibility, and even transience). Nin’s disdain for a loss of personality is precisely the thing that points most clearly to the constantly mobile ontological state of the cinema Deren trusted in. Within the set form of a ritual (moving through the gestures of socializing), any given individual may play a role, allowing her to connect to forces more universal than herself. This corresponds directly to Deren’s examination of identity (just not the sort Nin valued) in this and her next film project on social, religious, and cultural aspects of ritual. For instance, Deren often noted that to perform ritual, people wear flowing clothing, costumes, or even masks, to make their role within that ritual consistent with the whole process and to de-emphasize the individual. Rather than lose herself in the collective, the individual finds “enlargement” there, not diminishment, shallowness, or emptiness, as Nin would have it. Going through a ritual, the individual is able to acknowledge, process, and appreciate a change in her own state of being—even the unusual change from widow to bride. Ritual draws on the rich symbolic imagery of her earlier films, using it to explore new but related territory. Repetition, for instance, remains a touchpoint of Deren’s visual schema for the film—witness the party sequence’s repetitions of gestures across many couples, the direct duplication of some of that footage, the way Deren and Christiani replicate each other, the repetitions of the spinning game played by Westbrook with three different women, and so forth. Further, Deren’s water and mirror imagery from the coda section of the fi lm draws on her favorite tropes and myths, for example with the plunge into water passing through the reflective surface—what Holl calls the “lethal deceit” that ensnared Narcissus. That mirror surface recalls, too, another of Deren’s recurring interests: Medusa and her fatal reflection that spells her own destruction. The mirrored, twinned figures of Deren and Christiani implicated in this sequence undergo radical transformation of their individuality in favor of a dual and collective role. By cutting through the reflective surface, in effect breaking the Narcissian draw of it, the Deren/Christiani character experiences rebirth. The apparently happy ending of many a narrative film is achieved—she becomes the bride—but with significant variations: she escapes partnership and the temporal order is reversed (usually widow follows bride). Thus 126

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the parameters of ritual cross-sect with “transfigured” time. The protagonist does not merely pass through a rite, but restructures it. The negotiation of binaries here thus still draws on the opening-out energies of incompletion, but for wholly transformative purposes effected through ritual. At stake is how ritual itself interacts with time and space to provide the fortification necessary for transformation. Holl incisively indicates the “matter of photochemistry” that allows the widow’s transition into bride; it is a transformation predicated on “radically cinematic” means.88 Just as editing precipitates a cut that allows the substitution of Deren for Christiani’s figure (making cinematic continuity and discontinuity evident), Deren here employs a device unique to the photographic quality of cinema for spurring radical transformations. This method of using the negative image mobilizes simultaneity for its effects: she is widow and bride, white and black, negative and positive, at once. Deren’s method—fi xated on simultaneity—is appropriate for this moment in her career, as it is strongly tied to her other major project from this same year, her Anagram, published by Alicat Bookshop Press in Yonkers (not far from the private estate recently transformed into a public park where she filmed Ritual ’s statuary sequence). Several scholars have taken up the issue of the Anagram for Deren’s burgeoning film practice with depth and insight, but a few issues deserve comment here.89 The text galvanizes several of Deren’s key interests at this point and outlines issues she developed in Ritual. Most important are simultaneity, which both structures the Anagram and serves as a main theme, and the role of depersonalization: both of these come to bear on Ritual. Deren introduces the anagram form in terms of how it generates ideas whose impact derives from simultaneity: “An anagram is a combination of letters in such a relationship that each and every one is simultaneously an element in more than one linear series. This simultaneity is real, and independent of the fact that it is usually perceived in succession.” Simultaneity, in contradistinction to causal linearity, reconfigures the temporal relationship between the artwork and its audience. In alignment with the “real” nature of simultaneity, she layers the parts of her anagram (and her film works) to be considered in oblique combinations. Rather than develop them according to the usual rules of chronology, this method allows the artwork’s meanings to unfold according to the recursions of time 127

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characteristic of thought, dreams, and rituals. These concepts coincide with their expression in Ritual, which binds related aspects in a single image. As her preface to the Anagram spells out, although the English language contains many words that are useful or beautiful, it is their infinite capacity for combination that matters, especially, as Deren tells us, in poetry.90 Fortuitous juxtapositions engender meaning. So, too, does the combination of images in a film, and the resonances generated may outstrip the significance of any individual image (as is evidenced in the mirroring motif of Ritual ’s final images). The parts of the anagram reflect how film shots generate meaning through a series of relationships presented as potentially equal. The audience holds all the parts in relation to a whole: “In an anagram all the elements exist in a simultaneous relationship. Consequently, within it, nothing is first and nothing is last; nothing is future and nothing is past; nothing is old and nothing is new . . .”91 Ritual then uses this simultaneity to investigate—through a medium-specific film practice—the transformative energy of depersonalization through ritual. An example of this medium-specific exploration arrives in the film through the binary of movement/stasis. To have cinema, you must make use of the qualities of both at once (the paradox of the illusion of mobility engendered through still frames). Deren crafts her ritual for the Deren/ Christiani character from these apparently opposite but completely codependent qualities: the film draws attention to cinema’s need for still frames, but also its need for having those frames in motion to achieve movement, exemplified in the statue garden’s spinning scene. She highlights the materiality of the medium (still/moving, framing, the editing) and coordinates the mise-en-scène and extra-filmic elements to draw attention to dualities (dark/ light, ancient/modern, nature/culture, public/private). Several small sets of shots within the statuary sequence demonstrate all of these levels at once. The sequence begins with the transition to the statue garden (effected through a close-up match on action of Westbrook and Christiani coming together, cheek to cheek), where Nin along with two other women spin and laugh and throw their heads back (another figuration of the Fates). This set of three women is also depicted separately as statuary in the garden (the statues of course unmoving, albeit depicted in the apparent course of movement).92 The actual statues are mirrored by the women: we know they are mobile and not statuary themselves because 128

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FIGURE 2.5 Statuary-type Figures, Ritual in Transfigured Time, 1946.

they are in motion through the film process. However, when one of these “Fates” women enters the scene unfolding between Westbrook and Christiani, Westbrook spins her and she stumbles out and away from him, out of the frame. The next shot picks her up, still trippingly running, until Deren freezes the frame, and she is held in suspension. Within this shot, another statue on a pedestal that also appears to be arrested in motion, looms down towards her (fig. 2.5). The sequence continues with more of the spinning ritual until Westbrook, taking the position of this same statue on the pedestal, is frozen for several seconds, several times, by the camera as he incrementally begins to leap off it and to pursue Christiani. The notion of the still versus moving frames is solidified: now that the film is also frozen, the layers of representation (of movement, of an artwork, of the figure of a woman, of the woman herself) are laid bare. The many moving parts of the third sequence thus perform a complex set of meanings. The first woman to spin, in her frozen shot, demonstrates 129

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the tension of still frames and moving images by being both at once. The mise-en-scène depicts statues made from antique models contrasted with a very modern dance. These ideas in turn bring Deren’s theoretical ideas about temporality to the fore—the passage to other moments from present to past and future, expressed as a simultaneity, effected through ritual.

Ritual and the Collective, Control, Completion Now, that is an accident within the tolerance of the scene. Some accidents are not within the tolerance. But you cannot close it down so much that you stifle it. . . So it took me three times to find out just how much leeway to give them and how much direction to give them, what to direct and what to leave breathing. — D E R E N , D E S C R I B I N G T HE A P P E A R ANCE O F AN U N WA N T E D P I P E I N R I T U A L ’ S PA RT Y S E Q UE NCE 93

Ritual further exemplifies the complicated relationship between control and accident that shaped Deren’s oeuvre. While Deren avowed fully intentioned progress across her films, documenting it in her notes that accompanied screenings, in her letters, and by circulating it as press for her work, a more faithful way of describing her process would note the various contingencies and misgivings that shaped the work in its final form. Ritual derives its shape from the interplay of accident, intention, and revision of intention. For instance, Ritual ’s production depended on the busy lives of its participants, which were difficult to coordinate and led to filming conditions that were at times less than ideal. Deren expressed frustration with juggling many people’s needs to fit the schedule she had planned. In certain cases, she cajoled people to accomplish feats of endurance for her fi lming needs. Westbrook reportedly met Deren at dawn in Central Park to film before his rehearsals for another company, and she gathered the whole crowd for the party sequence for twelve-hour stints of fi lmed socializing. Although Nin’s diaries report that Deren always had people willing to offer an extraordinary amount of support—beyond the call of duty—and Miriam Arsham insists that Deren was very effective in getting whatever

130

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she demanded,94 Deren lamented that her process was disrupted by the people she depended upon to make the fi lm: “the more one is dependent upon circumstances exterior to one’s own adaptability, the more discouraging the entire effort. . . Under such pressures one hurries through, hoping that somehow it will come out better than it does. It never does . . .”95 Certainly, Deren is describing the problems of a collaborative medium, of which film is an extraordinary example; however, Deren up to this point had been able to command most of the production process herself, using just one or a handful of other actors, most of them intimate friends or herself. In addition to problems managing others’ schedules and wills, the usual round of accidents—from the drastic (e.g., the solarizing of part of the footage) to the minor (e.g., the appearance of a pipe she hadn’t planned on among the partygoers)—shaped the final film, even though Deren planned the film with an unprecedented amount of forethought and preparation. However, in fact, those plans were ultimately radically altered as Deren readied herself for her first foray into Haiti: the project underwent significant revision as she worked, especially after winning the Guggenheim award. The result is that Ritual expresses ideas that are quite different from the way Deren originally imagined it. The outtakes for the film demonstrate how fully Deren had engaged in a different vision for the fi lm, and it is unclear what caused her to abandon that vision. What would have been an hour-long film charting the journey of its dual protagonists became a compact statement about one-quarter of its original length. Ritual ’s preproduction notes include a number of themes and symbols consistent with Deren’s work up to that time. Some of the motifs she planned to explore are familiar: “Continuity with chess, sand drawings, hopscotch, magic symbols.” Likewise, she mapped out variations on temporal and spatial collapses, e.g.: “Something spilled one place wets a place faraway—.”96 Other incidents that would have extended the reach of the film as it came to exist were also planned, including several events related to the protagonist’s sexual initiation. Another change involves cutting out a recurring character, a child who gives Christiani fruit and later ties her to a chair.97 Also for the first time, Deren mapped out sound ideas for the film: for example, “voice fugue, meeting coincidentally on certain syllables,” and “Same person with different voices at different points of fi lm—A

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familiar object strangely referred to by a strange name.”98 She made headway into plans for recording sound for the film, a project that would find purchase in her wire recordings of Haitian rituals the next year. These possibilities for the fi lm may have been abandoned for any number of reasons, including Deren’s lack of funds and her desire to move on to the Haitian film project. In the end, Ritual does not have sound, nor any chess imagery, nor several sequences that she went to the trouble to record and edit, including a sequence featuring Westbrook as maypole and a series of moments depicting Christiani’s shame when confronted with “lascivious” desires of her own or manifested in others. This last idea was partly fi lmed in two separate sequences. The fi rst casts Deren as the protagonist: she walks through a park while folks on benches and passing her by point and laugh. The second, longer scene ends with the maypole sequence and contains a libidinous dance with many of the party sequence attendees. It connects the socialization ritual of the party sequence with the later statue garden sequence’s playing out of sexually charged energies (Fig. 2.6). The sheer amount of time, money, and energy Deren devoted to these unused sequences is inconsistent with her working method to that point, which tended to fi lm one or two takes after meticulous rehearsal and pre-fi lmic planning. The planning remains the same, but the outcome— and specifically the rejection of three-quarters of its material—is quite different. Ritual represents a shift in Deren’s method and thinking about process. Overall, Deren was becoming more interested in the elements of ritualistic form in relation to the individual. As she writes in the Anagram: The ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of the dramatic action, but as a somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole. The intent of such depersonalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension and frees him from the specializations and confi nes of

FIGURE 2.6 Outtakes: A Walk of Shame and Lascivious Folk Dance, Ritual in Transfigured Time, 1946.

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personality. He becomes part of a dynamic whole which, like all such creative relationships, in turn, endow its parts with a measure of its larger meaning.99

The individual in this case is incomplete without the ritual to bring her into the collective fold. These views, especially the individual becoming larger than the self by shedding the confines of personality, give shape to Ritual and indicate the direction of her next project. She makes an argument for the use of ritual form because it allows for a universal expression that withstands the vicissitudes of time and place: “It creates . . . an imaginative, often mythological experience which, by containing its own logic within itself, has no reference to any specific time or place, and is forever valid for all time and place.”100 The universality of the expression depends upon its being unmoored from a specific context; it upholds its own logic and functions according to its own laws. It is “contrived, created,” and as such depends upon the operations of the artist for its efficacy. In expressing a ritualistic form, Deren must again navigate forces of control and forces beyond her control. Deren’s supporters as well as her detractors wrote of her work in terms of its relationship to surrealism on one hand and personal subjectivity on the other. Both represent a misunderstanding of her point: she neither leaves all to the chance encounters of the unconscious mind erupting briefly into art, nor obsesses about her own personality and feelings. Indeed, it is through the collision of the two—chance occurrence meets obsessive articulation of the artist’s agency—that Deren’s films work. That tension has been little explored, with most of her contemporary critics choosing one or the other about which to cavil. Some, though, were hopeful at least about her future if not quite up to speed on her intentions: on the brink of her journey to Haiti, one reviewer of her work wrote: “Right now, I understand, Miss Deren is in Haiti making a film on a Guggenheim fellowship. The results should be interesting, particularly if Haiti prompts Miss Deren and her camera to probe material outside of her own subjectivity.”101 Indeed, she had already begun to do so. The films she had made up to 1946 strongly shape Maya Deren’s legend and provide evidence of her growing interest in the maintaining of tensions that would fully preoccupy her work thereafter. 134

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Haiti The filmed footage (containing more ceremonies than dances) lies in virtually its original condition in a fireproof box in the closet; the recordings are still on their original wire spools; the stack of still photographs is tucked away in a drawer labeled “TO BE PRINTED,” and the elaborate design for the montaged film is somewhere in my files, I am not quite sure where.1 — M AYA D E R E N , D I V I N E HO R S E M E N : T HE L I V ING GO DS O F H AIT I

Although Maya Deren began to focus her energy on plans for a film involving Haiti as early as 1946 in the wake of her success in securing a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and although she continued to make progress on that project long thereafter, it never came to fruition in the form she initially intended. It became instead her great, unfinished labor. She never relinquished her plans for it entirely and continued to repurpose her work concerning Haiti until her death in 1961. Over this span of years, she devised several other kinds of projects related to Haiti as her experience with the country deepened. These projects expanded the cast of Deren’s creative net into several different kinds of work: a nonfiction text of anthropological significance, her Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, published in 1953 (not to be confused with the film of the same name); an album of music entitled Voices of Haiti, also from 1953; an unrealized plan for a six-album compilation of Haitian music through Cadence records; a cut of the Haitian footage Deren edited for a news and arts program on CBS, Odyssey;2 a photographic series of Haitian subjects; and a number of interviews or  lectures over several years, in which she took up the cause of making Haitian Voudoun and the Haitians who practiced it more familiar to her

HAITI

audience. These projects related to Haiti, as well as other creative work, supplanted the incomplete Haitian film project and redirected its energies elsewhere. Deren arrived in Port-au-Prince in September of 1947 with camera equipment, a few belongings, and two letters of introduction afforded her through the Guggenheim Foundation.3 She knew no one there personally, and she possessed a limited understanding of what she might be able reasonably to accomplish in the period of time she planned to spend there. These limitations shaped her experience from the beginning in important ways. For instance, in her diary Deren laments having to pay for ceremonies (she expresses uncertainty about whether she is being swindled) and confesses her frustration at not being able to get the right light, find the right people to talk to, and so forth.4 Although she took footage of a couple of ceremonies, a great deal of time in her first visit to the small country was spent on the matter of making appropriate contacts and arrangements for filming. While in her first visit she was well funded by her Guggenheim grant, she would never be so flush again within her lifetime, making a travail of the logistics and expenses of fi lming in subsequent visits. Further, she had to bring heavy, unwieldy equipment into remote places, again demanding that a large amount of her time and energy be spent in practical concerns rather than the creative process of filming. What Deren did have or came to have, however, counterbalanced some of these limitations. First, she possessed the background and preparation that would assist her in making inroads toward the completion of her plan. Deren had already researched Haiti in connection with a series of articles she published from March to May of 1942, “Religious Possession in Dancing,” in which she addressed Haiti in some detail. She saved sheaves of notes on her reading and paid close attention both to the method of observation employed by the authors and to the details of their observations. Some of her sources, including William Seabrook’s seminal study of Haiti, The Magic Island, provided a point of reference for her interactions with Haitians that proved influential in her understanding of the place and its people. She also had a number of advantageous intellectual contacts that proved important to her progress. She plied her connection with Katherine Dunham, whose own Haitian research provided practical inspiration for Deren’s project.5 Dunham also helped Deren with making contacts in 136

HAITI

Haiti.6 Deren also forged relationships with Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, and several other friends or professional contacts who at least initially were highly sympathetic to her plans. Bateson donated footage from his Balinese researches conducted with Mead, which Deren aspired to use in her cross-cultural examination of ritual; he also gave Deren professional advice, consulting with her about the “fugue form” she wished the film to take as well as instructing her regarding field research; finally, he gave Deren money to help her complete the work she had begun there, fully comprehending the kind of time she needed to take to get the footage she desired for her fi lm.7 Joseph Campbell later persuaded Deren to write her book on Haiti and provided many hours of his time serving as her interlocutor and editor for that project. Among her assets, Deren also possessed a tenacious but respectful attitude and the desire to be more than an observer: her participation ingratiated her to circles that would allow her to get footage and audio recordings of Voudoun rituals and to learn about the culture from which they emerged. Eventually, this approach provided her with close, loyal associates in Haiti who offered her the help she needed. Deren made a total of four visits to the country. The first visit, from September 1947 into April 1948, was the longest period she spent there, and she established a number of important contacts at that time. After her return to New York, she scrambled to find money enough to return quickly, and when she earned an advance on her book about Haiti, she was able to make arrangements to go back in June of 1949. She stayed through that summer, but had to return to New York after four months because she had committed to teaching a workshop for the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) starting in October.8 However, she returned again in January 1950 and stayed until that July. Her final trip was not possible until December 1954 (this time with Teiji Ito), and she was so financially strapped that she had to stay until she could muster funds for her return ticket in February 1955. Thus, over the course of eight years, she spent nearly two years in Haiti, lending her insight into its rituals from quotidian routines to Voudoun ceremonies. She filmed and gathered information during each visit. She was well positioned to conduct her research and fi lm work, but despite her increasing familiarity with and exposure to the culture of Haiti, she never finished the film she had planned. 137

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The fact that Deren never completed the Haitian fi lm project has been open to various kinds of speculation. Because she continued to work on it for so long, there are many life circumstances that challenged her and may have contributed troubles with completing the project, including health issues, financial difficulties, and interpersonal tensions. Perhaps ironically, the incompletion of Deren’s Haitian work is often attributed to the very forces Deren sought for so long to demystify and de-sensationalize. That account, more persistent than one might suspect, supposes that Deren, who did indeed become initiated into Voudoun practice, got enveloped in its dark magic and in some way cursed her project (by some accounts this even led to her early death). Of course, neither biographical nor superstitious explanations may be confirmed or denied with any kind of certainty. In any case, they may well be beside the point, as we have seen that setbacks in Deren’s work did not necessarily lead to failure. More constructive derailments counterpoise this focus on failure, including the allure of other interests for Deren, both cinematic and otherwise. The unfinished projects, of which the Haiti film is the most predominant, point again to the productive force of incompletion that guides Deren’s cinematic style and working method, inflected especially in this case with the ritual mode she had been developing. Her time spent on the film provides the contours for the shape of incompletion in Deren’s work. It yields worthwhile yet unanticipated results (other projects, different work than expected) and, contrarily, it allows Deren to mine creative capacities by keeping results at bay (leavening her work with the energies particular to holding things in balance, simultaneity, irresolution, etc.). The Haitian film project tends to be a point of fi xation for explanations that would call Deren’s unfinished work and her creative trajectory post1947 a failure, often attributed to a lack of resources or a disconnect between what she had hoped to do there and what she discovered when she got there.9 Frequently, such accounts point to Deren’s own words about the project from her preface to Divine Horsemen, in which she calls her attempt to make the film “a defeat” and indeed, a “failure.” Looking more closely at what she is suggesting in that preface, however, we see that the terms of that failure have “ambiguous consequences,” which divert creative energy toward new, disinterested purposes. She leaves her “own intention” behind, but finds in its place a vivid transformation—both personal 138

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and professional. What she suggests about possession could apply to this transformation in her work life: “It’s rather like being overcome by a transcendent and larger force. And you don’t take to it easily.”10 Haiti becomes a rite through which she passes as an artist, and the work she accomplishes after this point is marked by that passage. This chapter thus posits Deren’s unfinished film project in Haiti as a channel for another kind of creative effort and as a phase consistent with her artistic aspirations both before and after. Others have also attempted to recuperate Deren’s work in Haiti according to models outside of failureversus-success by reconfiguring Deren’s relationship to Haiti. For example, in her preview of Deren’s notebooks from 1947, Catrina Neiman reflects on P. Adams Sitney’s remark that Deren’s time in Haiti “radically deflected” the other films she might have worked on: “One might, in fact, make the reverse claim, that her interest in Haitian dance was initially deflected by her discovery of film.”11 Not only was her first research in Haitian dance in 1941 detoured by her marriage to Hammid and subsequent fi lm career, but her view of dance once there occurred through the lens of a fi lm project rather than on its own terms. In fact, the projects feed into each other, serving as reflections and redirections of each other rather than as a mark of failure. Further, Annette Michelson’s comparison of Deren’s footage with Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film Que Viva, Mexico addresses the issues at stake here with an eye toward a model outside of a failure/success judgment.12 Michelson argues that the parallels between the projects show each director to be grappling with ideas that set them at variance with their culture and field of enterprise: The first of these [similarities] is that the fragmentary character of these projects, their forced suspension, their subsequent diversions and sublimations, suggest more than the pathos of personal defeat. They point, rather, to the contradictions inherent in the situations of two fi lmmakers at variance with the dominant practice of their times, with its economy and its labor structure.13

Michelson identifies the way that Deren’s and Eisenstein’s approaches to material foreign to them inspire exploration of their own creative positions relative to that material. While she characterizes the footage as a defeat in 139

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the face of which Deren, acknowledging the integrity of the practices she witnessed, humbly acquiesced, she also thus designates the unfinished film as a productive site for Deren’s aesthetic development.14 Deren’s Haitian work admits diverse influences—anthropological, political, musical, pictorial, poetic, religious—and demands a focus on creative motives and processes rather than the final product. It also repeats Deren’s adherence to the artist’s commitment to abandonment as part of the creative principle (an artwork is never finished, just abandoned). In another sense, as she asserts in her book’s preface, the material demanded that she “abandon [her] manipulations.” 15 Th is claim registers a shift in her sense of the provinces of creativity (recalibrating creativity in relation to documentary), but it also serves as a continuation of her strategy for thinking about the nature of artworks (unfi xed, open, in flux) from her Provincetown Playhouse screenings. It is not that the Haitian project as it was conceived deserved abandonment so that it could beget other outcomes for Deren; indeed, it is regrettable that there is not a Haitian fi lm made by Deren after her labor toward such an end, and this period certainly represents a series of frustrations in her creative trajectory inasmuch as she operated there with a minimum of funds and a maximum of difficulties. However, the tension between completion and incompletion that characterizes Deren’s thinking and her work up to this point and afterwards finds its surest purchase in the pressures and releases of her exertions concerning Haiti. The Haitian project serves as a productive field of play for those tensions, sharpening Deren’s already pointed sense of the relationship between camera reality and the artist’s creative intentions, for instance, and navigating between the poles that separate them. The mediation of documentary concerns and creative agency, in fact, though not new territory for Deren’s thinking, became her primary concern in the years following 1947. Her book, Divine Horsemen, is replete with references to such mediation. Its imagery, descriptions, and metaphors vividly extend the concept of negotiation of opposites in tension with each other. For instance, Deren describes the god of the crossroads, Legba: Whether as cord or phallus, Legba—life—is the link between the visible, mortal world and the invisible, immortal realms. He is the means and 140

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avenue of communication between them, the vertical axis of the universe which stretches between the sun door and the tree root. Since he is god of the poles of the axis, of the axis itself, he is God of the Crossroads, of the vital intersection between the two worlds.16

We hear the echoes of Deren’s eventual exegesis on “vertical” and “horizontal” structures for fi lm form here—another complex intercession between opposites that she finesses in the years post-Haiti.17 And we detect an interest in the tension between polarities (visible vs. invisible, etc.) negotiated by the loa (the Voudoun gods), by the rituals designed to serve those gods, and by the vevers (chalk drawings that both represent the god him- or herself and, at times, serve as a gateway for their entry into the world).18 But we also detect a new direction in Deren’s thinking encapsulated by an interest in things that cannot be depicted directly. Legba, “avenue of communication” between the seen and unseen, the mortal and immortal, and the material and the spiritual, serves as an apt go-between for the world and the divine realms. He negotiates the world as it appears and the latent world that may be manifested through Voudoun’s set of rituals. From this point, Deren begins to explore the possibility of similarly affording access to those invisible forces through the intervention of cinema. This possibility is a significant reconfiguration of her concerns: in her films prior to 1947, she strived to create a new state of being by manipulating the familiar terms of time and space in a non-camera reality. With the increasing importance of ritual to her thinking and aesthetic, this creative motive starts to shift, and she instead attempts to penetrate or make manifest interior states of being (in this case, trancelike states of possession) instead of generating a state of being through camera devices. As Deren saw it, this interior state of trance is not something personal to the self, something one owns. One is possessed by it: it represents a universal principle rather than a personal one. The self must be displaced in order for it to occur. The idea of possession appealed to Deren because it depends on the individual being transformed by communal relations and thus affirms values important to her politics and principles (aesthetic and otherwise). In order to emphasize its universality, Deren had to disassociate Voudoun from all taint of black magic and establish its roots in a system of selfless worship aligned with venerable traditions, including Christianity. 141

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As Deren portrayed them, rituals specific to Voudoun bear a resemblance to those in Deren’s earlier films including Meshes of the Afternoon and Ritual in Transfigured Time. In fact, rituals have been becoming increasingly important to her filmmaking and theory about cinema (rather than appearing as it were from nowhere once she encounters Haiti). Capturing the signs of an elusive state such as possession becomes Deren’s objective. In this endeavor, she attempts to render what is invisible somehow visible. Appropriately, one metaphor she uses for possession draws on the invisible man, who is only visible when he is dressed (the clothes do not make the man: they simply make him visible to those around him): Now, about possession, it is a matter of the loa or the principles being non-material and having no physical existence. Therefore to become manifest, they have to put on the flesh of a body, in much the same way that the invisible man in the fi lm had to wear clothes or you couldn’t see him, but when he had the clothes on you could see him.19

The invisible is present but not discernible in its own form; it becomes perceptible only when forced to reveal itself in some indirect manner. Deren fi xates her creative efforts on lending shape to otherwise elusive realities. What she had aimed to do with the Haitian material would not yield the results Deren planned—it would have remained a surface exploration of similar states of being across different cultures and ritual practices, rather than a way of comprehending or even perceiving those states. She therefore rechanneled her creative energies into unfolding the nature of indirect modes (an extension of what we’ve seen in her earlier fi lms) through other kinds of projects, which became more efficacious engagements with her Haitian subjects. In short, Deren’s work in Haiti is by no means a lost cause amounting to needless failure. Indeed, it maneuvers Deren toward recognition of failure’s transgressive power for creative purposes and informs her own aesthetic confrontation with an undocumentable, ineffable reality, in contradistinction to the world documented by a machine-medium. As Catherine Russell has pointed out, Deren was working with material over which she had very little pro-filmic control: these were “ ‘found’ rituals” for which she attempted to “[isolate] formal tendencies.”20 Deren’s cinematic practice 142

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as it developed through this period remains a vehicle for artistic expression, even as it increasingly negotiates the material and immaterial worlds.21 We should note that during this same period, Deren also took up several projects not directly related to her time in Haiti, some of which she completed and some of which likewise remained unfinished. These projects— including Meditation on Violence, The Very Eye of Night, and a filmed dance from Jean Erdman’s repertory, The Transformations of Medusa— intersect in important ways with the Haitian work, and they will be addressed accordingly in the following chapter. Here, however, the focus will fall entirely on the Haitian projects, first because they deserve consideration in their own right as a specific nexus of creative output in Deren’s oeuvre and second because her work there has a definitive impact in transforming her aesthetic, thus redefining the nature of the work to come. Again, this transformation does not emerge like white-winged Pegasus from the death’s head of the Medusa, as if new and fundamentally different from that which bore it; rather, Deren’s engagement with Haiti obligates her to recalibrate the ways she already thinks about forces that had been part of her aesthetic all along—antipodal tensions between the universal and personal, the visible and invisible, the complete and the fragmentary, the controlled and the chaotic, and the metaphysical elaborations of these relationships—so as to confront the nature of creative effort in the face of already fully sufficient phenomena. The circumstances surrounding her Haitian travels help to establish the boundaries of Deren’s engagement with the material for projects there. First, the environment of Haiti when Deren fi rst arrived proves important to her approach to Voudoun and her plans for the film project. Second, after her first sojourn in Haiti, Deren continued preparations for the fi lm by formulating detailed plans in connection with her second grant application from the Guggenheim Foundation to gain continued funding: because she had to justify her expenses, her applications and informal letters seeking financial assistance reveal the contours of her thinking about what she hoped to accomplish there. Third, the nature of the work that did eventually come out of Deren’s involvement with Haiti—including her book, lectures, recording projects, photography portfolios, and the rough fi lm footage itself—underlines the value of Deren’s notion of incompletion for arriving at other productive ends (both in terms of the projects’ dynamics 143

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and themes and in terms of the creative forces that shape them). Finally, Deren’s ultimate participation in the rituals and proselytizing of Voudoun as a social and religious practice illuminates her investment in Haiti over several years, marking a trajectory that cannot quite be characterized either by a notion of failure or success but rather depends on both.

Deren in Haiti of the 1940s–1950s

Against the prevailing tendency, Deren was from the first careful not to romanticize or sensationalize Haiti as she approached its culture, particularly the Voudoun rituals she had gone there to film, a subject about which she had learned a great deal in advance. She arrived at a moment when this was not often how outsiders approached Haiti. In fact, outsiders were increasing in numbers through the 1940s and 1950s: right around the time Deren made her first trip, so did a number of celebrities, artists, and other public figures. In the mid-1940s, visitors included W. E. B. Dubois, André Breton, Truman Capote, John Dos Passos, A. J. Liebling, Gregory Peck, and Dawn Powell, all of whom brought an increasing degree of visibility and touristic allure to the small country. Moreover, Capote and Liebling went there to write on an aspect of the country in high-profile outlets— Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker, respectively. Neither article is as uncomfortably colonialist as features coming out around the same time in other magazines, such as the eight-page spread entitled “This Way to the Islands,” in which privileged white women tour the markets of Haiti in fancy dresses available from Saks Fift h Avenue, Bergdorf, Lord and Taylor, and the like. (One caption reads: “Left: A spectator sheath, bright white linen buttoned with two rows of brass and bloused. By Junior Sophisticates. [ . . . ] That lady at the sewing machine is making voodoo shirts. Th ink you need one?”)22 However, although they do so with a great deal more sensitivity and intelligence than other more representative examples, Liebling and Capote similarly contribute an outsider’s perspective, romanticizing aspects of Haiti that seemed foreign to their sensibilities and therefore encouraging potential tourists to do the same. Liebling, for instance, recounts a gathering of the press in which the Haitian journalists recite poetry: “It was unlike any other press party I have ever attended, and I 144

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wondered what the boys up at Police Headquarters on Centre Street would have thought of it.”23 Capote’s piece focuses on the artist Hector Hyppolite, but he finds ample space to wax poetic about certain, odd details of Haitian life, to wit: Tell me, why are there so many dogs? to whom do they belong, and for what purpose? Mangy, hurt-eyed, they pad along the streets in little herds like persecuted Christians, all innocuous enough by day, but come night how their vanity and their voices exaggerate! First one, another, then all, through the hours you can hear their enraged, embittered, moon-imploring tirades.24

Such details tend to focus, as here, on the thin line between civilization and wildness—e.g., unclaimed dogs, neither clearly wild nor domesticated— that Capote observed in (or overlaid onto) every aspect of his visit to Haiti. Th is approach likewise inflects his assessment of Hyppolite’s work, which often incorporated both Voudoun and native Haitian (some called it “primitive”) imagery. In short, the tendency for visitors to Haiti in the 1940s was to conceptualize the country with varying degrees of appreciation, suspicion, and condescension—their attitudes both positive and negative predicated on their perception of Haiti’s otherness. Deren, on the other hand, seemed immediately to fi xate on Haiti’s similarities with her own culture. Her recognition of kindred practices—similarities among quotidian rituals across cultures—drove her creative project to begin with, and it granted her a degree of access that was otherwise elusive to the noncelebrity, average visitors to Haiti, of which there were increasingly many. Accompanying increasing attention to Haiti in popular press feature articles or advertisements, tourism there was on the brink of exploding. In 1949 there were 8,404 visitors to the country; that number increased to 35,749 tourists in 1953.25 While she was not a stranger to Haiti’s history when she arrived, Deren began collecting clippings of articles about Haiti— the things that tourists would have encountered as enticement for their visit—around the time of her first trip there. Most are derogatory to the Haitian way of life even while touting the allure of its attractions.26 The tenor of the tourism more often than not accentuates the exotic aspects of 145

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Haiti, with consistent reference to “drums in the distance,” and Voudoun as an alien attraction rather than as a way of life natural to many Haitians. At least one article from the time notes that Voudoun ceremonies available to the tourist were not real ceremonies, and that such access as would give a tourist an authentic Voudoun experience was difficult to achieve. The visitors coming suddenly to visit Haiti in droves would much more likely witness canned, commercial, titillating “performances” of Voudoun, which were readily available in high-traffic tourist areas (as Deren described it later, “quite a few non-Haitians are profiting nicely by performing vulgar, commercial pseudo-Voudoun dances”).27 Deren’s diaries from her first visit to Haiti document that she well understood the need to leave the beaten path to find more authentic rituals.28 In this climate of rising tourism with its attendant influx of visitors looking for exotic enticements, it is no wonder Deren encountered difficulties in breaking down suspicion among the people she wished to film, if not study. Neither an anthropologist nor a tourist, she attempted to forge a relationship with the native populace that would allow her to complete the work she came to do without altering their ceremonies through her expectations or participation. Although she initially sought to make it fit into her film plan, Deren began to approach Voudoun on its own terms. The realization that it did not fit into her scheme came into being only because she was so earnest about respecting the context of Voudoun outside of her plans for it. This context, in the late 1940s, was complex and included tension among practitioners of Voudoun, adherents of Christianity who primarily constituted the upper classes of Haiti, and the local and national governments. In Divine Horsemen and in interviews, Deren blunts these antagonisms by underlining the way in which Voudoun assimilates principles from other religions, including Christianity. She proposes several consistencies between the two religions, for example citing an analogy between the loa and the Catholic saints: both are subject to supplication, are important but lesser beings than God, and existed once as humans before becoming sacred.29 In Voudoun, there are pictures of the Christian saints in the peristyle (the ritual space), as several of them correspond directly to the loa (e.g., St. Patrick serves as image of Damballah because both are associated with snakes, though in notably different ways). Certainly, the collision of

146

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imagery and ideas between the two religions may have in fact fueled some of the animosity of Christian Haitians, in that they perceived such uses of their iconography as blasphemous. But for Deren, Voudoun’s borrowings from Christianity constituted a form of flattery and an indication of likeminded principles across cultures, classes, races, and religions. In her first trips to the country at the end of the 1940s, Deren investigated the nature of rituals particular to Haiti and from other cultures (including the United States: e.g., Halloween, children’s games) to highlight their timelessness as they related to concepts of life and death, the material and spiritual worlds, and the quotidian and cyclical interactions that take place within a community. She sought points of connection between her own culture—especially her own artistic one—and that of Haiti’s people. Deren thus worked against derogatory conceptions of Voudoun initiated by Christian adherents and outsiders to Haiti,30 conceptions that had for many years pushed the authentic (non-touristic, quotidian) practice of Voudoun as a religion underground. The division in Haitian religious cultures was also a class issue, with the upper classes upholding Christianity and the lower classes practicing Voudoun. As a result of its notoriety combined with its widespread adoption by native Haitians, Voudoun prompted a contradictory political stance, according to Deren’s experience. Ceremonies were not outlawed, but neither were they fully sanctioned. While officially practitioners had to seek permission from the local government to hold ceremonies, generally the houngans (Voudoun priests) preferred not to do so, keeping their practice of Voudoun undocumented.31 Deren was alert to these issues, and outlined her initial difficulties in obtaining access to “authentic” Voudoun in these terms: 1.) Until quite recently Voudoun was severely suppressed in Haiti, both by the government (which did not want Haiti to be known as “primitive”), and the Catholic clergy (which is very strong), and although, at present, legal permits for ceremonies are issued by the rural police, there is some persistent feeling among the houngans that they are not entirely at ease and secure and they are particularly uneasy about photographic “evidence.” This is particularly true of animal sacrifices, which are barely permitted by the government. [ . . . ]

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2.) Several unfortunate precedents have been established by persons seeking to photograph the rituals. Either out of insensitivity or out of coarse disregard, they have behaved in such a way as to disrupt and interrupt the ceremony for their own purposes, or made offensive comments or gestures which has made some of the houngans quite unwilling to risk this again. 3.) Finally, there is the usual feeling that the efficacy of a ceremony would be affected by the too intimate participation of a stranger, a non-believer, whose relationship towards the events was patently objective.32

Deren’s relationship with a local houngan facilitated her in overcoming most of these cultural obstacles, and she assures her reader and potential film audiences that her footage is unique as a result. Her awareness of her position made her approach the climate of tensions surrounding the filming of Voudoun with sensitivity, and indeed made her aim for inclusion of the intimate details of the ceremonies, eventually by “serving” Voudoun herself. Voudoun was practiced widely, but often at night and often in out-ofthe-way places. It had not been filmed often (outside of the commercial performances of rituals) and Deren’s clunky congeries of equipment were difficult to cart to the sites where Voudoun thrived (the initial filming locations Deren used were only about fifteen miles outside the capital). Even if she could get to the place, she had difficulty securing access to ceremonies because of the houngan’s reservations. Her first opportunities for filming beyond “bought” performances came only after having forged a relationship with the open-minded houngan who gave her permission, acceding to her wishes with the acknowledgment that “everyone serves in his own fashion.”33 The local circumstances in fact allowed a certain misconception of Voudoun to thrive, and it was against this concept that Deren determined to fight, through a range of creative interventions.

GR A N TS, G U G G EN HEIM F UND ING, A N D DER EN ’ S FILM PLANS

When she first arrived in Haiti, Deren planned to make a film that would outline the similarities between Voudoun and rituals in other cultures. 148

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The way her plans changed and developed relative to the Guggenheim Foundation’s support illustrates how her thinking both about fi lm art and Voudoun changed. Alongside her series of visits there, she abandoned, modified, and ultimately redirected her work over many years. Stan Brakhage attested that Deren labored on the footage for at least ten years; her own meticulous record keeping indicates that she at least collected funds from various sources for work on the footage and continued to advocate for its completion for the remainder of her life. Whether she meant eventually to realize her design for the film, or simply consigned the footage to the solitary dark of the Medaglia d’Oro coffee cans she used for safekeeping her films because it would not conform to her plans, the project went through a series of possible purposes that it more or less fulfi lled at different phases along the way. Deren received the news that she had won the Guggenheim fellowship on April 5, 1946. The application she submitted was her second attempt at securing the grant, and she would continue to apply for further funds after the expiration of her initial grant period.34 For her successful grant, Deren supplemented the regular application with a letter to the Secretary General of the foundation, describing the aftermath of her great success with film screenings at the Provincetown Playhouse in February of 1946, which may have bolstered her chances at the award.35 During the same period, Deren also sought an award from the Rockefeller Foundation and, at the suggestion of her academic mentor, Sawyer Falk, intended to apply to the National Theater Conference (also funded through Rockefeller). As her application materials demonstrate, she was mainly seeking funding to continue her ongoing work (she titled her successful application “Second Application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a Fellowship to Continue Work in Experimental Film”). If she had specific plans for going to Haiti during that time, she did not mention it in the application. Instead, she focused on the work she had already accomplished, arguing forcefully for her need for support to continue in a more general sense the work she had begun.36 In the second (successful) Guggenheim application, Deren notes that she is in the process of working on a film (Ritual and Ordeal, later titled Ritual in Transfigured Time), and that the funding would help her complete not only that film but give her a start on another one following it. The 149

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only hint of future plans comes at the end of the application, where she states: “In any case I would try to go to a region where my personal living expenses would be reduced to a minimum, thus leaving more to spend on film, etc. and where favorable weather would make it possible for me to work mainly out of doors, thus eliminating the very great expense and complications of lighting equipment.” Possibly Deren had Haiti in mind when she drafted this description (though she also expressed her desire to film in New Mexico, Arizona, or Mexico in January of 1946, before she received the grant). The editors of The Legend of Maya Deren note that Deren had hoped to go to Haiti as early as 1941, to research her article on religious dancing firsthand.37 Once she made definitive plans to embark for Haiti, Deren’s plans for the creative project similarly began to take shape. First, she consulted with anthropologist Gregory Bateson about field research. He gave her several reels of his footage of Balinese rituals taken with Margaret Mead; together Mead and Bateson had been foundational in the establishment of visual anthropology in the field and took hours of footage that would later result in the article “Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis” (an analytical work with photographs) and Trance and Dance in Bali, a short documentary that was released on CBS in 1952. Deren worked in depth with this footage for four months before going to Haiti, where she hoped to find resonances in the ritual practices as well as the creative freedom to make her own footage. Just before leaving, she applied for funds via the West Indian Research Fellowship of the Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theater Arts and to the Viking Fund, an anthropological foundation, for the loan of sound-recording equipment. Both of these were granted. The Viking monies allowed her to bring sound-recording equipment as part of her eighteen pieces of luggage; the resulting recordings became both a major component of her film plan and part of several ambitious audio projects outside of that plan. So the details of Deren’s plan for her “creative work in fi lm” made possible by the Guggenheim funds shape up after the funds were dispensed to her, and they were wrought because she had to justify to the Guggenheim Foundation the need for future journeys there. The fullest statement of her Haitian film plan resulted from her third application, for the first renewal of her fellowship, made just after returning from her first trip to Haiti in 150

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1948. Being on the ground in Haiti may have helped her to see the possibilities for what she could accomplish in connection with the Balinese footage she had already studied. The nineteen-page document Deren prepared in her application for a Guggenheim renewal (unsuccessful, as were all subsequent applications for renewal) begins by describing the four films she had completed up to the point of the application, sketching an arc of achievement based on her exploration of various film ideas related to the notion of reality and filmic articulations of continuity. In Meshes of the Afternoon, she argues, she had been interested in “the creation of an imaginative experience or reality rather than a reproduction of one already existent.” In At Land, however, she turned an “increasing awareness of the special nature of the fi lm instrument,” specifically photography and editing, toward resolving issues related to reproducing reality balanced with creative activity. She notes that photography is the means “by which actuality is recorded and revealed  .  .  . in its own terms,” and clarifies that editing then mobilizes actuality toward creating a new reality.38 Deren claims that the ideas underlying the basic components of filming accorded her freedom in asserting principles of continuity. She can make two places “continuous both in space and time, without any lapse understood,” because this particularly “volatile variety of space and time are united into a continuity by their consistent relationship to a central character identity.” That is, the interests of the protagonists hold disparate spaces and times together. To these continuities, for Study in Choreography for Camera, Deren adds movement (a less personalized version of identity) as a vehicle to serve continuity. And finally, for Ritual in Transfigured Time, she begins to argue for binding several “modes of continuity” to create a fugue that would underline movements “common to individuals who are identified as singular and are used as inter-changeable variables within a consistent pattern created by the fi lm instrument.”39 In other words, through variations on the notion of continuity—from a more subjective-based imaginative experience in Meshes, to a balance between creativity and reality on its own terms in At Land, to disinterested movement without agency in Study, to a blend of all these levels and the introduction of a collective, structural will in Ritual, Deren moves along a path from the self toward depersonalization and ritualization. 151

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The application then turns to the project she hopes to make in Haiti. The film in progress originated, she claims, as an idea about children’s games. The forces impelling the playing of games, Deren argues, are both the child’s imagination and the form of the game, which exists outside of any reward or goal within the game. She describes a game’s genesis (whether made up on the spot or part of a long tradition, like hopscotch) according to its own self-contained, auto-formal, ritualistic demands: “the reality [in which children are involved] or a ritual activity is not a function of its relationship to any actuality exterior to itself.” In fact, the game establishes a certain authority “towards which actuality may be answerable”; it makes sense out of the chaos of childhood according to a child’s perspective. The game’s rules both preexist and come into being as it is played—it balances tradition with improvisation through ritual form (the playing of the game). Such a form is founded on the belief that “the idea of order . . . can create bicycles.”40 Deren discerns in the Balinese footage inherited from Bateson and Mead a similar set of forces, and expresses a hope that she will find yet another “climactic variety” among homogeneous traits that match up with other cultures, like the ones Bateson and Mead discover in Bali, once she arrives in Haiti. She provides a table outlining how different ritual activities across her three contexts (Bali, Haiti, children’s games) relate and interpenetrate each other. For instance, moving from what she calls “individual” (the animated self) to “inanimate,” she outlines ritual activity according to how it involves individuals: one kind displaces the personality (Voudoun possession, trance in Bali, children’s impersonations of animals), another represents another identity (the use of masks across cultures), while yet another uses representational images or symbols (like diety images, dolls, cabalistic symbols, cards, chess, etc.). She hoped to demonstrate the similarities and differences among the three contexts, to preserve the intensity of each ritual in its place while allowing parallels to be drawn across cultures: “It is upon these three ritualistic forms—children’s games, Balinese and Haitian ritual that I wish to build the film—using the variations between them to contrapuntally create the harmony, the basic equivalence of the idea of form, common to them all.”41 To mark the connections, Deren sketched a plan of using graphic matches (“photographic identifiability”), for instance coordinating images 152

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of circles across different ritual contexts to highlight a connection. So a ball in a children’s game might match with a circular dance pattern in Bali. Further, she intended to use the temporal parameters of editing to mark other kinds of relationships, noting that if she were to indicate a relationship of A to B in one context and C to D in another, and then connect A to C and B to D, she could temporally elide parts of rituals by representing the first step of an action A-B, the second step of the action in C-D, and the third in A-B, making the absent steps in each pair implied by the relationship (although we are missing the second step of A-B, it is suggested by the second step using C-D, which relates to A-B). It is a detailed sketch of her thinking about similarity, difference, and the relationships between them. Deren’s Guggenheim renewal application was not accepted in 1947–48, but she went to Haiti anyway. She sought other sources of funding, especially from lecture tours and other professional activities (photography, the Very Eye of Night project, articles, etc.) to continue her work there, even though she almost immediately aborted the film plan for which she first felt she needed to spend time in Haiti. As she writes in her preface to Divine Horsemen, Deren abandoned that plan definitively but found other projects that entreated her attention once she had witnessed Haitian Voudoun rituals firsthand. She applied for the Guggenheim again in 1953, pleading her case on a personal level: “will you, who gave me the first line, now give me the last line, so that I may resolve that commitment and be free once more (to take on others, no doubt).”42 She never does find that freedom, but as she shows in her outline of activities in Haiti for the fi rst three trips there (September 1947–April 1948, the summer of 1949, and January–June of 1950), her original project had multiplied into many worthwhile projects, the most central of which was a newly envisioned plan to make four shorter Haitian fi lms for which she was petitioning funds. In the application, she explains that she would divide the footage she had already taken into four groupings: (1) a “general ceremonial film,” (2) a ceremony for Agwe, loa of the Sea, (3) a ceremony for Ghede, loa spanning death and life, and (4) a film showing “secular dances” (e.g., Mardi Gras, the Ra-Ra Festival). The first was to run approximately twenty-five minutes, and the other three would run fifteen minutes each. She imagined 153

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they could be shown separately or together, as a series. She claimed that although she had already come a long way with collecting the footage, without a renewal of the Guggenheim, she did “not have the means to bring this last phase to completion.” Moreover, in addition to her lengthier explanation for why she turned away from her original intentions in Divine Horsemen, in her renewal application Deren simply notes: “I gradually became aware that these dances were only part of the ritual and could not be separated from either their ritual context nor their metaphysical structure of which they were a statement.” In other words, she insisted on not dismantling the ritual’s parts, only to see the whole disintegrate entirely. Instead, she began to seek other outlets for the material, ones that might lend themselves simultaneously to respecting the integrity of Voudoun and making it yield its secrets somehow.

A H A I T I A N PR OJEC T B EC OMIN G HAIT IAN PROJECT S

Drawing on her Guggenheim funds and hoping for further resources both from that foundation and from other sources, Deren worked for years on the Haiti material. Whatever location she may have had in mind when making her initial grant applications, Deren’s hope to discover a region of favorable weather was not fulfi lled when she made her first trips to Haiti. The climate—hot and damp even in the late autumn months of her first trip—demanded that the rituals, which involve a great deal of physical exertion in drumming and dancing, take place at night (not an ideal time for filming without lighting equipment) to allow the semitropical heat to abate. And although she enjoyed reduced living expenses there, her fi lm costs were increased by several factors: filming for long periods of time to capture the whole of ceremonies (something she seldom did in her earlier films), transporting equipment to remote locations, engaging professionals for expensive equipment repairs, and even the relatively moderate cost of having to contribute financially to the ceremonies in the poor districts where she worked. In her expense records for Haiti, Deren notes that from September 1947 to March 1948, she spent $1170.50 on camera repairs, raw stock, and other materials—a real strain on her budget. From 1949 through 154

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July 1950, for raw stock, lab costs, sound equipment, “special equipment,” and overhead, she spent an additional $4,080. Considering her original Guggenheim grant was for $3,000, over $900 of which she spent immediately toward the completion of Ritual in Transfigured Time, her excursions in Haiti (per her own account) significantly stretched her limited resources. Whatever her assumptions for working on the cheap in an easier and milder climate, unexpected financial considerations and the vicissitudes of the environment also shaped the work Deren accomplished there. While it appears that Deren never changed her plan to have a film as her central project in Haiti—even though the parameters for that fi lm changed radically—she began almost immediately to add supplementary projects to that plan. In order to make money enough to cover costs on repeated visits, Deren intended to sell the photographs she took there (purchasing a Rolleiflex camera for that purpose), to write a book and several articles about the country, to market the audio recordings as a series of records, and to hit the lecture circuit. She calculated on doing something, at last, with the copious footage she had taken of filmed ceremonials, dances, and daily life in Haiti, ultimately altering her plans to propose the four-fi lm series of documentary fi lms about Haitian Voudoun and related dances. Tapping as many channels of creative activity as she could, she mined her experiences of Haiti for material to be used in a range of projects.

Photographic Evidence in Haiti

Not unlike during the period just prior to making Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren spent time while in Haiti making folios of photographs. She carted three pieces of luggage related to still photography with her, invested in a new camera, and reported taking more than a thousand negatives over the course of the first three visits. In addition to the photographs taken during ceremonials, which constitute the majority of her images, she took pictures of people (both portrait style and as part of the diverse Haitian environment) and a whole series of images of architecture and the landscape. In these latter images, she represents a series of contrasts in living styles, classes, settings, and habitats. She made use of her still images for commercial 155

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purposes, submitting some of them with her essays for magazines in hopes of earning greater fees. Photography made up an important part of her income and helped her to make subsequent trips back to Haiti. But she also thought of it in much broader terms—on one hand as part of the whole package of Haitian materials through which she hoped to make a living by educating various audiences, and on the other hand as an extension more generally of her aesthetic program. It was an important outlet for her work and pleasure with making images. Her later lectures suggest the appeal of photography for Deren during this period. She notes how it may contribute toward making new, inventive landscapes, and it takes on greater importance as she begins to contemplate documentary concerns on their own terms. Largely, she takes for granted photography’s special relationship with the real as a one-to-one relationship. If anything, the practice of making both a fi lm and photographs in Haiti only solidified Deren’s notion of the “show-it-to-me,” realistic, authenticating power she had argued was inherent in photography: Now, every medium using photography is absolutely unique in that it doesn’t require an artist in order to create an image. [ . . . ] In effect, it means that the image is not the area where the creative activity takes place. [ . . . ] You see, the validity of photography, its impact, its strength, the authority of its reality, the fact that you cannot argue with it [ . . . ] that authority, which carries so much weight, is dependent upon the fact that nothing intrudes between reality and the image.43

The artist only comes into the picture in her “use of the image,” not in the creation of the image. The photograph is beyond question. With this supposed power, the Haiti photographs would pose no problem to her desire to abandon manipulation. In the basic element of the photograph, the reality of which the artist comes to after the fact, the relationship between creativity and documentary reality is pre-negotiated, with creativity taking a lesser role. Her photographs attest to that view. In her still photography from Haiti, Deren’s creative intervention—if indeed she intended any—comes primarily through the contrasting types she explored. She did not leave them as a portfolio that would have put these images in specific configurations, but the striking oppositions 156

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among the range of images (some of them shot multiple times, seeking a felicitous combination of lighting, composition, and contrast) speak to her sense of relationships among types of people and places to be found in the diverse culture of Haiti. Consider a chaotic mass of fish across the foreground of one image—immersing the spectator in fish—contrasting with an empty, isolated street shot from a distance and from above. This latter image from a high angle is also in counterpoint with a hotel veranda with its complex woodwork shot from below, a little aerie for the upper classes. Or note the single figure on the staircase in a wealthy household, against the single chicken before a wooden shack, its shadow cast on the ground (fig. 3.1). In the former, the room is neat and organized, and Deren shoots it to emphasize the two identical statues on the right side balanced against the narrower rows of columns on the far and left wall. All is orderly to the point of obsession. Deren’s placement of the woman on the stairs emphasizes her role as mistress of this upper-class domestic domain. In contrast, the exterior shot of the shack with the chicken has a homelier order to it, with the ground, the wood slats of the body of the house and the thatching on the roof making a study of textural contrasts. The chicken, lord of his own domain, seems to pose for the camera, too. What this pairing of photographs suggests is a ranging interest in photographic evidence about the status of Voudoun adherents versus that of the often émigré moneyed culture. Being an artist grants her access to both spheres, where she can document the difference as an artist. Deren did not publish these as a series, however. Haiti inspired an adherence to documenting what she saw, rather than a sense that she could use it for telling another story (one of her own creation, a Balinese story, or a story about children’s games, for example). It allowed her an outlet to witness through the lens of the camera the things she was experiencing in Haiti beyond the well-trod tourist path and would have also played a role in the package of materials she proposed to put together about the “real” Haiti. The film footage was also intended for the three-tiered project Deren wanted to launch to document the role Voudoun plays in the lives of Haitians. It would have included music, Deren’s book, and moving and still photography. Deren envisioned it as “a companion set: the same wonderful subject seen from three complementary views.”44 She recognized its 157

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documentary and potential monetary value: at one point she deposited it at the Museum of Natural History with Margaret Mead for safekeeping. Mainly, though, it remained in the coffee cans she used as storage containers, so that for many years Deren simply kept the footage she had taken in the hopes of being able to find time, money, and perhaps inclination to work with it. In 1972, a decade after her death, the footage found its way from Grove Press to Anthology Film Archives. The following year, Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel requested and were granted the footage, which they wanted to use to make a film of their own in line with Deren’s wishes.45 The Itos compiled their fi lm, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, out of the raw footage, with voice-over from Deren’s book. It is a film sometimes apocryphally attributed to Deren, but it is not Deren’s fi lm. However, because it is not encumbered (or protected) by archival status, it offers certain access to the motion pictures Deren took in Haiti, about one quarter of the full amount on deposit at Anthology Film Archives, footage that would otherwise most likely not been available outside of occasional screenings there: it offers access to the incomplete work. Several scholars have written in detail and with great insight about the Haitian footage, both in its raw form and as compiled for the Ito fi lm, providing a map for understanding its interest from both a fi lm historical and an ethnographic point of view.46 Here, I will consider the way that, as an unfinished text, it raises a number of other attendant issues as well. The raw footage is comprised of several ceremonies for the loa; parade footage during Mardi Gras; interiors and exterior shots of the places where ceremonies were about to take place, showing preparations for worship; people drawing the vevers on the ground; casual shots of Haitians; animal sacrifices during ceremonies; and dancing and possessions. In the Ito version of the film, parts are taken out of reels and redistributed without details about what belongs where, so it now proves difficult to decipher the original state of Deren’s footage. Over thirty years later, Anthology Film Archives, led by Jonas Mekas and marshaling the expertise and willingness

FIGURES 3.1a and 3.1b Maya Deren, Haiti Photographs. (Courtesy Boston University

Special Collections)

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of Martina Kudláček (who had just completed her fi lm about Deren), planned a major preservation project for the footage which would have also attempted to make sense of it, sorting out the ceremonies each reel depicted (they were unable to round up sufficient funds to complete this new Deren project). Kudláček went to extraordinary lengths to document the details about these pieces of fi lm, asserting through her research how it should be put together. With great attention to detail, she assessed the holdings at Anthology and proposed making an inventory of the collection of footage (including other fi lm sources which had not yet been determined to be originals or copies of parts of the duplicate negative). As part of her plan, Kudláček intended to add information about what people were seeing. Deren occasionally mentioned doing the same, though she also often asserted that the films would speak for themselves. Kudláček’s plan represents a change from the way Deren left it—indeed, in the space of that change lies the difference between what David MacDougall has called ethnographic fi lm footage and an ethnographic film: “Films are structured works made for presentation to an audience. They make manifest within themselves the analysis that justifies such a presentation. Films are analogous in this sense to an anthropologist’s public writings and to other creative or scholarly productions.”47 The latter sounds precisely like what Deren hoped to bring to the field of anthropology at one point: a creative approach to the discipline. However, although Deren edited a segment of the film herself for inclusion in the CBS television program Odyssey, she otherwise left the footage intact, possibly hewing to the direction of Margaret Mead, who had told her that the longer, uncut ceremonies would be of interest to the Museum of Natural History. Either way, like the Legend of Maya Deren’s editors, Kudláček’s impulse to supplement the material of Deren’s archive continues as much as represents the legacy of Deren’s work. Deren’s unfinished work invites conjecture about what she would have done with it, which in turn invites filling in what she left behind. Its very open-endedness begets a further sense of incompletion. At the time of her death, Deren ceded control of the footage to Ito, her legal partner. Whether it was her intention or not, this meant he could extend its use beyond the bounds of the state she left it in. Deren’s work consistently pushed the limits of closure, and this case may be the exemplar of that tendency, such that it remains open and able to change even beyond her death. 160

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Such as it is, the Ito film provides a view into the Haitian footage and offers a number of clues to Deren’s thoughts about what she was filming. A couple of details stand out for the modes of incompletion under consideration here. First, the central sequence involves a ceremony that depicts all the mirroring and oppositional forces Deren discusses in her book. It features a trance state experienced by one of the dancers, which Deren’s camera observes with sensitivity but also clear fascination. Second, there are several slow-motion sequences, which represent an effort to make the dance movements more legible. This manipulation of “reality” might immediately strike an ethnographer as problematic; however, Jeanette DeBouzek has conceded that such a device used for ethnographic purposes is admissible because it underlines the subjective experience of possession, coordinating Deren’s work with feminist ethnographers who value such experience though it often lies outside the purview of the discipline. Moreover, DeBouzek characterizes Deren as both an “insider” and “outsider” to the rituals she observed, merging the two into the idea of the artist-ethnographer.48 The footage—both in its attention to the symmetrical and sensational aspects of the ceremony as well as through its creative devices— navigates the usual tension inhering in documentary between objectivity and subjectivity, with creative impulses heightened here. The incomplete footage both entreats incorporation in Deren’s oeuvre and goes beyond its scope. It poses questions about the “definitive” or “authentic” text as much as it does about the “defi nitive” or “authentic” ceremony. As Moira Sullivan has claimed, the footage presents a point of entry for access to ritual practices in Haiti and “should be seen as complete in accordance with the aims Deren insisted were crucial to an understanding of Voudoun.”49 Even so, the film project would continue to be added to for several years; meanwhile, by her second visit to Haiti, Deren comes to feel a need to explain its content.

DI VI NE H O R SEMEN : THE LIV IN G G OD S OF H AIT I (BOOK)

The film Deren proposed in her Guggenheim application never came to fruition, and neither did the revised film project to make four documentary films from the footage. Instead, her greatest completed work to result 161

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from the enormous investment of time, money, and energy in Haiti was her book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (fig. 3.2). Not long after her first visits to the country, she began to collect information that would eventually be incorporated into this volume, taking notes and keeping journals and files of ideas about her experiences there. She planned several articles beyond the book as well. It was a topic that had engaged her imagination for a long time: as early as 1941, well before she embarked for Haiti, she started working on and eventually published installments of an article entitled “Religious Possession in Dancing” in Educational Dance magazine, citing her authority on the topic as garnered through the “criticisms, suggestions and helpful reading of the MS. by Herbert Passin, Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University, and Dr. S. D. Deren, of the Department of Psychology, Syracuse University.” Some of the research she would later use in Divine Horsemen is already cited in that article, including anthropological work by Harold Courlander, Bronislaw Malinowski, Havelock Ellis, and Melville Herskovitz. Alongside that scholarship, Deren remarks, “It is difficult for me to conceive that anyone who has read either popular travel books or anthropological monographs would fail to have his curiosity stirred by the accounts of possessed dancing in various primitive communities.”50 However, this curiosity leads Deren not, like her touristic counterparts, toward titillating accounts of Voudoun; instead, she probes “what relationship [possession] might have to the religious ideology of which it is a part” and “the peculiar psychological state of mind which is involved,” as well as how ritual dance might relate to patterns in her own culture. Her reason for these considerations is that while “popular writers have stressed the alien, incomprehensible and even grotesque qualities of possessed dancing,” she wishes, of course, to do nothing of the sort, not in 1941, and even more so not after her first visit to Haiti in 1947.51 As it eventually came to be, the book gave her the credentials she sought for continuing her Haitian work in other media and helped promote that work in other ways, too. The advance she received on the book allowed her to return to Haiti when she was otherwise unable to raise funds to do so. She used her authorship of the book to assert her claims to expertise on the subject and as accreditation for other projects she wanted to undertake. It appeared on her resumé, as part of her bio for film screenings, and 162

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FIGURE 3.2 Maya Deren, cover of Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.

in letters in which she aimed to promote herself to interested parties who wanted a part in producing the films.52 Her work on a book in lieu of the film came about partly due to the influence of Joseph Campbell, who had in the wake of publishing his blockbuster The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) just been named editor of a new series, Myth and Man, at the small London/New York publishing firm Thames and Hudson. Deren’s book was one of the first two in the series, and it came about through a great deal of Campbell’s personal attention, moral support, and practical assistance. As it became clearer that she had exerted efforts that were not finding purchase in creative work, she began at his suggestion to work on the book through an interlocutory process. The two sat down to record a conversation about Haiti, so that the work was swaged by his probing questions about the material. Several sections of the book derive directly from these conversations.53 Campbell helps Deren to identify patterns and key insights, and even at times serves 163

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as midwife to her thoughts about what she saw firsthand in Haiti. At one point, he remarks: “You know what is happening, Maya, as you go through these gods—certain basic principles come out in connection with the deities themselves. And here they come out in a sort of anecdotal way which is very attractive.”54 Indeed, the book takes shape through such an “anecdotal” way of recounting the details of Voudoun, and as such lends the slant of a personal, casual, direct observer to Voudoun’s pantheon of gods, symbology and rites, and evolution. Even so, the ultimate form of the book is not casual or accidental. The process balances the personal and objective, the deliberate and the accidental detail. Later in the recording, Deren tries to adumbrate the features of possession in an orderly fashion, even as Campbell encourages her simply to get her thoughts about the matter out—however they might come out—advising her that she can edit, arrange, and shape the issue once she gets the details into the recording. In the end, she follows this suggestion closely, going back through the transcripts of the interview, making notes for herself in different colored pencils, and assiduously changing, correcting, and revising the text. Some parts are lifted straight out of the interview, but most are developed from the verbal form into the written one. Through this process, of which the final book is just one outcome, Campbell helped ready Deren’s material. At the end of one tape, he wryly remarks how many great details there are to her anamnesis of her experiences with Voudoun, recalling her unfounded fear that she didn’t have enough material to write a book.55 From her initial misgivings to the final, finished product, Deren mines her abundant resources to make something out of the Haitian material. (Who knows what might have happened if someone had taken a similar interest in shepherding her through the fi lm footage?) The resulting text is marked by the approach that led to its existence. In its poetic and digressive description of Voudoun, Deren offers a sense of what the ceremonies look and feel like: The shadow of the houngan, projected from within the tent by the fl ickering of the candle, dances and glides over the folds of the cloth as he completes his final preparations. Then the candle is extinguished. But the moon is bright. It picks out, with a sharp brilliance, the round 164

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mound of the tent, the regular stretch of the limbs under the white sheets, the easy vigilant stance of the la-place in white trousers and shirt, the white dresses and white-kerchief bound heads of the participants.56

Such description does more than serve as anthropological document in respect to the “logics” of Voudoun. While she interprets some actions for the reader, she just as often lets a detail remain unremarked, enticing the reader to imagine the place and draw her own conclusions about what it means; it is documentary, albeit from a particular (subjective) perspective and often at a decidedly poetic slant. When one compares it to other writing Deren did on Voudoun, especially her article “The Artist as God in Haiti,” which offers her journals from Haiti as an account of her trials and pleasures there, the book expresses a highly tempered subjectivity similar to that aimed for in the classicist tradition.57 In addition to providing an insider’s account of Voudoun’s history and the mechanics of its expression in ceremonies, Deren provides an account of its mystical dimensions, culminating in possession: the making manifest of an invisible principle in a communal setting. Through devotion, discipline, and movement, Voudoun rituals allow its serviteurs (those who practice Voudoun) to transcend the earthbound body and its material circumstances. Deren’s book outlines the terms of this relationship and its salutary effect on both the individual and his community while still providing historical, geographical, and cultural contexts that make these terms comprehensible. She claims to seek general principles and larger forms, rather than simply catalogue the features of the religion (although she does a great deal of this, too). Overall, she hopes “to delineate the metaphysical principles underlying those practices and to render them in terms of their cultural context in such a way that they may become, for the non-Haitian reader, as real and as reasonable as they are to the Haitian worshipper.”58 Indeed this is her key point: to make Voudoun legible as a practical, useful, and even necessary practice for development of the whole person and her relations within the community. She reminds the reader that it is a sedate religion designed to serve communal interests: “Religion, being a collective enterprise, is concerned with directing the cosmic forces toward a collective public good.”59 165

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As we have seen, in her preface Deren lays out a forthright explanation for why she abandoned the fi lm originally conceived for her time there and turned to writing the book instead. She claims that the “irrefutable reality and impact” of Voudoun convinced her to change tack: “I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by recording, as humbly and as accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations.”60 There are a few aspects that mark Voudoun’s reality, such as it is observed by Deren, as distinct from the “reality of show-it-to-me” in, say, At Land. Those distinctions emerge in consideration of Voudoun’s relationship to abstract, metaphysical principles as well as in its “logics,” which render it part of a broader set of phenomena from which Deren dares not divorce it. As far as reality goes, it doesn’t matter so much what Voudoun looks like since so much of what it depends upon cannot be seen. Deren focuses instead on the principles that govern it. Deren identifies metaphysical principles in the structure of belief on which Voudoun is founded; Voudoun, for example, “proposes that man has a material body, animated by an esprit or gros-bon-ange—the soul, spirit, psyche or self—which, being non-material, does not share the death of the body.” 61 This spirit, after death, may achieve the status of a loa, a divinity, and become the archetypal representative of some natural or moral principle. It may become the animating force of his physical body. So both the serviteur with her material body but eternal soul and the loa whom she serves represent a vitality that is not visible but becomes manifested through the rituals. The practice of those rituals enhances the individual’s relationship to several intersecting communities: the living (the present), the ancestral (the past, with an eye to future generations as well), and the divine (the for-all-time). Practice is the operative word for ritual activity (process, not product). Deren specifies that the objects, songs, settings of worship—even the worshippers themselves—only activate the divine through ritualized activities. “Neither the song nor the singer is sacred; the sacred moment is the singing of the song for the sacred purpose of summoning Legba. Divinity is an energy, an act. The serviteur does not say, ‘I believe.’ He says: ‘I serve.’

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And it is the act of service—the ritual—which infuses both man and matter with divine power.”62 Neither are the objects of the ritual sacred per se, although they become charged with divine energy within the context of practicing the ritual. These objects are “sacred only in action; and since an act is transitory in time, Voudoun has, indeed, a quality which can only be described as a constant ‘disappearingness’; for when its function is fulfilled, the object ceases to be sacred.” Or to put it into the ultimate statement of incompletion, as Deren does immediately thereafter: “Nothing is accomplished forever; it must always be done again.”63 The idea of a life’s work relative to Deren’s Haiti projects takes on new meaning in this light. We see in these details of Deren’s approach to Voudoun a continuation of several of her principal artistic concerns, particularly those having to do with the tension between binaries: e.g., subject vs. object, visible vs. invisible, process vs. product. The imagery inhering in Voudoun as Deren explicates it also draws on such binaries. Of the traits common to all of the loa, Deren identifies several that articulate a study in contrasts: each presides over both death and life, each contains both positive and negative aspects of the principle embodied by the god, each is both abstract and concrete, and each is both distant and immediate.64 Furthermore, several of the loa are threshold figures, bridging these opposites while never resolving them, as we have seen in the figure of Legba, who provides a “link between the visible, mortal world and the invisible, immortal realms.” Such figures also frequently feature another loa as a counterpart: for Legba, it is Carrefour. While Legba “commands the divinities of the day,” Carrefour manages to control “the daemons of the night.” While Legba is associated with the sun, Carrefour is associated with the moon. 65 These pairings proliferate in Deren’s descriptions of the loa, so that she outlines a symmetrical system. The Voudoun gods keep these traits in close balance without merging, dissolving, or even synthesizing them. They articulate a complex system of contradictions without resolution. Her book fi xates on several of the images, symbols, and concepts we have seen recur in her oeuvre, including elemental figures like the sun and moon, mirrors and mirroring, and doubles. The visible representations of the loa often take on these shapes: “But the sun also is a source of life, and so Damballah is represented as a serpent stretched across the sky in the arc

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of the sun’s path (which is also as a rainbow), and this arc, reflected in the sea, describes a circle [because it is reflected] which embraces the cosmos.”66 Reflection above all abounds in Deren’s description of Voudoun: it extends even to relationships among the participants in Voudoun ceremonies. The houngan (priest) calls the divinities by working backward from the salute made in their honor, mirroring earlier actions by other participants in the ceremony. When two women are possessed by Agwé, they meet, embrace, and weep together; Deren describes their weeping as mirroring each other, and as the ceremony comes to an end and everyone rejoices, she turns away and also weeps, reflecting their behavior but also adopting it as her own, setting a model of participation she will press to its limits through her account of her own possession.67 Deren is compelled by Voudoun’s structures as expressed through mirroring, such as in the idea of our world (above) as mirror of the divine world (below), like sun reflects on deep waters, or the branches of a tree mirror its roots: “The stylized tree, its branches and roots symmetrically extended to both sides of a horizon, is signaled, over and over, in the vevers.”68 The vevers (abstract drawings symbolic of the divinity being worshipped, but also a “doorway,” a conduit for the loa to pass from the divine world to ours) are expressed “in mirrored symmetry to both sides of an horizon” (fig. 3.3).69 Legba (god of the life source) and Ghede (god of the dead) exert their presence on both sides of the threshold, and both therefore represent both life and death. The semimystical symmetry of the two worlds provides an amplification of the persons in the ceremony who summon the loa. Within the principle of the loa lies the principle of humankind: “A loa contains both subject and object, both the seer and the thing seen. In Voudoun neither man nor matter is divine. A loa is an intelligence, a relationship of man to matter.”70 Humanity reflects the gods, and vice versa. It is through their relationship that both derive meaning. Thus the performance of the rituals is designed to prepare the devout to be better citizens of both their spiritual and quotidian communities; through that performance, Deren’s book emphasizes the close relationship of the self and other, reality and imagination, material and abstract being. Indeed, the relationships are close enough that Deren tends to revert to their similarity. For instance, for the serviteur, the literal and the symbolic are cut of the same cloth: 168

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FIGURE 3.3 Vevers.

In effect, nothing is more meaningless or perplexing to the Haitian than to be asked what some ritual action ‘represents’, ‘stands for,’ or ‘symbolizes’. When food is put down for the loa, the Haitian understands precisely that fact: the loa are being given food; and all ritual action is understood with the same immediacy. The real, visible action of a ritual is not the symbolic statement of some idea . . .71

When a Voudoun serviteur dances, she is exercising “the meditation of the body, so that the entire organism is made to concentrate on a concept as defi nite and real . . . but more complex and less accessible to verbal articulation.”72 In essence, the inaccessible and invisible are made accessible and visible. At the crux of these opposites in tension with each other is the practice of Voudoun itself, which mediates them as non-dual dualisms. 169

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Through ritual, the serviteur brings cosmic forces into relation with her daily life. It demands the depersonalization of the individual, but in exchange allows the expansion of the self into larger universal, cosmic interests: “The sense of the dedicated act is to serve, not oneself, but the object of one’s dedication, and it is therefore characterized by a quality of selflessness, discipline and even of depersonalization. The performer becomes as if anonymous. It is from this that one derives a sense of the abstract.”73 Ultimately, though, Deren’s investment in the rituals of Haitian Voudoun became pretty personal. Partly, she sought an authentication of her likemindedness with the specific ritual practice of Voudoun. For instance, she claims that she approached the culture with such “discretion,” that native Haitians “early formed the conviction that I was not a foreigner at all, but a prodigal native daughter finally returned.”74 Her ability to interpret the foundations of Voudoun practice are based, she reports, not on “historical or esoteric research” (although as we have seen she armed herself with a great deal of reading on the subject both prior to her first visit and in the midst of her researches for the book), but rather on “immediate experience.” The anecdotally proffered reactions of native Haitians serve as her legitimization: “Indeed, my interpretation of the rituals . . . proved so consistently correct that the Haitians began to believe that I had gone through varying degrees of initiation.”75 Although she claimed a “disinterested receptivity” to what she observed, citing the fact that because she lacked an anthropological background, she could not be seen to have an agenda, Deren was certainly not disinterested generally.76 Eventually, she became a more active participant. In fact she did not just seem in her instinctive understanding of rituals like an initiate to the Haitians—she actually became initiated. Her fellow serviteurs served as witnesses to her own transfiguration through ritual. The final chapter of the book, about her possession, partially defies the ineffability of such an event of sheer depersonalization. She describes a state from which she herself by necessity was absented by adumbrating all the circumstances that immediately surrounded it. She clothes the invisible man with any evidence she might marshal to that end. One of the shortest parts of the book, this final chapter is comprised mostly of the narrative of Deren’s own possession, with a short introduc-

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tion to the context in which such a thing might occur. Possession, the “white darkness,” brings several binaries into productive relation: light and dark, ascent and descent—“The vertical dimension comprehends both the abyss below and the heavens above the earth, the dimension of infinity; the horizontal comprehends all men, all space and matter.”77 Deren accounts for the way that possession functions as a bridge between humankind and divinity, remarking that the gap that separates them may be filled in by rhythms, music, and ritual actions: “[the distance] is implied in all the calling sounds—song, drum beat, asson and langage—which are like lines thrown out, to become the cables of the bridge upon which man would cross that chasm. [ . . . ] To understand that the self must leave if the loa is to enter, is to understand that one cannot be man and god at once.”78 Divinity and humanity come together, but they are not one thing. They maintain individuality and universality at the same time. The key action is to empty, to lose the self, to depersonalize, in order (paradoxically) to receive and even become divinity. Deren’s account of possession mobilizes the various elements she had been describing in Divine Horsemen all along: it involves the merger of abstract and concrete being and more generally denotes opposites entering into more empathic relationship with one another. She walks the reader through the details of the dance, focusing on the mirroring and doubling relationships between herself and the others engaged in the ceremony; the description is vivid and subjective, drawing together the themes and foundations of Voudoun in one extended anecdote whose authority remains intact on an important level because it comes from the one who experienced it, the only witness to its authenticity. Enigmatically, the experience can only be attested to by the feeling of absence it inspired: “There is an unpleasant lightness in my head, as if the many parts of the brain were being gently disengaged, its solidity, its integrity being somehow imperceptibly dispersed, as a fog might be gently dispersed by a light, inconstant breeze; and as these separations occur, there are little spaces of emptiness.”79 Noting that endurance rather than intellection are key to the possession, Deren finds herself susceptible to possession before she knows what is happening. However, once she does become aware of it, her cinematic imagination takes control:

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the pace which had seemed unbearably demanding had slipped down a notch into a slow-motion, so that my mind had time, now, to wander, to observe at leisure, what a splendid thing it was, indeed, to hear the drums, to move like this, to be able to do all this so easily, to do even more, if it pleased one, to elaborate, to extend this movement of the arms towards greater elegance, or to counterpoint that rhythm of the heel or even to make this movement to the side, this time.80

As if in a dream, subject and object at once, Deren observes herself and the details of her movement while also feeling part of those movements, not unlike being director and actor of a fi lm at once (a state with which Deren was very familiar by this point). Suddenly, she comes to understand what is happening to her despite lingering assertions of her self. The realization is accompanied by bifurcation—a necessary split so that the divine may cross the threshold: I realize, like a shaft of terror struck through me, that it is no longer myself whom I watch. Yet it is myself, for as that terror strikes, we two are made one again, joined by and upon the point of the left leg which is as if rooted to the earth . . . my sense of self doubles again, as in a mirror, separates to both sides of an invisible threshold, except that now the vision of the one who watches flickers . . .” 81

The awkwardness of the language—“it is no longer myself whom I watch”—recalls Deren’s treatment for Ritual in Transfigured Time, in which her protagonist is similarly divided between subjective and objective positions. At the moment of possession, the binaries merge and are used to describe an experience that Deren herself is at something of a loss to explain, excepting through incongruous opposites colliding together: “The bright darkness floods up through my body . . . I am sucked down and exploded upward at once.” 82 Possession channels divided components of a universal principle back toward unity. Deren notes that this is consistent with the loa seeking a sacred space to make themselves known and observable. It is also consistent with Deren’s thinking about the relationship of binaries that coexist, the horizontal and the vertical, the bright and dark, the seen and unseen: 172

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it contains both what is present or came into being and the thing that shadows it and may yet come into being at any time. This is not unlike the projects that ever shadow the book Divine Horsemen—Deren’s unfinished film and its multiple possible forms as well as other Haitian projects including several related to Voudoun’s music. In fact the possibilities available to those projects remain open now. While the film project was never finished, the book sallied forth toward completion upon the good will of many of Deren’s supporters. Catherine Russell has articulated some of the troubles tied to Deren’s film work in Haiti and distilled the influences that affected Deren in choosing to make the book. Russell argues, in fact, for a hierarchy of representation between the two predominant formats that served as outlets for her research: “Deren eventually wrote a book that supplanted the fi lm as the more adequate expression representation of Haitian voodoo.” 83 Deren herself calls the book a more “qualitative” treatment of the material available in Haiti— and supplicates for funds to help her bring the fi lm up to the book’s higher standard. Russell posits that the fi lm footage “is . . . suggestive of the challenge that possession poses to cinematic epistemologies. [  .  .  . ] Haitian possession consisted of two very different discourses, the invisible knowledge of the gods and the visible evidence of the possessed body. Her failure to make a film is ultimately a failure to reconcile these two forms of representation.” 84 The book, because it did not need to visually represent such discourses, may have had an easier time of it, while the fi lm’s “failure to reconcile” may be considered part of her aesthetic and also a disincentive to completing the work. In any case, in its motifs about the loa and messages about the practice of Voudoun’s serviteurs, it reflects Deren’s preoccupations with contemplating complex antipodal states and her process-oriented aesthetic as well as any example in her oeuvre.

Voices of Haiti, Cadence Records, and Ritual Sounds

Deren claimed to have recorded over fift y hours of sound during her time in Haiti, primarily drumming, songs, and ceremonies, which she intended to use in the film project. Despite her earlier fi lms’ extensive use of rhythm and dancerly movements, Deren had not until preparing to work with the 173

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Haiti material felt sufficiently compelled to use music or sound to accompany the images. Indeed, she wanted the earlier films to be screened silently as well: in a checklist for rentals, she insisted that exhibitors not accompany the films with music. Prior to her first Haitian trip, only a few notes in Deren’s archive suggest she was even thinking about ideas for films with sound.85 But from the first moment of her involvement with the Haitian rituals, she incorporated sound into her plans. Once in Haiti, she took hours of audio recordings, bolstered by the windfall that gained her access to the latest technology for doing so. As she prepared for her trip, a grant from the Viking Fund allowed her a loan of audio recording equipment from the Webster Wire Recorder Company, portable equipment she could transport anywhere. She then invested in a converter that would allow her to run the recorder on automobile battery power. Since many of the places she intended to film and record sound were without electricity, this step was necessary for acquiring the audio tracks directly from the rituals she filmed. Because it was a new technological possibility to bring the recorder out into the field, she touted her work as being better than earlier records of Haitian music and rituals: it was uncanned, authentic sound taken in the field. The direct quality of these recordings mattered to her: to make them, she would mount the microphone on the poteau-mîtan (the center post around which the ceremonies revolved) to capture all the drumming, songs, the participants’ prayers, the voices of the possessed, and all the ambient noise of a ceremony as it transpired. Upon returning to the United States, she almost immediately used some of those recordings for a film. However, it was not the film she had planned to make in Haiti; instead, she lent some of her recordings of drumming to the soundtrack of Meditation on Violence, combined with a track of a sole Chinese flute (a preexisting recording that she did not engineer). She mixed the sound herself (mostly keeping the two sources separate), marking her first foray into sound filmmaking.86 Deren then kept the rest of her recordings for eventual use in her films about Haiti, but unlike the film footage, she didn’t keep them away for long, instead putting them to several practical and personal uses, even for ambient party music. Deren envisioned an interlocking set of projects for these recordings: first and foremost she intended them for her films of Voudoun rituals, but 174

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this purpose they never fulfilled in the way she hoped. She later conceived of the project to put together a multimedia set of materials she intended to sell to universities or other public institutions to propagate a more authentic version of Voudoun for American audiences, of which the wire recordings would be a part. At one ambitious point, she described that project as including some ten hours of recordings from the wire recordings accompanied by still images of objects used for the ceremonies and an analytical text to explain them. At the furthest extent of such a project, Deren imagined the 16mm fi lm footage as part of the package to be marketed to educational institutions: “I would further recommend, and if this were possible it would make the study really rich, prints of selected portions of my 16mm motion pictures of the actual ceremonies and dances, some of it filmed in slow motion for an extremely precise analysis of complex dance movement.”87 The scope of this plan illustrates Deren’s ambitions to serve as an ambassador for Voudoun’s interests. It also shows Deren to be interested in a much more practical way in bringing together her wide-ranging, cross-medial interests for one centralizing purpose and merging the multiple creative outlets she discovered for her Haitian projects. While the whole of this enterprising plan was never put into motion, before long, Deren did embark on two major record projects, only the first of which she released. The finished project, a single long-playing album of songs from ceremonies, was produced for Elektra Records; it was released in March 1953 under the title Voices of Haiti, and it enjoyed some success as part of their ethnic and folk category (fig. 3.4).88 It features a little over thirty minutes of singing, ceremonial call-and-response, and drumming. The contents include processionals like “Creole O Voudoun” and “Signalé Agwé Arroyo,” a shoulder dance “Ayizan Marché,” and representations of different traditions (Ibo, Banda, Mahi) in dances, most with some singing.89 The second project was for Cadence Records—an ambitious plan for a set of six long-playing records. It progressed so far that a few public notices were issued about it coming out soon (including in Billboard magazine);90 catalog numbers were assigned to each of the records. Deren drafted copy for the liner notes with detailed descriptions of the contents of the albums, and she devoted a great deal of energy to preparing the recordings for production. Nevertheless, this series was never released.91 175

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FIGURE 3.4 Maya Deren, cover for Voices of Haiti record. (Courtesy Boston University Special Collections)

Both projects were designed to make Voudoun practice more familiar to a non-Haitian audience. As Deren remarks in her liner notes, the recordings were taken from performed ceremonies; they are presented as a point of access to an otherwise inaccessible, authentic state of worship. At one point, she wanted them to accompany the films without any other explanatory sound or text: she believed the images and music spoke for themselves. When she released it as a record, Deren decided to use the liner notes and her book’s descriptions to provide context for the music, paint-

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ing a vivid picture of the all-encompassing way of Voudoun life experienced by its practitioner: The devout worshipper is engaged in an almost continual ceremony: the sacred symbols are part of the structure of his own thatch-roofed hut; the libation which precedes his own food and drink has become an unshakable habit; the syllables of the sacred names of his divinities, or loa, form silently in his mind or may become the song which sounds out in the hot silence of afternoon or the cooler silence of evening.92

Deren’s notes are lengthy, detailed, and more poetic than ethnographic. They approach the subject of Voudoun from the position of an appreciator and artist. Just as she does later in her lectures, interviews, and articles, she attempts in this way to educate her listener about what they are hearing on a personal level; in so doing, she wrenches the music into a specific shape for the audience’s reception. For example, she describes the Mardi Gras Festival as “all raucous, spangled hilarity,” contrasted with the Ra-Ra Festival: “surprisingly, a carnival in minor key, beautifully lyric, almost melancholy.” These are not objective descriptions that would leave the listener to interpret what she hears herself; rather, they are descriptions from the perspective of an individual experiencing them from an artistic point of view. Noting the beauty both of the music and of the practice that motivates it, Deren also lends shape to the ceremonies, affording Voudoun comprehensibility and universality in relation to other traditions. For instance, Deren depicts sound as a “sacred formula of symbols” inhering in other religious traditions worldwide, such as “mantras in ancient Sanskrit . . . the chants of the Moslem muezzin, or the saying of the Catholic rosary.” She addresses universal concerns seen in Voudoun and other religions, including the need “to enlist . . . assistance” and to ritualize behavior so as to address powers larger than oneself. Deren explains that in observing and listening to the act of ritual worship, the Voudoun outsider may discover how the transformation of the individual into part of the larger, universal macrocosm occurs. She aims to provide a psychological explanation akin to other traditions of religious transformation. The transformation, moreover,

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has positive, communal effects that hardly conform to the exotic, supposedly oversexualized contortions of the possessed individual. Thus disparaging “maligned and misunderstood” interpretations of Voudoun “confounded with superstition and magic,” Deren takes the opportunity to set the record straight through the testimony of rites overheard.93 Deren’s liner notes also comment on what she saw as her recording’s unique qualities. These center on the authenticity of the ceremony and the participants’ ignorance of being recorded. Strapped to the center post, the recording ostensibly obviates a disruptive anthropological presence in the center of the ceremony. The people thus recorded do not address an audience (though, notably, Deren did); instead, they address themselves to divinity, and the listener is a surreptitious witness to it: “They are singing for the gods; it is a privilege to have overheard and to have recorded it.” The lengthy written commentary ends with a citation of Deren’s credentials as author of Divine Horsemen and with the unfulfi lled promise “for immediate release” of “a series of 16mm fi lms of Voudoun ceremonials,” making the recordings part and parcel of Deren’s larger project and emphasizing her experience with the subject. These recordings are the result of the conclusion Deren reached in her preface to the book—that she had to cease her manipulations and present all of the materials as they were in their own self-contained reality. Even so, the anthropological establishment censured Deren’s methods for all of her interventions in Haiti; for whatever direct qualities they contained, Deren tended to interpret and present them in such a way that, although not quite artistic at its foundation, was neither quite ethnographic. One of her more vehement opponents turned out to be Margaret Mead, who wrote to Deren that she could not provide a blurb for her book because the work was “methodologically . . . inadmissible.”94 Considering the stakes of Mead’s own claims to visual anthropology, in which she and Bateson with an obsessive attention to detail documented contextual data pertaining to their gathering of anthropological information, her rejection of this aspect of Deren’s work, which as we have seen strongly depends on anecdotal information and a subjective perspective, is consistent with her professional aims.95 The combination of poetry and ethnography in evidence in this collection of recordings from Haiti precisely mirrors Deren’s approach to all of 178

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her Haitian projects, which may have contributed to the difficulties Deren had with finishing the films, since she wanted them to be part of the province of documentary—not experimental or creative film work (in other words, an uncharted province for Deren over which others, including Mead, held dominion).

Mike Wallace and Lectures on Haiti For many of us, Voodoo is the black magic of the grade C jungle movie. But for Maya Deren, the myth of Voodoo was a challenge. She went alone into the heart of Haiti. For three years, she lived it, was possessed by it, and has come back to tell just a little of the mysteries of Voodoo without the mumbo jumbo. — M I K E WA L LA C E , C O N C L U D I N G A R A D I O I N T E RV IE W WITH MAYA DE R E N

Deren brought Voudoun to public attention through as many venues as were available to her. One option was to give interviews and deliver lectures—whether about the topic of her book, related to her fi lms (both fi nished and projected), or more generally—in which she addressed its history and vitality in the lives of Haitians. Often she saw these appearances in person, voice, and/or print as opportunities to advocate for Voudoun as well as for her project. To this end, on May 30, 1957, Deren recorded a radio program with Mike Wallace for his program Night Beat. Because her interlocutor in this instance takes the form of an unusually wily interviewer—in most other cases, she is more neutrally allowed to present her thoughts—the program uniquely illuminates Deren’s position and what she was working for and against in her defense of Voudoun. It shows her reiterating and therefore emphasizing certain aspects of Voudoun, especially bent toward making its similarities with the Night Beat audience more evident. After cueing drum music from Deren’s stock of recordings, Wallace begins: “This is Voodoo. The dance to the god of death and life, as seen and recorded in the Haitian hinterland by our second guest, Maya Deren.” Although the interview concludes with Wallace’s statement about Deren leaving the “mumbo jumbo” out of her account of Voudoun, he himself 179

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does less well at skirting sensationalisms. Even at his most even-handed moments, Wallace cannot seem to help himself from suddenly bringing up orgies, black magic, possession, and “witch doctors.” As such, he serves as the stand-in for an educated public that is nonetheless transfixed by rumors of Voudoun’s primitive, “jungle” otherness. Deren counters Wallace’s questioning in two ways: she attempts to educate her audience about “real” Voudoun and she attempts to make it relatable for that audience: in so doing, it becomes evident that not being tied to all the hard facts of Voudoun ultimately serves her own artistic arc. Notwithstanding that this arc is marked by an investment in specific anthropological perspectives and their semi-didactic, logical, intellectual functions, Deren does not wholly reject the possibility of creative ends coming out of her time in Haiti. That is, despite her admission of creative defeat in the face of “the logics of a reality which had forced [her] to recognize its integrity,” a defeat that she claimed provided inspiration to shift her labor to work of anthropological significance (her text of Divine Horsemen), reality in fact did not completely overwhelm the possibility of a creative approach. As we have seen, even Divine Horsemen depends on her role as an artist for both its motive and conclusions. For precisely that reason, it has met with resistance from the anthropological community then and now, with Mead being simply the most vocal of Deren’s contemporaries against her methods.96 In fact, the book depends on navigation of Deren’s artistic tendency in light of the anthropological goals she sought. Deren reflects on precisely this sort of navigation as she recounts in her notebook from 1947 a recent conversation with Hammid about the praise she received from anthropologist Alfred Métraux regarding her 1942 article about dance and possession: And on the way back that whole discussion with S. [Hammid] who said maybe I would eventually abandon fi lm and become an anthropologist. And my insistence that I would never be satisfied analyzing the nature of a given reality but would want to make my own. And his answer that that attitude brought to anthropology might make a new branch of it. And my answer that perhaps in introducing the anthropological attitude into fi lm I was making a new branch of fi lm. Well—maybe . . . Anyway, I don’t see why you have to leave facts and ideas out of art. Why not coordinate the whole business in the creative terms of art?97 180

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Deren’s advocacy for the practice of Voudoun here is marked by an awareness of productively toeing the line between reality-objectivity-anthropology and creativity-subjectivity-art. Her work develops by balancing these points of tension, as we have seen in earlier efforts. In the interview with Wallace, as well as at several other moments when Deren acts as ambassador for Voudoun, her involvement with the facts of Voudoun as an artist comes to the fore. Wallace begins the interview by asking Deren to explain just what Voudoun is: “nobody seems entirely to agree, from what I’ve read, just what Voudoun is. Black magic? A dignified religion? An orgiastic ritual, or what?” Deren responds seriously and authoritatively, making a distinction between a “real Voudoun ritual” and what most reporters in Haiti are exposed to and address in their writing. She steers the discussion away from the shim-sham Wallace brings up (as if he is simply addressing the general consensus about Voudoun and without acknowledging his complicity in propagating that perspective). Throughout the interview, Wallace cannot resist returning to preconceived, deprecatory, and/or sensationalistic versions of Voudoun—not when he cites others and not when he engages in his own line of questioning. Deren hies quickly away from Wallace’s misrepresentations in an effort to educate the listeners about Voudoun’s role as a religion, noting its social functions and framing it as part of the fabric of the society from which it derives. When Wallace asks about its origins and structure, Deren takes time for a disquisition on the matter, drawn from her book. It ends with her assertion that on their arrival in Haiti, slaves from African tribes that had been separated focused on the similarities in their beliefs with slaves from other tribes: “And so today you have a structure in which you have in a sense a congress of tribes, and when they invoke, let’s say, the god of power, they may use all the names by which he is known to the different tribes, but the principle is the same.”98 The people who originated Voudoun sensed the familiarity of certain universal principles among their beliefs; Deren then suggests that non-Haitians, too, should be able to recognize the same echoes of universal ideas and rites among their own ideas with Voudoun. That it shares features of several religious traditions becomes central to Deren’s portrait of it. Not far into the interview, Wallace asks: “What are the characteristics of Voudoun which distinguish it from other religions— 181

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what is the set up, if you will, the table of organization, of its gods?” Deren counters that Voudoun is actually not “distinctive.” Rather, she replies: I think on the contrary that it is very much like other religions. It has a pantheon, which is very similar to the Greek pantheon as we knew it, of divinities. Or very similar to the Hindu pantheon. Where the various cosmic principles are represented in archetype, so that you have a figure that stands for power, and you may even have various aspects of power, and you have a figure which stands for love with its multiple aspects.

While Deren stresses the universality of Voudoun, Wallace, returning to its otherness, queries: “And then what about the magicians . . . so-called black magic. Are these witch-doctors also a part of Voodoo?” Deren vehemently counters: “Oh, no. They have no part in it whatsoever. None whatsoever. They have no role at all. They’re just completely separate . . .” Wallace, seeming not quite to believe it, and aligning himself with the “skeptical” audience he imagines to be listening to the program, continues his attempt to get sexier answers. Accordingly, Wallace asks her to describe possession. Deren delicately admonishes him, noting that, just as her editors for the book thought leading with possession would make for “a nice, sensational beginning,” talking about possession “unless one had gotten all the background properly” might give people the wrong impression. After briefly encouraging people to read the book first to gain the proper context, Deren obliges Wallace’s question in a way that foregrounds the visual/nonvisual divide we have seen in the ritual observances of Voudoun: “Now, about possession, it is a matter of the loa or the principles being non-material and having no physical existence. [ . . . ] So, in order to become manifest from time to time, and to show their nature to the community, they possess an individual.99 Deren outlines a relationship between the individual and the community as well as the visible and invisible. “To show their nature to the community,” the loa inhabit that community bodily. In such a state, they are able to “overcome” the individuals—against their will, though clearly possession is a desired outcome of Voudoun rites—so that the community might prosper against the more selfish desires of the individuals comprising it. The subjectivity of individuals is temporarily exchanged for a ritualized 182

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collectivity, made manifest for the health of the community. Deren notes that the average Voudoun adherent wishes never to cause “pain and hurt to somebody.” In fact, it looks similar to the moral system with which her radio audience would have felt themselves to be familiar. In such a way, for the duration of the interview, Deren insists both on taking Voudoun seriously and repositioning its seemingly primitive, obscure, or titillating practices so as to be familiar and understandable to her audience, an audience she trusts to comprehend the concepts she expostulates without the skepticism both underlined and adopted by Wallace. When next they listen to a recording of music played to Erzulie, one of those direct recordings taken during a ceremony which Deren repurposed for various projects (such as this interview), Wallace does not respond as the ideal, receptive audience Deren might wish for. Instead, he returns to his notion of love potions, wild dancing, and sex parties: “Now, what about—we hear from time to time about alleged orgies. Does this dance to the god of love involve sexual passions?” Deren takes time to explain how being “Erzulie-like” helps the individual doing the ritual to become more lovable, a better person through the “interior miracle.” She insists on the morality and accessibility of Voudoun, protesting that, although she is not exactly a “convert” (in Wallace’s terms) to Voudoun: I agree that there are the forces in the universe of which Voudoun speaks, but there are other religions which speak of those forces also. And I’ve mentioned several of them. I do find that the manner in which it operates in practice, ritually, the interior miracle, if you will, is very valid. I find that if you follow those rituals you sometimes get the same results.

Following Voudoun can (“sometimes”) bring you to the same end as rites practiced in other religions. The name is different, the practices might vary, but the miracle desired by and sometimes conferred upon the practitioner is the same. Deren frames the practice of Voudoun as an all-encompassing way of life. Through ritual the serviteur comes to a full appreciation of the value of life—for herself and her community. At the end of her description of the practice, Deren adds, taking a page from her (own) book: “Whether that would be called believing?—You see the Haitians never ask whether you 183

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believe in Voudoun. They say: do you do it? Do you serve?” The act of doing comes to represent the religion itself. One can see why this would appeal to an artist whose sense of process was particularly heightened. It also begins to suggest an answer to the question of what happened between the plan for Haiti and the ways in which Deren “served” her artistic mission there. Fundamentally, even ten years after her first visit to the small country, Deren was still in the act of creating her project—bound up with her own notions of self, community, and the larger questions of transcendent experience before, through, and after cinema. Deren ends the interview by responding to Wallace’s suggestion that the audience must be “looking askance” at her talk about Voudoun: Well, I don’t think they would be if they just related a little bit to things that they have from time to time felt. For example, at those moments when they forgot themselves, and when everything was clear by a certain logic that was larger than themselves. Those moments, imagine those multiplied a thousand times so that oneself is really transcended and everything is clear in another way, I think one would begin to know what I mean. I think artistic inspiration is in that direction. I think love is in that direction. The logics of love are different than the logics of non-love.100

This conclusion encapsulates the relatable nature of Voudoun, as well as Deren’s belief in the idea that “logic” and “inspiration” need never be divorced from one another, just as art and reality, self and others, art and ideas, and the human and divine need not be. This belief shapes the work she accomplishes (and the work she continues without “completion”) in and between trips to Haiti. It also motivates the way the work brings together these disparate tendencies into ultimately felicitous interrelation. Her interviews and lectures helped Deren sort through these ideas on her feet and to promulgate Voudoun as a comprehensible religious practice.

R ITU A LS IN N O TIM E If the earth is a sphere, then the abyss below the earth is also its heavens; and the difference between them is no more than time, the time of the

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earth’s turning. If the earth is a vast horizontal surface reflecting, invisibly, even for each man his own proper soul, then again, the abyss below the earth is also its heavens, and the difference between them is time, the time of an eye lifting and dropping. The sun-door and the tree-root are the same thing in the same place, seen now from below and now from above and named, by the seer, for the moment of seeing. — M AYA D E R E N , ( D I V I N E HO R S E ME N)

As we have seen, even before Deren embarked on her first trip to Haiti, her films experimented with space, extending Euclidean notions of space through “camera reality,” in which noncontiguous places are joined together to engender creative geographies (for example her character’s steps across grasses, sand, pavement, and carpet to kill her sleeping self in Meshes of the Afternoon). Her depictions of cinematic space, however, began to shift as she focused her work on Haiti and ritual. Her work began to fi xate on spaces that may not easily be depicted, such as sacred space, voids, or ethereal interstices. The unfinished Haitian footage bears witness to the expansion of this interest (as do other late films like The Very Eye of Night). These works underscore the possibility that the invisible might materialize out of seemingly nowhere, and they probe—to repurpose Deleuze only slightly—the any-space-whatever where the invisible might emerge. In such spaces, whatever seeks material presence might be glimpsed, however briefly or from a slant. Deren uses the evocation of such impossible spaces to pursue questions about the capricious material basis of cinema, augmenting and complicating how we might think of cinema’s ability to grapple with our relation to spatial matters. Further, just as it does for her earlier films, and with even greater influence, Deren’s Haitian project draws on the principle of incompletion. The rituals that so engaged Deren do so because they mobilize in a practical form several of the principles—particularly metaphysical notions regarding the related binaries of invisibility/visibility, absence/presence, and incompletion/completion—that guide her sense of creative activity. The means by which those principles are examined include, again, mirroring, recursion, and simultaneity. Even as it guides Deren through a decade of considerable work, the star of incompletion forestalls Deren’s own completion of the project and places that work in a precarious position for her legacy. 185

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The key strategy for Deren amidst these circumstances was—across several media, using methods appropriate to each—to demonstrate the recognizable features of Voudoun, fi lming, explaining, and framing them in familiar terms. A sense of familiarity was fundamental to Deren’s perception of Voudoun, and her creative projects aimed to level perceived differences. However, although Deren consistently tried to vindicate Voudoun according to its own terms, undoubtedly she also brought her own notions about what she hoped to discover and shaped her descriptions of it accordingly. Rita Christiani, interviewed years after filming Ritual in Transfigured Time, reflected on Deren’s state of anticipation for the journey to Haiti as a search for fulfi llment of something difficult to characterize, the very difficulty which becomes central to her aesthetic: It was as though she were looking for something. She knew what it was, but she just could not verbalize it, within the confines of a mind. Now whether that was why she used so many of the things that she would later experience, I don’t know. She might have known that some of these things would be the things that she would find in a culture such as Haiti.101

Not being able to verbalize the thing she sought in Haiti in fact points to the nature of what she found there. Joseph Campbell, in an introduction to Deren’s text of Divine Horsemen, comments on “the manifestations of rapture that there first fascinated and then seized her,” which “transported her beyond the bounds of any art she had known.” He attributes her inability to work with the Haitian material as an artist to her success with navigating an unverbalized, difficult-to-access condition of being: “She was open, willingly and respectfully, to the messages of the speechless deep . . .”102 But it is precisely through her ranging artistic temperament that she felt she was able to access any of these messages in the first place. Both are necessary to her work. Deren sought to elucidate the similarities between Voudoun and a range of different kinds of rituals across diverse cultures to demonstrate how it might relate to a non-Haitian audience; she became an advocate for the logic of Voudoun as she focused her work on the notion of ritual. Deren also saw similarities with the experience of practicing Voudoun on a per186

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sonal level. In her first encounters with it, Deren considered the practice of Voudoun as contiguous with her otherness as an artist: in a modern industrial culture, the artists constitute, in fact, an “ethnic group,” subject to the full “native” treatment. We too are exhibited as touristic curiosities on Monday, extolled as culture on Tuesday, denounced as immoral and unsanitary on Wednesday, reinstated for scientific study Thursday, feasted for some obscurely stylish reason Friday, forgotten Saturday, revisited as picturesque Sunday.103

Perhaps part of her recuperation of Haitian Voudoun derived from this recognition of its affi nities with her own preoccupations as an artist. If she could not exactly accomplish an artistic aim through Voudoun as she had planned, she at least could come to understand something about her art by rigorous consideration of Voudoun’s terms and form. Deren anticipated her fi lm serving as a bridge between possession as an idea and as an experience. For her 1942 article “Religious Possession in Dancing,” she concedes: “Perhaps nothing is more difficult than to comprehend the emotional quality and emotional value of an experience which does not have its counter-part in one’s own emotional history.”104 In confronting the model of Voudoun’s religious practice, Deren sought any outlet that would allow expression of its ineffable principles, just as through rituals the loa seek an outlet for expression of their principles. Deren was primed for a multimedial engagement with Voudoun as a result of her own divergent interests as well as the demand that ensued of dealing with material that did not fit the mold of “reality” with which she was accustomed to work. Her recognition of the universality of Voudoun— against what she discovered about its position in the Haitian and touristic atmosphere in the late 1940s—drives her work there and eventually elicits a record of her own struggle as an artist. That struggle entails her efforts to document a preexisting reality that is by nature elusive, invisible, and transitory, and further, to create something out of such a reality.

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At the same time that Deren was laboring on many Haiti-related works, she proposed and worked on several things not immediately related to those materials. Deren finished and distributed two more films during this period, Meditation on Violence and The Very Eye of Night, and she made headway in her plans for other fi lms, including one on Medusa, one about the circus, and one that she called a “haiku film,” through which she intended to explore poetic form and themes of communal relations. In addition, Deren continued a program of lectures, traveled with her films around the United States, served as a somewhat reluctant administrator for the Creative Film Foundation, completed several articles, and published photographs not having to do with Haitian subjects. These projects, both creative and critical, finished and unfinished, provide her with funds to support her Haitian projects; they also extend the forms and themes Deren was exploring there while allowing her to vent other ideas from a vantage point outside of Haiti. In a recent interview, Miriam Arsham suggested that by the fi rst time Deren went to Haiti, she had in mind focusing on creative projects other than filmmaking.1 Over the course of a decade of work there, she accomplished or attempted work in a range of media. Also, however, during this late period, if completing projects had been important to Deren before,

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more often than not they fall further by the wayside now; they are either abandoned wholesale, shelved, or frustrated along the way. As a result, more than ever incompletion becomes the modus operandi for the remainder of Deren’s career. The late projects confirm Deren’s investment in incompletion, especially through engagement with ritual form.

THE FIN ISHED WOR K , 19 4 7 –1 9 6 1

Deren’s harnessing of the energy of incompletion continues in the years after her first trip to Haiti. Two of her fi lm projects—Meditation on Violence (1949) and The Very Eye of Night (1958)—met with the success of being finished, screened, and eventually distributed as part of the Deren oeuvre. However, even as finished works, the terms of incompletion are embedded within them in several ways: their progress by no means flowed unhindered from conception to completion, they embody paths untaken or rerouted, and they expand several of the symbols and modes of incompletion we see in her earlier works. Moreover, the key issues Deren was working through with the Haitian project find an outlet in these other occupations. The finished films of this period push the formal boundaries set by Deren’s earlier fi lms, experimenting in new directions while being guided by old questions: e.g., in their original forms, Meditation on Violence and The Very Eye of Night feature sound, unlike any of their predecessors. With their reconfiguration of cinematic elements and their hierophantic treatment of semimystical subjects, both fi lms initiate a new set of relationships within Deren’s oeuvre that reinvigorates her creative agenda. Meditation on Violence mobilizes incompletion primarily in its themes and form, which embraces a non-resolving arc. Her drawings describing the structure of the film literally take on the form of such an arc: “a parabolic curve extend [sic] into infinity.” The film addresses themes having to do with the balance of energies, taking as its subject the Wu-Tang and Shao-Lin martial arts that seek to effect this balance. The Very Eye of Night is an exemplar of incompletion in its themes, medium-specific concerns, and practical progress (or, often, lack of progress) toward completion as a film as well. It shows the simultaneous freedom and frustration of her work when it is shaped by aspects of incompletion, in this case mainly 190

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through its collapsing of the negative/positive, light/dark, and heavenly/ bodily divides, as well as by its development as a project. Notwithstanding a few champions of their charms, both fi lms have often met with denigration within the Deren oeuvre, both in Deren’s lifetime and afterward. For instance, in an article for Film News in 1979, Thomas Mayer begins in adulation for Deren and her work, claiming that her films “are a milestone in the history of cinema . . . [they] broke new ground.”2 But when he comes to the years post–Ritual in Transfigured Time, he laments the reasons that “prevented her in the last fifteen years of her life from completing any film, except for Meditation on Violence . . . and Eye of Night.”3 The sentence’s beginning—“prevented her  .  .  . from completing any film”—sounds at first almost as if she did not complete any films after that point (as if these last films should not but for historical accuracy even be included in the list). And its conclusion—“except for . . . [the films she actually did complete]”—is tentative, qualified. Tentative and qualified are in fact as far as Mayer is willing to go with the last works. Of Meditation on Violence he writes: “It is one of her most ambitious fi lms, and her biggest failure.”4 Toward The Very Eye of Night, he is similarly scornful: “it is impossible to follow what happens in the fi lm without reference to the fi lmmaker’s writings. And again, as with Meditation on Violence, her concepts . . . are far more interesting and complex than the film which resulted.”5 The work that Deren accomplished in the last years of her life is often greeted with similarly dismissive reviews. Such responses call attention to the scrutiny paid to the earlier quartet of films (Meshes, At Land, Study, and Ritual) and the relative scarcity of consideration for the productions from the end of her career.6 This neglect may also at the time have abetted the decline in Deren’s productivity in her later years of work: she was not getting the kind of encouragement for which she had hoped. Contemporary reviews were mixed; Walter Terry reviewed a preview screening of Meditation on Violence before its short stint at the Provincetown Playhouse, noting that the preview “had rough spots, but Miss Deren reports that cutting, improvement of the sound and other corrections will be made before the public showings . . .”7 Deren’s promise for improvement underscores her desire to keep working on a project, to tinker with it even beyond its release, while Terry’s withholding of judgment points to an ambivalence about what he has seen—ambivalence 191

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forged through an uncertainty about the relationship between the fi lm as executed and the ideas that drive its formal elements, as well as prompted by Deren’s promise of revision. This sampling of reviews of Deren’s work points to the importance of ideas as the architecture for each film, particularly in her last decade of work. Recall her fondness for saying that “The most important thing in this world is an idea,”8 or her recounting the conversation with Hammid about the Haitian footage: “Anyway, I don’t see why you have to leave facts and ideas out of art. Why not coordinate the whole business in the creative terms of art?”9 While she recognizes that many people demand a cinema predicated not on ideas but motivations and actions, she was not herself deterred by such demands. Indeed, her next films demonstrate as much, and they patently reject the notion that drawing on ideas might degrade the result.

Meditation on Violence

Deren conceived of Meditation on Violence “in terms of the form as a whole, and particularly in reference to a non-literary continuity for film.” That is, just as in her other fi lms, and here baldly stated, she is not interested in psychological causality or linearity of a narrative sense. The film’s openness works both in favor of its themes—how violence and inaction are related to one another, for instance—and its structure, which is circular, recursive, and in excess of a closed system. The film evolves out of this “form as a whole,” and that form is its point: Deren maps the formal ideas based on the notion of a curve describing traditional training movements of Wu-Tang and Shao-Lin schools of Chinese boxing. She charts this movement commencing with her performer Ch’ao-Li Chi executing steady and balanced movements (Wu-Tang) that then increase in intensity and speed (Shao-Lin), culminating with a peak of velocity and violence of motion (Sword Shao-Lin). The third section employs slightly disorienting cuts to keep up with the pace and finally, even more disorientingly, climaxes in the opposite of what one expects of moving pictures: stillness. Ch’ao-Li Chi jumps into the air, and Deren holds him suspended in air for a second or two before resuming his motion and allowing him to land (a similar action of stilling the frame as in the statuary sequence of Ritual in 192

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Transfigured Time).10 Deren explains: “The ultimate of an extreme becomes its opposite. Here the ultimate of violence is paralysis.” From that point of stasis, the action is run in reverse through the same motions through which it just passed, so that it runs from Wu-Tang to Shao-Lin to Sword Shao-Lin to stasis, then back to Sword Shao-Lin, Shao-Lin, and WuTang. It sketches an arc that then boomerangs back on itself rather than heading toward an ending, a resolution. All of the filmic elements are plugged into the service of this formal arc. The setting, costuming, and other aspects of the mise-en-scène (the walls should be curved, the background all white, the costume “anonymous”) and the angles, film speed, and editing (the flow of the action in the photography is “not to be interrupted. Long camera runs. Slight slow motion”) allow the film to examine “a constant state of balance in motion.” The first section is marked by a calculated rhythm and connection among the shots. The film’s return to this same movement at the end begets a tentative closure through balance in its form. Parabolarity takes the place of closure (fig. 4.1). While Deren dictates that movement should “round back upon itself, rather than complete into a full extension, since such extremes are vulnerable to points of stasis,”11 the film eventually seeks out such stasis at its center. It keeps these opposites in balance by running backwards over the steps it has taken to come to a position expressing the ultimate tension, then effectively deflates that tension by undoing what it has just done. The second part represents Shao-Lin, “a discipline of strength” marked by a quality of aggression, separation, and sharpness. Deren adds shoes to Ch’ao-Li Chi’s costume, alternates between black and white walls, and includes a “sharp side light making black and whiteness and shadows.” The film speed for this second section runs at a normal rate (not slightly slower, as in the previous section), and the medium shot becomes the norm. In these ways it designates a transition from the fluidity and pacific interiority of the first section into the pulsating rhythm and outward-directed violence of the third section. The editing, too, becomes more severe, with “cuts at ends of movement so that movements are separated and segregated.” Unlike in the first section, for which Deren describes the camera “as witness” (a role that allows the camera to “gently identify” with Ch’aoLi Chi’s own movements), here “the camera is confronted,” albeit not yet obliged to battle, and the manner of filming echoes the increasing energy 193

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FIGURE 4.1 Parabola describing the structure of Meditation on Violence. (Courtesy Boston University Special Collections)

of the performer, with the camera dipping and bobbing in an effort to frame his movements. The final section to be developed, Sword Shao-Lin, builds on this increase to lash out against the camera; Deren notes that here “The camera is engaged as adversary.”12 This portion of the film is staged out of doors on a round, stone plateau overlooking a deep ravine. It represents a space apart specifically reserved for confrontation. Ch’ao-Li Chi moves into the camera, making eye contact with the lens while thrusting the sword into the foreground, breaking the taboo of looking into the camera and also cutting through the cinema’s version of the fourth wall. His actions are vigorous— a controlled outbreak of aggression—against the invisible force that provides the spectator’s view of him. This last of the three sections to be presented takes place at the center of the film (from there the film runs backwards to its starting point again). Deren allows the least amount of time for this section and provides the least description of it in her explanatory notes. Even so, the moment when violence briefly trumps meditation is central (literally) to the formal balance of the film. The camera moves out of doors to what Deren calls “hard 194

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reality” (in contrast with the “interior reality” of the first two parts). The section introduces a slight overall acceleration and a preponderance of lower angles. In the editing, Deren calls for jump cuts “so that more movement occurs than is seen. The hand faster than the eye. Jump from long shot to CU, low to high angle, left to right frames. Oppositional cutting.”13 Such oppositions represent a new phase in Deren’s strategies: up to this point, as we have seen (for instance in her Guggenheim application), her work emphasized the development of ideas about continuity even in impossible mobilizations of space and time (e.g., the footsteps across many landscapes in Meshes). Now she pushes beyond that idea’s parameters to mobilize a distinctively cinematic assertion of her developing philosophy. That is, the cinematic medium can vaunt incredible flexibility in the balancing of oppositional forces. For instance, this fi lm’s stilling of the violence between camera and man tellingly abnegates its subject the moment before returning to a balancing act with that subject. The pas de deux between camera and subject, initiated in A Study in Choreography for Camera, takes on new and aggressive possibilities in Meditation on Violence— on both sides of the camera. Ch’ao-Li Chi thrusts his sword camera-ward, and the camera answers his aggression with similar movements toward him and, ultimately, with stopping his motion altogether. It reproaches the violence that develops naturally out of his movements by cinematically straitjacketing it. This trajectory of camera-subject relations—from witness, to one who confronts, to active participant—recalls issues Deren explored in Haiti, just as her recordings of Haitian drumming that accompany Meditation’s second and third sections remind us of her concurrent Haitian projects. It is no coincidence that Deren takes as a subject another practice (“Chinese boxing”) for which she is a cultural outsider. She teases out in various forms and in non-Haiti-based films the problems she confronted with the Haitian material. Deren’s work in Haiti recognizes the desire to witness, but also to confront the practices it witnesses. Meditation on Violence rehearses Deren’s approach to that difficult subject matter. Moreover, the use of the Haitian recording represents a first repurposing of those materials, prompting a reassessment of the Haitian work’s use-value for Deren’s aesthetic and film practice, as well as the need for reconsidering what happens to the “incomplete” work Deren accomplished 195

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in Haiti when we find it turning up in places other than the film she planned for it. Its transplantation simultaneously imports the energies driving her Haitian ideas into this fi lm and exports the work she accomplishes in this film to our understanding of the issues she was grappling with in Haiti. In its conception, Meditation on Violence builds a case for incompletion as a formal method through the avoidance of resolving opposites and keeping things open, unfinished, for as long as possible. At the core of the energy characterizing violence’s outward appearance there lies silence and stillness. For every breath in, there is a breath out. Light (a “sharp side light”) brings shadows. The very arc Deren describes is open-ended (indeed, it extends “into infinity”). As dictated by that arc, the form of the film navigates extremes without resolving them. Deren takes this idea as the impetus for her title, in her claim that “meditations investigate extremes.”14 The film addresses this balancing of extremes as its theme and as a physical mandate of the boxing traditions it depicts. For the first section, Deren determines the shape of the movements according to “on-going metamorphosis, a continuous alternation between negative and positive.” The movements describe a “constant, dynamic flow . . . the movements always round back upon themselves before they have lost their dynamic flow.” That first section is all about maintaining balance, which “is never lost.”15 The second section also employs balance, but in Shao-Lin, the idea is to practice how to recover a balance that has become destabilized. Ch’aoLi Chi’s movements are demarcated by contrasts in framing, speed, and sound (the drums become distinct in this section). Finally, in the last section, the inner and outer realities come into contact with each other, extending the balance to the individual’s relationship to the world. Thus in the place of a strong side light, we now have “the real sun.” Balance as a formal construct in the fi lm in fact draws attention to the extremes and binaries that subtly or overtly generate the fi lm’s nonlinear meanings. For instance, the movement/stasis binary, dramatized in the film through the “still” image at its center, expresses ideas about cinema’s medium-specific foundations and the balance of energies in the fi lm, two of its primary themes. Of course, that central still image is no more still in essence than any of the ones surrounding it (nor is it any more mobile than they are). That is, the still image comes into being in the same way as 196

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the fluid, moving images of which it is a part: the single shot is reprinted many times over, then some dozens of them are run together to give the impression of stillness even while a film strip continues sliding through the projector, just like the ones that assert an impression of motion. The stillness/motion binary that undergirds cinema in its running of still images at twenty-four (or thirty-two, for the first section) frames per second makes “moving images” possible. The film’s depiction of images via variable frame rates demonstrates the flexibility of the movement/stasis binary in action, effected here through multiple repetitions that look singular— the many becoming one. This action figuratively suggests something about a collective enterprise working together for a unity, again recalling Deren’s work in Haiti. Similarly, Deren recapitulates the binary between the visible and the invisible. It becomes noticeable through various themes, including the fi lm’s depiction of interior versus exterior realities.16 Moreover, in the initial sequences, Deren’s performer moves in and out of the edges of the frame, making offscreen space as useful as onscreen space. What is visible in the frame rhythmically dodges out of sight, and the camera encourages such suppression of the full figure. At one point the performer and camera seem to be in such complicity on this count that by his actions of pushing his arms out repeatedly against the frame edges, the view widens as if by his physical command (fig. 4.2). Doubles of Ch’ao-Li Chi in the form of shadows also contribute to the play on visibility, such that the power of invisibility also drives how we see. This bears kinship with the principle in horror fi lms of keeping the dreaded person or monster just out of the frame to build tension. Deren mobilizes a similar if less-suspenseful tension for the purpose of asserting the metaphysical binary of presence and absence, the seen and unseen. At times only his shadow remains in the frame, bridging the seen with the unseen (and meanwhile asserting other binaries important to the cinema: dark/light, black/white). He also therefore at times seems to spar with his own shadow, dividing himself into subject (person) and object (shadow). The shadow is both part and not part of him: it is like the manifestation of an unseen principle in him. A part of him not usually visible is thus activated in part by Deren’s camera’s necessary relationship to photochemistry and light (and lighting). 197

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FIGURE 4.2 Maya Deren, still from Meditation on Violence, 1948.

Further, Ch’ao-Li Chi’s muscles push and pull with varying degrees of tension, an exertion against and activation of invisible forces. As Deren posits in one of her publicity sheets for the fi lm, Meditation depicts “the actual movements” of Wu-Tang and Shao-Lin, which are “a physical statement of certain metaphysical concepts, employing the physical movements as only one of the visual means.” An invisible idea puts on the plain clothes of Wu-Tang practice and thus is able obliquely to manifest itself. The movements are not the idea, any more than the clothes are the man, but they point to it and give it shape. Deren relates the actions comprising this practice to the creation of film images: There the inner eye meditates upon it at leisure, investigates its possibilities, considers fi rst this aspect and angle, and that one, and once more reconsiders, as one might plumb and examine an image or an idea, turning it over and over in one’s mind. The fi lm itself, then, is a 198

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meditation upon a muscular mediation—a Chinese box within a box.17

Such a sense of mise-en-abîme serves the basic metaphysical statement of Deren’s film. She claims that the fi lm asserts “the idea of life as a continuous, on-going, dynamic force deriving from the perpetual alternation and interaction of positive and negative.” This force never resolves, never comes to rest. The negotiation of opposing terms becomes the fi lm’s compulsion as it traverses its arc forwards and back again. As such the film itself represents a point of fluid transition between these opposites in “alternation and interaction” with each other. It embodies the notion of incompletion through its forms and themes as practically as possible.

“ A S IN A MIR R OR DARKLY ” I am in a fever to finish it now, to arrive finally at that triumphant moment [when] the blaze of successful accomplishment will make all this miserable history of reverses, despairs, anxieties, and frustration a thin disappearing ghost. — M AYA D E R E N , C L O S I N G A L O N G L E T T E R E NUME R ATING T HE S E T B A C K S S HE E N C O U N T E R E D CO MP LE TING T HE V E RY E Y E O F N I G H T ( MDC)

The concept of positive and negative elaborated in Meditation on Violence had also found expression, as we have seen, in the final shots of Ritual in Transfigured Time, with the widow-into-bride moment enacted through the reversal of the fi lm negative. Such a literal interpenetration of the positive-negative binary finds its fullest elucidation in Deren’s last completed film, The Very Eye of Night, in which again the film negative image inverts in relation to the positive image, only here for the entire fi lm, lending the image an ethereal, hovering quality. As Deren describes it: “The blackness of night erases the horizontal plane of the earth’s surface and the movements of the dancers and of the camera, released from this reference to a horizontal plane, become as four-dimensional and directional as those of birds in the air or fish in the water.”18 Wearing dark face paint and 199

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costumes, the actors illuminate the negative fi lmstrip like stars rising in a night sky. The Very Eye of Night, like several of its mythical cast of characters, is one of a twinned pair. Its partner is the earlier film Ensemble for Somnambulists, which Deren worked on for a workshop she taught for the Toronto Film Society in 1951. Ensemble is only ambiguously unfinished—Deren shelved it after the workshop was over and never distributed it—since after setting it aside, she essentially began it again, using the same concept, a project which became The Very Eye of Night. The later film’s production circumstances speak to its long-term, ongoing, in-process status, a component of its essence that shadows its finished state. She began working on it in 1952, premiered it first in Haiti during her visit there in 1955, and then refinished it for its U.S. premiere in 1958. The two films together raise questions about the nature of incompletion per Deren’s work. Ensemble for Somnambulists was taken up and finished quickly, enjoys a certain formal closure, and indeed seems as complete as any of the other works in Deren’s oeuvre. Conversely, The Very Eye of Night took years to finish, is indelibly marked by open-endedness in its structure and process, but is claimed and discussed in Deren’s portfolios of work. Together the two fi lms precariously balance modes of the incomplete with those of completion. The happenings are slight and very similar in Ensemble for Somnambulists and The Very Eye of Night. They depict a “sleeper” rising into the night sky to take his place as a constellation among the stars, represented by dancers playing various heavenly bodies (the constellation of Gemini, for example) (fig. 4.3). Both films are animated by a set of semi-narrative instructions Deren designed for executing their themes, as well as by the emphasis she placed on the fluctuation between positive and negative (in their depictions of day/night, light/black, and similar positive/negative opposites). Both fi lms rehearse heady concepts: they are idea-driven fi lms. Although the reviewer of Deren’s oeuvre cited above discounts The Very Eye of Night by remarking that “it is impossible to follow what happens in the film without reference to the filmmaker’s writings,” in fact those writings if anything make “what happens” more abstract. For example, describing the motivation for one of the main actor-dancers, Deren suggests: “Whereas by day we move by decision and desire, by night NOCTAMBULO is moved by gravities, or laws, and, advancing by the blind incalcula200

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ble accuracies of the sleep-walker, is drawn to the celestial center which revolves eternally in the dark geometry of its orbit from the beginning of time.”19 The attraction of the film has more to do with its pleasantly disorienting qualities, its inversion of the principles of visibility inhering in the photographic medium, and its marshaling of musical, terpsichorean, and cinematic rhythms than it does with any specific, legible happenings. Addressing the formal fi lmic elements of which they are comprised, both films are propelled by resonances among images and ideas to a greater extent than through drama imparted by narrative (although they marginally engage in that way, too). The films take interest in qualities of the medium through which they are conveyed, as well as in metaphysical concepts that Deren manifests through cinematic language. The Very Eye of Night extends the types of engagements with space, movement, and the collective ensemble with which Deren was occupied in the earlier Ensemble for Somnambulists. It serves if not exactly a completion of, then as a complement to, the earlier film. The process of working through the films’ ideas, many continued from Deren’s earlier projects and her recent time in Haiti, took two fi lms and seven years. Mirrors, twinning, and the idea of heaven reflecting earth (divine/human) again are emphasized, as Deren’s alternate titles—“As in a Mirror Darkly,” “Nocturnal Reflections,” “The Eye in the Mirror”—suggest. Taken together, the two films dismantle notions of continuous spatial relations and provide a clearer lens through which to observe Deren’s navigation of opposites toward the aim of greater metaphysical clarity.

Ensemble for Somnambulists

The six-minute Ensemble for Somnambulists closely resembles The Very Eye of Night, but with certain distinctions. While both fi lms are rendered in the negative, Ensemble does not optically layer a scrim of stars (a positive image added later) into the image, so although the image still seems free-floating and shimmering, it confines itself to a more singular rhythm in contrast with Very Eye’s multiple directions of movement and tempos effected in its triple printing through the use of an optical printer. 20 Ensemble for Somnambulists’ lack of sound likewise relegates the rhythm to 201

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one primary set of movements (not an uncomplicated set, however). Like Very Eye, Ensemble features exploration of different types of movement in and out of the frame, within the frame, and across cuts. But thematically, there is a lesser sense of interaction between the collective and the individual than in the later fi lm, and less emphasis placed on coupling/ doubling. Finally, related to all of these aspects, the film has an economy of form that underscores a variable set of relationships among cinematic elements. Unlike any of Deren’s other fi lms to this point, Ensemble begins with a long string of credits. Of the six-minute duration of the fi lm, nearly a minute is devoted to credits. In any other fi lm, this would not of itself be unusual, but it marks Deren’s notation of the technical labor going into the film, something she had not troubled with before: if anything she diminished that labor—recall how some of the people of whom she demanded time and energy in her films recollected that labor with varying degrees of disgruntlement. These credits call attention to the collaborative nature of this workshop film (and possibly point to Deren’s desire not to take full credit). The final credit, just before the title, reads “Conceived and Filmed by Maya Deren” (not “directed by”), falling something short of Very Eye’s equally complex set of credits that nonetheless begins with “A choreography for camera by Maya Deren, made in collaboration with . . .” and ends with “Conceived, directed, filmed and edited by Maya Deren.” She flags her more reticent relationship to Ensemble before she finally tucks the footage into a coffee can for good. The title appears as points of starlight on a black background. This first shot, along with the last shots, represents the sole times the stars appear (unlike in Very Eye, where they are a constant layer of the mise-en-scène). The camera almost immediately begins to track downward toward a completely blank black screen before a cluster of stars lights up magically in the darkness. The camera tracks in for a closer look, rising slightly to immerse itself in darkness, but from the top of the frame suddenly descends a set of glowing figures. The camera has entered the Empyrean realms in search of these beings cast of light, these heavenly bodies. For the rest of the fi lm’s duration, Ensemble explores two things: these bodies in movement against the camera’s movement (and by implication, the movement of the background of celestial bodies running their courses) 202

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and the light-white-positive aspect against the dark-black-negative. As Deren suggested, the horizon line disappears in this depiction of the night sky with its dancing stars, lending the possibility of movement in any direction. Figures spin upside down, move diagonally, whither they will. The space thus limned allows limitless motion. As filmmaker David Warwick has put it in a Deleuzian context, by manipulating the mise-en-scène—for instance through the addition of shadows in Expressionist cinema (an apropos referent, for Deren’s reinvention of a Caligarian somnambulism)— “you effectively fragment and disturb the homogeneous space within the frame, and increase the possibilities or potentials of the image to link with that which is hidden.” Not limited to what lies beyond the frame edges, Warwick proposes that “that which is hidden” (think of Deren’s visible/ invisible binary) may be accessed by introducing disorientation into the formula; Warwick sees this as “the key to constructing any-space-whatevers, i.e., the feeling that a space is limitless and free, and open to infi nite manipulations and linkages. It’s about altering or disrupting spaces, in order to reinvigorate them and open them to the new.”21 The unlimited sense of universal space, of ambiguous frame edges, and of a nongravitational logic to the movement of supernal entities reinvigorates spatial relations in a way different from how Deren had generated creative geographies in her earlier films. The cavorting celestial figures outline unlimited spatial configurations with unlimited potential to reimagine human relations to the universe (and to the mythical figures that make the firmament their odeum and playground). Movement articulates this limitlessness of spatial relationships: both the camera and the dancers disport in all directions, and the distance between camera and figure introduces a third kind of movement as well— volumes surprisingly collide when there is no baseline of horizon or a figure through whom we can compare sizes, distances, depths, or even directions. While a general movement toward the edges of the frame may be identified as left/right or up/down, it is often difficult to tell whether it is the figure, the camera, or even the film strip after filming that moves. Figures float and spin in ways inconstant with usual notions of continuity and contiguity of spaces; they enter upside-down and spin while other figures enter at a distance, moving in different directions. At times, it is all three kinds of movement at once. Disorienting indeed. 203

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Some of the movements signal a relationship with earlier Deren films. The first shot of a dancer who descends in medium-close shot, seeming to fall into the frame, recalls the widow-into-bride shots of Ritual in Transfigured Time. Only unlike in Ritual, she has companions, and is connected to several other groupings of dancers. Later, a spinning pirouette filmed in slow motion recalls Talley Beatty’s movement in the Egyptian Wing segment of Study in Choreography for Camera (indeed, as this film begins with the title “A Choreography for Camera,” some similarity might be expected). Here, though, it takes place as a pas de deux with another dancer as well as with the camera (the dancer is only partnered with the camera in Study). Although the first shots of the two dancers are separated by a cut to an ensemble, Deren connects them implicitly in a later shot by panning sharply from one to the other as each one spins. The increased use of multiple figures stands out in both cases (the widow-into-bride-type descent and the pirouetting dancers), drawing attention to the fact that, here, the collective—the ensemble—takes precedence over individuals. The kinds of doublings Deren has in mind—so that the ballerina’s pirouette is repeated by a male dancer whom we encounter through a swing pan—are based on repetitions across more than one body, and are not meant to be reiterations of the same body as they are in, for example, the multiple Derens in Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land (the doubling of Rita Christiani and Deren in Ritual might be seen as a transitional figure from one kind of double to the other). Instead, as in Deren’s notion of the interchangeability of figures within one, whole, compelling form, the collective form matters, and it transcends the function of individual parts. As such, in its title’s reference to dreamlike trance, its expression of negative/positive values in productive conflict, and its formal investigation of the loss of individuality in lieu of the collective form, Ensemble provides a coincident outlet for  Deren’s creative interests coming out of her Haitian experiences and materials.

The Very Eye of Night

While Deren abandoned Ensemble for Somnambulists, she did not quit the ideas that drove it. In fact, she may have simply felt it did not ade204

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quately express those ideas, propelling her into an extension or revision of the fi lm. In any case, early the following year, starting in March 1952, Deren began work on The Very Eye of Night. Like Ensemble, Very Eye takes dance as its subject. The project afforded Deren the opportunity to work with John Latouche, the Broadway lyricist and avant-garde sympathizer (who agreed to produce it through his association with Aries Productions), as well as choreographer Antony Tudor, with whom Deren had hoped to collaborate for some time. Former resident composer for the American Ballet Theatre and head of faculty for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, Tudor arranged the choreography and managed the dancers, whom he cast from his company. It became a higher profi le version of the earlier film. Just as with Ensemble, the first shots featuring the opening credits for Very Eye are complex. A separate credit for Deren herself is joined by credits that list personnel in a creative, visual way. These credits depict an eye with an iris divided into two hemispheres, one light and one dark. Each successive image gives the names of the dancer-actors, who are credited alongside a drawing of the character they play (fig. 4.3). Each one is depicted at a slightly closer view in relation to the one that comes before it. First Gemini, played by two male dancers. Then four satellites of Uranus— Ariel, Titania, Oberon, and Umbriel (two female and two male dancers). Uranus and his female counterpart Urania are next, followed by Noctambulo, the somnambulist who has drifted in his sleep from one fi lm (Ensemble) to this one. He replaces the Uranus-Urania figure in the same framing, suggesting his equivalence to their dual principles in the same way that Gemini, the image of the iris, and the double male-female principle in the moon figures are bifurcated to express their dualistic nature. This cast of characters (and their presentation in the credits) upholds the philosophical, mythical, and/or metaphysical principles espoused by the film as a whole. A word is due as to the significance of the figures Deren assembles: for instance, Gemini, comprised of two male bodies, expresses Deren’s interest in doubling. The two figures mirror each other, and the dancers who play them in the film have several twinning bits of ballet business, moving together in the same direction, for instance. The constellation of Gemini derives from twins (actually half brothers) Castor and Pollux, one of whom (Pollux) was immortal, while the other was mortal 205

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(Castor). They hold several binary relationships together: mortal/immortal, dark/light, self/other, which are matched by the movements and costumes/ makeup (one’s right leg is dark and left leg is light while the other’s is just the opposite, for example). The doubles increase rapidly from there, along with the multiplicity of the suggestive referents that resonate from each set of personages. The moons of Uranus that come next are also derived from literary sources, multiplying allusive referents: Ariel, Oberon, and Titania are Shakespearean sprites and Umbriel is a “dusky, melancholy sprite” from Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” More twinning/doubling: two are male; two are female. Just as in the denouement of the Gemini story, “The Rape of the Lock” ends with the missing, stolen lock rising to the heavens to take its place among glittering stars. Deren’s film, of course, also fi xates on humankind in relation to heaven. She might have found an interested interlocutor for these matters in her contact with John Latouche, the producer and Broadway lyricist who during the same years was working on The Golden Apple, an eventually award-winning musical that takes up mythological themes in a present-day vernacular. Uranus and Urania, central characters of the film, also mirror each other and embody several characteristics that expand this concept. The presence of the yin-yang becomes clearer as we get closer to the eye in which these characters are given in the credits. Uranus is situated in the light half of the yin-yang circle on the title card while Urania remains in the dark. Stretched across these bifurcated hemispheres is a variation of the Vitruvian man drawing of da Vinci (also called the “Proportions of Man”), superimposed over the sphere and in the actual circle of yin-yang, with two types of light radiating out. Recall that the da Vinci drawing weds the idea of mankind with the idea of the universe by suggesting that the human body is a reflection of the macrocosm of the universe.22 While Uranus represents the intemerate celestial sphere itself, Urania is the celestial Aphrodite, the muse of astronomy, and (later) of Christian poetry. She is able to foretell the future by the arrangement of the stars. Associated with universal love, and bridging secular and religious iconography, she is akin to Deren’s patron saint of the loa, Erzulie. (Also recall that in Paradise Lost, Urania is invoked to aid the poet’s narration of the creation of the cosmos: she functions as muse for creative activity related to galactic 206

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forces.) Deren’s concatenating symbology opens the fi lm out to forces and structures outside of its own would-be closed system. It connects this fi lm to her interests in the negotiation of dualities as a principle in itself (earth/ heaven, humankind/gods, yin/yang, female/male, dark/light, black/white, close/distant, and the attendant figures of the mirror, reflections, doubles), as well as, inevitably, to her Haitian projects. Finally a singular figure, Noctambulo (“night walker”), our somnambulist, someone Deren would have well understood, being a notorious night-owl herself,23 appears at the center of the circle in place of UranusUrania. He represents the subjective, spectator-centered, integrated dualistic view of the cosmos, and functions as a stand-in for the audience’s perspective on the principles that will come into play around him. And these are just the credits.24 After this first minute, the fi lm begins in earnest, and the dualistic, suggestive imagery becomes all the more fruitful in the choreography that follows. The scene fades to black before little pinpricks of stars begin to emerge against the dark backdrop. The music chimes in (a Balinese gamelan: another possible remnant of the Haitian film, which was to interpose Balinese dances with Voudoun footage), and the camera pans slowly to the left. After a full minute of stars, a scene devoid of human presence, the dancers enter and their movements and pairings occur in synchronization with the beat of the music. The music of the spheres, the rhythm of the stars: a celestial cinema that takes on universal themes, principles of duality negotiated through the fluidity of cinematic and terpsichorean movements (fig. 4.3). The dances of the film also articulate the doubling relationships suggested by the credit sequence’s characters and their images. From the dancer groupings (two males, one male/one female, two males/two females circling one male/one female, and so forth) to the sequences of editing, a definite rhythm emerges that further suspends closure. The music reinforces that rhythm. Deren and Ito worked together to coordinate the image to the music through the use of a metronome and a ruler—taking the scientific measure of creative concepts that link humankind and the cosmos à la da Vinci’s “Proportions of Man.” As in Ensemble for Somnambulists, the dance derives its pulse from variations in distance, framings, and these pairings of figures. It derives its disorienting effects from the lack of horizon line and the multidirectional, multiplanar movements, here further 207

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FIGURE 4.3 Celestial dancers in The Very Eye of Night, 1958. (Courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

exaggerated by the additional layers of stars in the mise-en-scène. It keeps all these elements in precarious, shifting balance. The production of these images was difficult for Deren. She called the project her “Sputnik,” in part because of all the mechanical problems she had to solve in order to give it the right look.25 Deren was meticulous about making the images of dancers and stars of a quality sufficient to meet her standards. In her directions to the optical printer for the film, Deren nudges him toward greater attention to this project. In her characteristic way, she toes the line between dictatorship and amiability: “I know that this printing job is a pesky one, requiring more individual attention than most. That is why I have brought it to Filmlabs, where such craftsmanship is possible . . . So much has gone into this in the way of blood, sweat and tears. Please don’t let me down, Mr. Bursch.” As to specific directions for the footage, she notes that to give the impression of stars glittering in the sky: 208

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“it is of PRIMARY IMPORTANCE to achieve the highest possible contrast,” to find “the perfect combination of deep black background and brilliant figures.”26 She instructs him to keep the contrast consistent between shots and in reprintings of the same shots, which are doubles of moments she intends to use multiple times in the film. She prohibits diagonal splices because of the “blank background,” in which they appear more than ordinarily visible. Finally, she indicates that she has inverted some of the images, so that he won’t misidentify these inversions as mistakes in her own printing. Her perfectionism and control over image quality bespeak an aesthetic leaving little to chance. However, just as in Ensemble for Somnambulists, much is outside of her control, as Deren is working with an excess of personnel, several of whom have definitive ideas about how the production will look. Deren seems generally to have appreciated the professionalism of all her collaborators, particularly Antony Tudor and his troupe of dancers, but clashed with her producers at Aries Productions about costs and time for allowing the fi lm to take the form she imagined for it. The resulting set of disputes—a complex imbroglio—marred Deren’s productivity during the several years it took to finish the work. It had dramatic effects on Deren’s ability to deliver the final product and upon its final shape: the fi lm suffered the vicissitudes of Deren’s precarious financial situation as well as her investment in other work more than any other project aside from the one in Haiti. The setbacks incurred as a result of these disputes provide some insight into her working method as well as the daily grind of her working life that contributed to the near-incompletion of this project. If she hadn’t been beset by demands from Aries Productions, perhaps the film would be unfinished still. But despite—or because of—the push and pull of problems and solutions, the film was indeed finished, in the end. Deren consistently maintained a friendly relationship with John Latouche, who brought her into business with Aries Productions, but his untimely death in 1956 led to an intensified legal battle for the rights to the film and the recovery of costs involved in its production. Prior to his death, Deren attempted to balance financial concerns (both in her own interests and for the demands of the producers, who wished to see a return on their investment) with creative ones, pleading with Latouche, who was an artist himself, to understand the particular trials she endured. In September of 209

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1953, eighteen months after she began the project, she wrote a five-page, single-spaced letter to him to explain why the film was not yet finished, veering wildly from somewhat indignant justifications to apologies: even the assurance that only I could accomplish so much that is complex with such primitive equipments . . . cannot assuage my feeling [of guilt] . . . it is towards you personally that this terrible sense of guilt exists, for you do not know the circumstances and consequently are pained and outraged by what you feel to be a betrayal. And I feel guilty for pain and outrage which are real and true, though the cause be untrue . . .27

This letter provides a fascinating glimpse into the troubled nature of Deren’s relationship of completion and incompletion (as well as compulsively perfecting and letting go) vis-à-vis her work. It enumerates all (one hopes) of the ways in which it was necessary to take eighteen months to complete the project (which, at her writing, was still not quite finished). Among her reasons: the timing of Antony Tudor’s schedule started delays from which they never recovered; the galley proofs for her book (Divine Horsemen) came in and needed editing; the book’s press office was in England so it took longer than usual to go back and forth; the Haiti record needed “considerable labor of selecting the music . . . writing the album and slip in notes, and all that”; she ended up having to publicize the book herself, including setting up window displays in bookstores; she had to wait for someone named Marie to have time to help her resolve the animated cosmos background; she lent her camera to Willard Maas and he broke it; she had to repair her camera; her apartment was needed for the Theater De Lys screening project; the union wouldn’t give Ito membership immediately so they had to wait before recording the music; there was a heat wave and the apartment was too hot, making “the brain torpid”; a lot of time was needed to get back on track with the thread of the work after each interruption; she needed space of mind for the actual editing and measuring of the film so the shots and the music would match, as well as for the recording and selection of takes; not to mention (oh, why not mention) that “throughout all this,” there was “the destructive, interruptive, time consuming thought consuming nerve consuming demands of virtual 210

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poverty” (the time to walk to the store to save money on necessaries, the laundry done by hand, the “time of thought to invent the story to stall the phone company or the electric company or the landlord”).28 The work on the fi lm is thus detailed at length. Midway through the letter, she takes pains to describe the provenance of do-it-yourself production values in answer to the need for solving various problems in how the film depicts her ideas. Far from completely stalling the production, she claims, these setbacks are only one part of the story of why it takes so long to make such a film. Whenever she had time or wasn’t staving off the wolf at her door, she was working on the film. The other part of it that she urges Latouche to understand is the trial-and-error tenacity required for executing an idea that no one has tried before. She tries to avoid the problem of the stars shining through the figures (not completely successfully) by consulting with the lab first (but the expert is on vacation  .  .  .) instead of spending unnecessary time and money on filming something she doesn’t know will turn out. Through a series of efforts—taping black paper from the ceiling, piercing stars through it, laying track for the dolly, setting up lights, retaping paper from the ceiling after it sags, retaping it again after they have to redo shots days later, etc.—Deren accomplishes (but slowly, painstakingly) the effects she desires. In most of these steps, she demonstrates her willingness to accept what is possible or to change her plan when the results fall short of her expectations. Whether she exaggerates her difficulties to gain sympathy (or continued finances) from Latouche, Deren accounts for her extended process in a manner that shows her to be a tenacious investor in the work. Her letter’s explanations, which are in fact also requests for more time and money to complete the project (or to cover costs to get back to New York from Haiti), provide an account of her process, the ins and outs of which obsessed her. When Latouche died unexpectedly, Deren was called upon by Aries Productions to settle with his estate the amounts of money that had been advanced to her. Instead, she openly challenged Aries Productions, asserting: I am not indebted to the estate of John Latouche; quite the contrary, the estate of John Latouche is indebted to me for the advance of funds, advanced by me for the completion of the fi lm in question, namely THE 211

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VERY EYE OF NIGHT. [ . . . ] It is indebted to me and I certainly do not intend to proceed any further with the promotion or any other aspect of this fi lm until our respective rights are clarified.29

Her financial difficulties provided both a motivation for further work and an excuse not to continue it until settled. As we see in her descriptions of the way she spent her time, it is also clear that she was working on other projects in part to alleviate these financial difficulties: the work on the book as well as promoting it herself testify to this motivating factor. The major projects distracting her at this time, as we have seen in the last chapter, were her Haitian projects, and they take an enormous amount of her attention and energy. But we can also see in The Very Eye of Night an extension of the issues that preoccupied her in her Haitian work: they form a beneficial partnership of interests. Already we have seen the navigation of a profusion of dualities in Very Eye through the types of figures Deren selects as well as how she presents them throughout the fi lm, a strategy that also comes into play in her Haitian projects. The black/white, dark/light binaries find significant purchase in Very Eye’s imagery and filmic experiments (especially the negative/positive image). That it does so as readily as it does inspires questions about Deren’s thinking about these binaries, specifically corresponding to race relative to Haiti and to ritual. The black of the night sky—the context for the film— allows for the visibility of the white figures. That they should be brilliantly, contrastingly white is of utmost importance to Deren: white becomes legible through black. And humankind becomes legible through the way they reflect the gods. And in Haiti, the gods appear through the body. And in Haiti, those bodies are black bodies. In order to accomplish the effect she desires in the negative/positive filmstrip, Deren puts her dancers essentially in black face (fig. 4.4). There are moments like these in Deren’s oeuvre that demand thought about Deren’s appropriation of the cultures she was investigating, often under the blanket defense that as an artist, she is more similar to her subjects than different. But we might at least begin to take note of the ubiquity of Deren’s taking on of other identities under the rubric of ritual, in that an aspect of her aesthetic depends on the uninvited takeover and adoption of foreign principles as if they were natural extensions of her own person. Katherine Dunham, with some pique, recounts 212

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FIGURE 4.4 Deren filming The Very Eye of Night, circa 1952, a dancer in black makeup

behind her.

Deren’s insinuating herself into her dance troupe, so that some of the dancers even wondered why she didn’t try to pass as white. Ritual in Transfigured Time presents an interchangeability of (black dancer) Christiani for (white artist) Deren; Study in Choreography for Camera makes use of Talley Beatty as “a negro artist” who according to Deren should have been grateful for the exposure.30 Also recall Deren proudly recounting being told she must have “negro blood” in order to integrate so well in Haitian atavistic spheres within which she so readily moved. Here, Very Eye’s use of the black/white binary becomes an outlet for issues that Deren might not have readily expressed in a film about Haiti. In addition to its extension of problems Deren was exploring elsewhere, Very Eye is the most pronounced of the projects that illuminate the pushpull relationship in her work process. The fact that it is already a kind of revisioning of Ensemble for Somnambulists makes it an exemplar of the work in progress, the extensive project to the extreme. Counting both 213

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films amounts to a total of eight years, three premieres, and multiple stops, starts, and restarts for various stages of the project. Generally, after all that labor, it was not well received. As Stan Brakhage would have it, it was simply not understood. He himself archly defends the fi lms, charging those who disparage the film with having missed the point: “I’ve heard people say things like—say it’s like a child’s little theatre thing. That is exactly the point. [ . . . ] She wants it to be like a child’s vision, the somnambulist.”31 Others who often supported Deren’s efforts did not support this fi lm, including Parker Tyler, who gives it only a passing footnote in his Underground Film: A Critical History. But there is no denying that it creatively extends several ideas and strategies—including drawing on the energy of incompletion and nonlinear models—begun in earlier work. For example, this period coincides with one of Deren’s most interesting articulations of a theory of cinema: the difference between horizontal and vertical arts.

V ERTIC A L SPA CE

With The Very Eye of Night ’s debunking of continuity in spatial relations, Deren begins to articulate cinematically a notion that the next year she would put into more concrete theoretical terms at a symposium in which Parker Tyler also participated. That event was “Poetry and the Film,” coordinated by Amos Vogel under the auspices of Cinema 16 in October of 1953.32 This symposium allowed Deren a forum in which to articulate an aesthetics of cinema that draws on the verticality she literally enacts in Very Eye’s figures floating up and falling down, into and out of the frame. As we have seen, the state of verticality interested Deren long before 1953; however, in the symposium, she more fully articulates her sense of the notion in terms that resonate with her thinking on film art both practically and theoretically. Besides Deren, the participants included the playwright Arthur Miller, filmmaker Willard Maas (who officiated the proceedings), film critic Tyler, and the poet Dylan Thomas.33 Not very long after it begins, Miller and Thomas (who according to Maas was “completely plastered but also completely under control, witty and cutting”)34 inveigh against a notion of poetic film, especially against Deren’s ideas on the matter. Deren uses the occa214

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sion to expatiate on the question of how both poetry and cinema (when the latter is treated as an art form and not an entertainment, diversion, or mechanical reproduction of reality) are “vertical” arts, whereas drama and narrative are “horizontal.” Miller’s and Thomas’s disparaging, often impolite, treatment of Deren does not stop her from expressing these ideas. She explains: [A poem] also may include action, but its attack is what I would call the “vertical” attack, and this may be a little bit clearer if you will contrast it to what I would call the “horizontal” attack of drama, which is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling.35

Deren’s use of these terms to describe the poetic approach within an artistic context relates to Gaston Bachelard’s formulation of the “verticality” of poetry, which in turn draws upon notions of temporality via Henri Bergson (with whom Deren was familiar via T. E. Hulme). In On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, Bachelard notes the importance of duration as a prerequisite for poetry: in the poet, “the word reflects and reflows; in him time begins to wait.”36 Further, in L’Intuition de l ’instant, Bachelard claims that poetry maintains a “vertical” temporality that allows simultaneity in the accretion of meaning and ambivalence in the play between the poem’s parts.37 Possibly Deren was drawing directly on Bachelard or Bergson, or her idea of verticality may be based on Eisenstein’s notion of vertical montage, as Parker Tyler suggests elsewhere.38 In any case, for Deren, verticality as a poem’s expression of experience allows for the sorts of temporal eddying and recursions which interested her, and which provided the frustration principle, stymieing forward, linear movement: [In Shakespeare’s monologues], he brings together all various images that relate to the feeling, let us say, of indecision . . . It would have sufficed for Hamlet to say, “I can’t make up my mind,” and that’s all, and that would not have affected the drama of the play  .  .  . The poetic monologue there is, as it were, outside it or built upon it as a pyramid at that point as a means of intensifying that moment in the “horizontal” development.39 215

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For Deren, the intensity allowed in the moment of verticality represents a still point in any arc of development. The poetic impulse Deren describes derives from its ability to eschew forward motion—the drive toward completing a gesture or an idea logically or linearly—in order to privilege the fragment, the provocative idea or image that leads in other, unpredictable, associative directions. It also allows in certain cases for the condensation of time by removing connective details that would drive plot or continuity, for example in At Land (the dunes sequence, where the woman disappears and reappears too quickly in the distance) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (the party sequence, where all the exposition of talking to people at a party is dispensed with in order to emphasize the similarity of the gestures of meeting and greeting).40 As we have seen in her work on the metaphysical and the modern poets when writing her master’s thesis, this is a preoccupation throughout Deren’s career; it finds a foothold in these late projects as well. However useful verticality may be to Deren in contemplating the arc of a film, she also literalizes it. From the climb from beach to dining room table, to Talley Beatty’s “impossible leap,” to the widow-into-bride, to the rising and falling “stars,” Deren’s imagery probes all the possible orientations (and disorientations) available to the film frame. The floating figures of The Very Eye of Night, both moving in a steady rhythm and flying hither and thither, demonstrate the balance between the horizontal and vertical inclinations in her work. Dance serves as an apt medium for investigation of verticality, with its leaps, ascents, and descents. A similar formal prescription would have structured another dance piece Deren planned, the overture to The Magic Flute, on which she hoped again to work with Antony Tudor. She proposes the vertical/horizontal investigation it would advance in the following terms: The central theme of this ballet is that even an apparently casual, informal event has a thickness of meaning; it does not merely extend backwards and forwards into time. On the contrary, it has, simultaneously, levels upon levels of meaning. One may explore a moment not only in terms of history, but one may descend into it as down a spiral staircase. As with a spiral staircase, the two dimensional area which one covers as one descends is always the same. The Odyssey is vertical.41 216

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It is interesting that Deren chooses the spiral, which unfolds in z-axis depth as well as x- and y-axis depth, describing a cone-like descent.42 A “thickness of meaning” allows the horizontal and vertical axes to interact at the same moment. The history or the future of a movement, of an idea as it develops over time, may be examined in depth, as it were. While Ensemble for Somnambulists and The Very Eye of Night draw on orbital courses derived from their own, internal logic, they also look to connect with larger forces. This impulse accounts for Deren’s poly-allusive cast of literary, mythical characters as well as her exploration through those characters of the oppositional forces of the metaphysical universe. These opposing forces activate a sense of both interior and exterior spectatorial experience that Deren accesses through a fugue of intersecting tensions. For instance, we are asked to dwell on the blackness of the night sky, an effect generated by triggering the potential of the film negative. Such reflection inspires the spectator not simply to observe the movements of the dance unfold, but to contemplate the nature of light and dark and all the metaphysical implications they set into motion in cinematic terms. By augmenting the usual parameters for the dimension of time within the images in this way, Deren accents perceptive experience and offers a space for dwelling in her images. Like her sleepwalker, the spectator occupies both the human and divine realms through the bridge of a film. The stars are printed in two layers, she attested, because one is “objective” and the other “subjective”: sitting (actually dancing) at the crux of the world and the heavens is the human figure that travels upward and then back down to earth in search of dancing companions. In these films and the several other creative and critical projects over which she assumed control during this period, Deren developed complex cinematic ideas. Outside of her work in Haiti, but often related to the themes and issues with which she contended there, she did not surrender her propensity for coming up with projects through which she could test new ideas and projects.

THE U N FIN ISHED WORK

During this same period, Deren pursued or considered to varying degrees work on other projects that she never completed, either in the sense that 217

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she did not distribute or claim them as part of her oeuvre, such as is the case with Ensemble for Somnambulists, or because she made only partial headway toward a complete film, leaving some or most of the fi lming and/ or the editing undone. This latter case applies to her film projects Medusa and Season of Strangers, which differently galvanize the issues at stake for the arc of Deren’s interests over her career. In their conception of the terms of both absence and incompletion as part of the creative process, and in their actual unfinishedness, these projects highlight the mode of incompletion that drives Deren’s work. Both fi lm projects raise a nexus of issues related to Haiti (Deren was ostensibly working on them concurrently with her Haitian work) and develop recurring themes and methods of her oeuvre at large; both trade on Deren’s connections to social psychology, music, poetry, tradition, myth, and ritual—perspectives she remained immersed in at the time of her death. Both also represent material that has hitherto been neglected among Deren’s projects; what she did accomplish toward them highlights in a raw state her working methods, her creative and theoretical proclivities, and the amplitude as well as the limits of her ambitions. In addition, Deren began work on other projects that did not come to completion. The Magic Flute overture interested her a great deal, but she seemed not to have gotten very far with a plan for a film of it. She sketched a number of potential experiments with contrapuntal fi lm sound, but a viable film idea never emerged from those experiments. She also considered a number of thoughts about games—not all of them exclusively children’s games (e.g., chess)—either in development of the Haitian fi lm idea or as an independent project. And having taken to heart her father’s dictum that “The most important thing in this world is an idea,” she fi lled boxes with note cards outlining fragments of ideas that seem never to have amounted to an outright film plan. Slightly more information exists about an idea Deren conceived for a film about the circus circa 1954, the year after the release of her book on Haitian Voudoun. This may have gone a bit farther in part because of the enthusiasm of a collaborator, David Budd, who worked for the Cristiani Bros. and Bailey Bros. Combined Circus. In April 1954, he wrote to Deren from their tour of Texas, noting on the back of a card with his schedule on it: “Maya—If there is anything more that you might like to know, the 218

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wrong answers can be obtained by writing to me at any of the postmarks on the reverse.” Though he was in constant transit, they corresponded through the end of the year, and set up plans for working on a fi lm together. In this early note, he promises to “take motion pictures from time to time of the show and send them.”43 Deren accordingly outlines a plan for the film, drawing on her notes about a fugue film (which was also the form she had at one time intended to use for the film that would have included the Haitian footage). The pattern she began to discern involves overlapping sequences: [T]he form as a whole of the fi lm, which is beginning to emerge, is a kind of series of interlocking time spans—a kind of necklace chain of time-phrases. For example, the tumblers begin their time phrase; about half-way we are led to the juggler as he begins his time-phrase; as the tumblers complete their time-phrase we are already in the middle of the juggler’s phrase and, before he is finished, we have been started on the aerialist’s phrase, which is already carrying us by the time the juggler finishes. Actually it would be constructed somewhat like a singing round, so that once the song is started it never ends, being always carried forward by successive voices.44

The unfinishing quality of a song that never ends strikes a perfect chord with Deren’s aesthetic. Deren asks Budd whether the acts he knows so well would be suited to such a structure, and then attempts to set up a plan for working on it in a way that illuminates her stakes in all the diverse projects vying for her attention during this period. She claims that she knows when a project matters to her because her “inner board of directors” makes her push her busy schedule around to make room for it. She frequently perorates on her process, but her letter to Budd is particularly expansive as she reflects on the possibility of spending some of her limited time to collaborate with him. As for consulting with her inner board of directors, she notes that “This circus thing must have pulled off not only a unanimous decision, but a standing ovation as well, for I find myself sitting with a list of ‘MUST GET DONE’ in my right hand and a calendar in my left.” Then Deren details that lengthy list, showing all the things her inner board of directors were negotiating: 219

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The MUST GET DONE includes a lecture tour, a completing of the dance fi lm now in progress [The Very Eye of Night], a setting up of my distribution, etc. (a vast organizational task), the editing of hundreds of feet of Haitian Voudoun movies, and the making of some money to pay the rent. I also have a very gnawing suspicion (hell, it almost chewed my right leg off ) that I would need some other footage of the Haiti stuff to end up with [a] really first-class poetic documentary of it. This means that there are three different things for which the same months November through March, are the most propitious . . . How does it strike you if I set it up this way: I would try to schedule a lecture tour in the last two weeks of October which would go south and would both pay my way and provide me with extra cash so that I could go to Haiti from Miami. This would give me November and December in Haiti to shoot and test and cut my Haitian fi lm there. November and December are the best ceremonial months of the year. With that unfinished business off my mind, I would then come back to Florida, and spend a month, say January into February, doing the circus fi lm. I would then try to work my way north with a few lectures, bringing me into New York in March, to spend a month or so editing the fi lm.45

Deren’s tendency not only to have a great deal on her plate but to itemize everything in a flurry of concerns (as she does, for example, in her earlier letter to Latouche) accords with her work ethic and intimates the strenuous demands that as Martina Kudláček has pointed out may have contributed to her untimely death. This list underscores the struggle within Deren to accomplish more things than she reasonably has time to do—her “unfinished business” predominates. Something has to give. In this case, before very long, what gives is the circus fi lm. First, in light of Deren’s coming to understand that she lacks sufficient funds (again) for focusing her time on this project, she asks Budd whether he knows anyone who might make a donation to the Creative Film Foundation to support work on the film. She notes that she is headed to Haiti in November and has not enough resources to work on the circus idea. At the end of this trip, she in fact has to ask friends for enough money to get a return ticket home to New York, so it is not an exaggeration to say she may have over-

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extended herself. The last letter she seems to have written to him is dated October 23, 1954, and then there is no more word of the circus in her plans. Of the other two major unfinished fi lms from this late period—the Medusa film and Season of Strangers—one happens well before the circus plans go awry, and one happens well after that, during the last years of Deren’s life. The Medusa film was started in 1949 in collaboration with Jean Erdman, who had seven years earlier originated a solo dance about this mythological figure. Season of Strangers, begun ten years later in 1959, she sometimes called her “haiku” fi lm. It was set in an inn where strangers would come, stay briefly, and leave. Meant to demonstrate communal connections as part of a form that transcends the individual, the film draws together several of Deren’s long-term interests, including ritual and poetry. She died before she completed the work she intended for it. Both were begun as part of workshops Deren organized, and both extended Deren’s cinematic interests without coming to closure.

The Transformations of Medusa I turn your face around! It is my face. That frozen rage is what I must explore. Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place! This is the gift I thank Medusa for. —F R O M “ T HE M U S E A S M E D U S A ” ( MAY S ART O N)

The Medusa myth perpetually interested Deren, and she cited it often, usually alongside stories of other strong but scorned women, including Lilith and Erzulie. Medusa, in certain treatments of the myth (Ovid, for instance), had been one of Athena’s loveliest temple virgins, but after being raped by Poseidon in the temple was cast out. Why? Because Athena, enraged at this act of defilement—defilement not of Medusa, but of Athena’s temple—unleashed her anger on Medusa, changing her most becoming feature—her hair—to snakes and banishing her from the sanctuary and the company of herself and her retinue. She rendered Medusa anathema to all who might look on her. Condemned to a monstrous form and cast out

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of society to live in a cave on the remote island of Cisthene, Medusa came to embody a castrating rage, so that by turning her terrifying stare upon those who looked at her, she literally petrified them, turning men to stone. Her snake hair represents both the pernicious female monster and the object of her annihilating stare: the possibility of castration. Medusa may have transfi xed Deren’s attention for several reasons. As we have seen in her cavalcade of character-star-dancers in The Very Eye of Night, Deren took an active interest in what figures from mythology and astronomy could represent by way of powerful dualities. Medusa advances such duality in many ways. Through Medusa, Deren might articulate the binding of opposites through the mirroring motif—for instance, in terms of a violence directed outside the self that rebounds upon the self, a malignant narcissism. Further, Medusa bears a strong mirroring relationship with Athena. Parallel and/or inverse qualities have been noted between the two figures: e.g., together they embody the contradiction of innocence/ monstrosity. For her own shield (recollecting Perseus), Athena, goddess of war, had embossed the image of the Medusa-head. The two mythical figures are made to represent dual aspects of the unifying principle of femaleness. The figure of Medusa may have also served as a metaphor for something that can or should be experienced only through a representation: to be presented with her directly means petrifaction and death. The intermediary that allows the observer to witness her without harm is again the mirror, which becomes a complex emblem for the Medusa myth. For Perseus, a mirrored shield both allows him to avoid her look (protecting himself from that look) and to kill her with the power that properly belongs to her alone. Whatever her predisposition to mythological figures and however apt the metaphor of the mirror through Medusa may have been for Deren, the overarching concept for the Medusa fi lm did not originate with her. Medusa was to be a filmed version of Jean Erdman’s first solo piece, The Transformations of Medusa, first performed in 1942. Though the idea came from someone other than Deren, Erdman looked to be an optimal collaborator. She was a dancer whose career included an early stint with the Martha Graham Dance Company and who gained in prominence after establishing a solo career in New York. Their acquaintance began just after Deren’s first trip to Haiti, through Erdman’s marriage to Joseph Campbell, the 222

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mythologist and editor who would eventually publish Deren’s Divine Horsemen. According to Deren’s mother, Deren read some of Campbell’s work and sought out an introduction.46 Erdman then commissioned work from Deren to take photographs for her dance piece Hamadryad. They were like-minded in multiple ways. Like Deren, Erdman wrote a great deal about her chosen medium, publishing for instance that same year an article entitled “The Dance as Non-Verbal Poetical Image” in Dance Observer magazine. And not only does Deren’s image of Erdman in Hamadryad appear on the cover of the issue in which this article appears, but the two artists’ ideas also converge there. Erdman begins the piece by railing against sentimental views of what dance is, countering this attitude with some wry, Deren-like pronouncements: The dance properly, on the other hand (as an art, that is to say, not as cheese cake), speaks of potentialities and aspects of man that are antecedent to words . . . and constitute the primary heritage of the embodied human spirit. Therefore it is at once simple (in as much as it gives manifestation to the roots or seeds out of which the complicated fabric of human life grows) and complex (since it is forced to make use of a highly inflected visual language of aesthetic devices, to give significant expression to such hidden things). [ . . . ] But the idea . . . must be realized in immediate physical terms. The dance itself, then, becomes a direct image of something that formerly was invisible . . . 47

Several parallels are evident: the idea that her chosen medium is more than capable of working with invisible ideas that then become manifest through the means available to the art form, for instance, recollects Deren’s ideas vividly. While Erdman depreciates the value of words as means for expression— as a dancer, perhaps naturally preferring a gestural aesthetic not unlike Deren’s in A Study for Choreography for Camera—she like Deren also worked with words, especially poetry, in the development of her art. A poetic version of The Transformations of Medusa tucked into Erdman’s papers reflects the structure and themes of the dance piece. For instance, in part one, the mirror is ever-present and oppressive, as it is in the dance: “Though even then / she felt a pressure in her / right palm, / Caught glimpses 223

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of a face, / And even wondered— / Whose?” By the end of the poem, the mirror has disappeared, become part of the goddess: “but there are no mirrors to see. [ . . . ] / Death dances behind her eye. / She looks / and space turns to stone.” The poem effectively collapses the look within and contained by the body. The resulting dance piece then similarly probes subject/object positions as tensions to be navigated, recollecting Deren’s subject/object investigations from the same time period. Erdman felt that dance should be structured according to the capabilities and limitations of the human body, in other words through the material means of expression for her chosen art form (like Deren’s insistence on capitalizing on the virtues of her own medium). When the artist-dancer advances the details of the dance organically through these limits, yielding to that form’s natural development, the body itself is transformed: “the pulse of the dance . . . will conjure the new whole being that lies within us. The magic of its rhythm is the force by which the human body is transfigured, so that it renders visible a truth, an existence, or a new understanding of some relationship of existences, such as the mind has no word to describe.”48 Erdman thus initiates the visible/invisible binary, as well as the human/divine binary Deren was so keen to explore in her Haitian projects and eventually The Very Eye of Night. We hear echoes of the vertical in Erdman’s formulation as well. Erdman’s and Deren’s work progressed in similar ways, and they addressed similar obsessions albeit through different media. Later, Erdman links dancing in “primitive” cultures with the depersonalization of mythological, archetypal figures in a remarkably similar fashion to Deren’s analysis of Haitian and Balinese ritual dancing. From “the realization of anonymity,” a goal in her own dance, comes “an immense amplification of spiritual experience,” a ritual that transfigures the individual and binds her to “the unnamed immensity within us.”49 As it is for Deren, society may be lifted up and transformed for the better through an art form—but one reimagined as belonging to larger, depersonalized forces of universal human experience rather than the cult of genius often ascribed to the artist. Objective presentation, available through dance, allows ultimate freedom for the individual. Erdman and Deren should indeed have been perfect collaborators. In 1949, the two women began to work together on a project based on The Transformations of Medusa as part of Deren’s workshop taught for the 224

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YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) in the autumn (she had returned from Haiti to honor her commitment to teach that workshop). It is uncertain why the project went defunct not long after it commenced. However, several pieces of evidence—the surviving footage, Deren’s comments about the project, testimony about the dance itself as conceived by Erdman, and Deren’s notes about Medusa and related figures from the history of rebellious women—converge to reveal a set of interests and derailments parallel to what we have seen in the Haitian project. Deren’s work here met with similar aesthetic challenges as her other unfinished projects, particularly the footage from Haiti. Deren’s Haiti plans also impact Medusa’s progress directly: she returned to Haiti almost immediately after finishing the workshop, thus forestalling Medusa for the several months that were devoted to other, geographically distant work. Several factors characterize the convergence of interests that both drive and thwart the completion of Deren’s work on Medusa. Knowing the case of Witch’s Cradle, we can see that she was again problematically working with material from another artist’s oeuvre—work that already possessed its own set of artistic aims and accomplishments. Erdman’s concerns, along with the way they were expressed through the piece’s architecture, demonstrated creative principles to be illustrated through a dance piece. Erdman performed the piece throughout her career, and often referred to it as embodying the shape of her developing aesthetic, in which a root idea would develop organically through movement. She initially developed The Transformations of Medusa as a requirement for a dance composition workshop she took with Louis Horst, Martha Graham’s choreographer. The first section germinated through Erdman’s response to a request by Erick Hawkins (another Graham company dancer who was working on a concert) to show him something “Gorgonean.” Erdman then drew on the material Horst presented in his lecture demonstrations on pre-classic dance about how a dancer might use the material of ancient forms to create new, contemporary forms; in addition, she used guidelines from the Horst workshop, which demanded a piece that used the two-dimensional style (a concept Graham had invested in especially in her early work). In Erdman’s fulfi llment of the assignment, she attempts to give a frieze-like impression of the solo dancer. Exploring movement forward, backward, up, and down (within the limitations of the body’s ability to express such directionality) 225

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and particularly emphasizing side-to-side movement, the dance delimits the spatial dimensions in which movement occurs. Investigating through the dance what it means to move in a twodimensional way, The Transformations of Medusa could have made an interesting parallel to Deren’s expedients related to the cinema for her own Medusa, but instead the forms Erdman had chosen seem to have blocked Deren’s creativity. The footage for the dance as Deren filmed it includes just a few cut-ins, different angles, and repeats to gain space across the room. The three phases of the dance repeat in order to accommodate for the lack of width in the room where they fi lmed. These sections—Temple Virgin, Lady of the Wild Things, and Queen of Gorgons—present themselves as separate in only roughly edited form while the movements are continuous. The first section of the fi lm depicts Erdman slowly rocking back and forth with her entire body held very stiff. Her costume includes a skirt that opens at the legs, rendered in a design with strong black/white contrasts, as well as a headdress with vaguely snakelike protuberances that cast shadows on the side and back walls (an effect made possible through very strong front lighting). The defining feature of this section of the dance is Erdman moving her hand before her face like a mirror (fig. 4.5). Deren cuts in for a couple of shots to get a closer look at the dancer looking into her own hand: a mise-en-abîme of reflections through the body (body as mirror, body as mirrored). All the while, Erdman continues with legs erect, petrifaction suggested in her movements back and forth across the room. She embodies both the petrifying look and the result of that look. Remaining always in a straight line as she moves from one end of the room to the other, the dance thus far is very horizontal. Most of the footage, both here and in the next two sections, is in long shot. The second section features larger movements, including high leaps with legs akimbo, some of which are repeated (probably as multiple recordings of the same movement). There are several portions where the feet skip and hop nimbly before returning to the wider and stiffer legs jutting

FIGURE 4.5 Footage from Medusa, unfi nished film by Maya Deren featuring Jean

Erdman, c. 1949. (Courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

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out in broad movements. Running only two minutes, this section gives way quickly to the third and last section, which continues the larger, outward-tending movements. Several times the arms cover the area of the torso in a circular, waxing motion before they extend sharply outward, stretching the body as far as possible in space. The movement describes a course from core to furthest extension. While it uses more of the height of the space filmed, the dancer remains firmly on one track crossing the room, never venturing into any depth of either fore or background. Deren and Erdman seemed poised to collaborate on the film. For whatever reason, however, Deren did not finish it. She never claimed she intended to work on it further than within the boundaries of the workshop, except an oblique reference to the fact that she was fi nishing it (a claim she made on one of her grant applications).50 The footage as it exists is rough. It lacks the sound that would have accompanied the dance, commissioned from Horst. The extremely bald lighting scheme (at one point a bare light bulb apparatus is visible in the frame edge) suggests the context of a rehearsal or a trial run, à la Ensemble for Somnambulists, for the real film. The time and material constraints of the workshop setting may have put a premature end to the project temporarily, but even after the workshop finished, despite maintaining connections at least peripherally through Campbell’s editorship of Deren’s book, neither returned to the fi lm, and they seem not to have collaborated further. Late in her career, Deren supplies elaboration about how the film failed to fit into her oeuvre. She speaks at length about some of her designs for the piece, offering insight into her work process, her sense of ownership over the piece, and the difficulty of converging ideas with the practical matters that consistently stymied her work. She had planned to craft the piece anew, not according to Erdman’s design. In a workshop, Deren discusses with her students the topic of “getting back to first things,” and she goes into detail about the plans she developed for transforming the Medusa material toward her own idiom: first of all instead of her being confined within the theatre space, and going backward and forward, backward and forward, we were going to break that choreography and let her always go in one direction, always pass out of the frame let’s say to the right, always enter the frame at the 228

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left, to give a sense of a life odyssey altogether. And we discussed what the shape of the fi lm as a whole was, and decided that it was something of a spiral. Because, in each section, she picked up some of the movement or repeated the same movement.

In this way, Deren considered subtly manipulating the terms of Erdman’s piece, which as we have seen depended on an adamant sense of two-dimensionality. She describes wanting to make the overall arc of the movements “a life odyssey,” which would have been an experiential, noncausal trajectory corresponding to her desire asserted elsewhere to explore a “vertical” odyssey, incorporating the thickness of the spiral (here all is horizontal, literally). While Erdman articulates misgivings about narrative in essays and in her dance practice, the openness of form that could ensue seemed not to be her reason.51 Erdman locates the attraction of her art form as allowing a corporeal experience. Deren was not unaware of the effect of the film medium on the body, but did not emphasize it as such. Instead, Deren—privileging dislocation and disruption—connects Medusa to the idea of incompletion, which she would eventually express in her book per the kindred figure of Erzulie: For the loa of cosmic forces, there is an end to labor in the achievement of some natural cosmic balance. But the labor of Erzulie is as endless as the capacity of man to dream and, in the very act of accomplishing that dream, to have already dreamed again. [ . . . ] [Man] has conceived her without satisfactions, without balance, to insure an overwhelming balance against his own satisfactions. This is the meaning of the merciless muse, the most unhappy Medusa. Erzulie is the loa of the impossible perfection which must remain unattainable. Man demands that she demand of him beyond his capacity.52

The connection between Erzulie and Medusa—predicated on endlessness, process, and a balancing act akin to Deren’s “unstable equilibrium”53— points to Deren’s rethinking of archetypal forms to include mythological iterations of ideas. Continuity and universality butt up against discontinuity and individual needs (striving for an “unattainable” perfection). But Erdman’s piece fi xes on other concerns entirely, as we have seen. 229

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As a geometrical analogy to this nexus of ideas, Deren frequently invoked the figure of a spiral.54 Her notes often return to the figure of a spiral to undergird a dual system whose two strands come together productively or pick up parts already visited but for new purposes. A motif in her thinking, a spiral could be found even in her living room, where a paper sculpture with two centers, designed as a makeshift spiral, was suspended over a candle and would spin when a candle was lit below it. Deren talks briefly about the sculpture in an interview at her home, confiding in her interviewer that it was known to hypnotize people who started watching it.55 The spiral connects Deren’s plan for the structure of Medusa with several unrealized projects. For instance, as we have seen, she elaborates on the idea in her notes for filming the overture of The Magic Flute with Antony Tudor. The spiral becomes a central feature of that fi lm plan: Therefore the structure of the ballet would be, in a sense, spiral. Some casual, even ordinary incident would be first stated quietly, in terms of its face value. It would have in it several distinctly identifiable events or actions, and would be so constructed that it would lead back into its own beginning. But as it would reiterate itself for the second time, the movement quality of the actions would have undergone a subtle transformation, as if the entire event had slipped down to a lower level of meaning. Nothing of the action would be changed. But the sense of the action would have taken on a different coloring.56

Notably, here, the vertical journey is a descent.57 The spiral allows Deren to make the vertical investigations that lay outside the purview of Erdman’s piece, and its operations allow her a similar confrontation with the self. In notes about possible fi lm transitions for her Haitian film project Deren writes: “The animation of a circle could lead over to either a spiral or a circular choreographic pattern or the linear movement of a circular object such as a marble metamorphizing into a static linear pattern or design, and this, in turn, be re-animated into string manipulations.” A spiral would allow connection in counterpoint for different varieties of the same idea split into two cores. Through bifurcation, reconnection, and sheer ongoingness, the figure of the spiral emblematizes incompletion. It offers a

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model of flux and endless recombination that advances an idea without resolving it: the circle’s closed lines open out (and downward, to articulate depth) so that continuance takes the place of closure. The spiral motif holds interest for Deren for many years. As she sketches out the plan for her Haitian film, Deren discussed the problem with Gregory Bateson, arguing that his idea about nonlinear systems should naturally lead to “a spiral. And a spiral has no arc, for it has no constant radius.”58 Shortly thereafter, she discusses “the spiral problem” with Hammid. Deren recounts that he “makes his out of two centers. That structural tension is the tension between two centers. And he pointed out that his arithmetic spiral which did not accelerate is to the logarithmic spiral as the arc of a circle is to the arc of a parabola.” Deren follows up on Hammid’s point, turning to the dictionary: “A very nice point also in the dictionary, which defines the spiral in terms of a ‘receding’ from the center. Thus the spiral must be defined in terms of movement and time, whereas the circle can be defined only in terms of space.”59 Deren begins to see the potential of spiral structure in many things. A spiral allows the negotiation of dualities without attempting to resolve them in closure. Together, the twin cores spin dynamically around each other. Alone, they would be relegated to stasis. Incidentally, in Haitian Voudoun, spinning in a spiral leads to possession. It is in the attempt to regain balance that one sinks further into the white darkness. Deren meant for Medusa to adopt such a structure, but it did not mesh with Erdman’s design, which probably troubled adaptation of the piece. Deren also intended to provide a new background for each of the three sections, to make both the contexts and the stakes of her journey visible, even while remaining immersed in the abstraction of “a spiritual journey.” Deren would for instance have her move “as if she were descending . . . the three stairs into Hell,” and then pass through three different environments that would mark the stages of her odyssey: the first, which was the section as priestess, was to take place in a sort of pillared background, classical background. The second section, which was Lady of the Wild Things, was to take place in actually a vernal or a forest background, and the third section—which in a sense troubled me

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as for exact location because by then she had so much achieved the archetype that there was no place where it would happen—I had thought of as being almost quite an abstract kind of place.

Even though she is thinking of “an abstract kind of place” for the last part, Deren generally has in mind concrete locations, not the imaginary terrain offered by a bare stage in the film. Either way, she seeks contrasts. As with the Haitian film, Deren could imagine creating a “counterpoint” of movement and location, which became the idea for the film to which she felt most attracted. Indeed, she did something like this exactly in Meditation on Violence—three spaces, with the Wu-Tang and Shao-Lin movements penetrating those spaces as Ch’ao-Li Chi moves from meditation to violence (from gentleness to an eruption of movement to stillness and back again). Deren considered something like this for Medusa as well: “one of the things that I liked was the counterpoint of her two-dimensional movement in the round of a forest. That she should move flatly in a real round place seemed a very nice statement of the fact that she is always the same thing, even though she may be affected by where she is.”60 The inability to execute such a plan when aligned with Erdman’s original ideas contributed to Deren’s abandonment of the film. She explained her frustrations with the differences: Mainly it broke down because flat against round was all right. Because that wasn’t literal. That was an abstract relationship. But flat against flat just was—it was flat. And a temple place was a flat place. And the temple, the pillared idea, was itself in a sense abstract. And flat. And then her flat movements against it would’ve looked like simply a literal translation, which would have violated the dance, because the dance had transcended such literalness.

The plan for the film depended on the nature of Erdman’s piece as it existed. Deren could not claim ownership over it because they had not addressed the idea together: she was coming to Erdman’s idea after the fact. The fact that Transformations of Medusa did not originally belong to her, was not generated from her storehouse and card catalog of ideas, contributed to her abandoning it. The idea of a literal translation of dance ideas hindered 232

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Deren, and caused her to drop the project: “Well, that was why I cancelled the shooting. It isn’t that the film wouldn’t have been all right, the way I had it, but it wouldn’t have been the kind of film that I would really care to say was mine. Because it was something too easy, and I don’t think art’s that easy.”61

Season of Strangers

Indeed, art was not easy for Deren. But it was her passion, and she consistently sought new work even before a previous project was completed. While she was still laboring on the Haitian project, Deren conceived of a film workshop where she might be able to complete a film quickly, with a ready budget and personnel, while taking a little time away from the city. Taking as its theme the transitory nature of relationships, this became her last fi lm project, and she was still working on it at the time of her death. Tentatively entitled Season of Strangers, or simply referred to as her “haiku film,” it was to address the way strangers come together like ideas in the mind seeking outlets: an appropriate topic considering the artistic restlessness of its director. The lyrical aspects of the haiku would also motivate the fi lm, though Deren claimed that the location was more important as a structuring element. Like a few of her “late” film projects, Season of Strangers began as part of a workshop. It took place in Woodstock, New York, from July 6 to July 25, 1959. Broken down into four parts, the workshop allowed flexible participation. Students could sign up for some or all of the sections, and their roles would be determined partly based on the level of commitment they accordingly promised. The first two days, starting from Deren’s home base in New York City, were devoted to lecture-discussions on the topic “Imagining a Film in the Mind’s Eye.” Deren intended to discuss “notation for planning films in visual rather than verbal terms,” with some attention devoted to “the controlled-accident principle of photography.” Deren thus engaged a way to proselytize her views on that binary negotiation in film production to an interested, sympathetic audience working toward the goal of gaining practical experience on a film. The second phase of the first part, days three and four, left room to analyze the location upon arrival in 233

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Woodstock, and to prepare for fi lming. The students would focus on images they wanted to explore in connection with a script—a balance of plan and change of plans, preparation and organic availability to the unknown. As part of this phase, Deren would go over the “means for achieving the desired effect,” that is, offering practical advice about the translation of visual ideas into fi lm images. Looking over Deren’s schedule for the workshop, it is clear that she has the film idea already in mind (focused on the local inn location and the notion of haiku); the roles assigned to the participants would therefore both teach them a function in the filmmaking process and also serve the purpose of providing personnel for accomplishing her own vision of a project. The second part would take place over three days of the first weekend, Friday through Sunday, July 10–12. Deren titled this segment of the workshop “Filming an Image through the Camera-Eye.” The plan coincides with most of the footage that exists for the film. For the first two days, she planned to seek “patterns of movement across the screen, requiring rehearsal both for people and camera movement, as well as extensive lighting of the scene.” For the last day, she hoped to fi lm smaller groupings. Through this part of the workshop, Deren intended to undertake most of the logistical matters related to filming for the project, after which students could “pose questions on any phase of the day’s activity.” Her teaching style strategically incorporated a balance between practice and analysis/ reflection. The third part of the workshop, “Composing the Celluloid Memories,” included rushing the fi lm to New York for development, then projecting it for the group so that they might together select the best takes and put them into order. If retakes were needed, Deren reserved these four days (July 13–16) for doing so. She also proposed making initial plans for the film’s sound track during this time (voice-over, music, and sound effects), using Ito’s expertise to guide them. The final part of the workshop, “Relating Sound and Sight,” would incorporate those sound ideas developed in part three into a final score, adding it in postproduction to the film. The original reversal for the negative of the film would also be prepared during this phase. As a sideline, students who wished to do so could choose to participate in an additional workshop during the second weekend in Woodstock, which was to be run 234

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by Teiji Ito. It would feature lectures, classes, and a drumming jam session he called “Oratory and Rhetoric of Drums.” It was an option separate from but complementary to the film project. The workshop setting was desirable to Deren because it provided her with funding, fi lm stock, and a crew of interested helpers. Another draw was that she could incorporate Ito’s specialty into the program, offering the course in drumming that would increase their fee and allow them to travel and work together. The motivated group, she hoped, would offer her all the means she required for completing work in a focused environment after several years of not having finished a project (The Very Eye of Night having dragged on for the better part of six years). When she listed general information about the workshop for prospective students, she noted that there would be a premiere of the film in Woodstock on August 2, only a week after the workshop was to end. As one might easily imagine, however, the short stint of the workshop, the need to spend time talking about the film in addition to just working on it herself, and the fact more generally of having to instruct the (often rookie) participants on the ground, put an enormous amount of pressure on the project. With the Medusa and Ensemble for Somnambulists workshops as precursors, Deren might have suspected that the time frame she projected was unrealistic for completing such a project. It was. In short, as she bluntly claimed in a letter to the Ingram-Merrill Foundation on February 29, 1960: “Unfortunately, neither the receipts from tuition nor the time allotted to the workshop were sufficient to complete the film.”62 What exists as the result of her time spent in the workshop is therefore fragmentary, but a succinct document of an intense, focused work process. It incorporates several of her primary interests, here in raw form, beginning with its emphasis on a visual idea. Deren conceived the idea for the film first through the workshop’s location, “an interesting, untenanted inn in the country.” Possibly drawing on other ideas about poetry from much earlier in her career, Deren was seeking resonances that might derive directly from objects or sites, concretizing the abstract qualities inhering in poetry. From location and the theme of coming and going, she worked toward structure. She claimed that the fi lm would “consist of a series of lyric, fi lmic statements which could be described as filmic haiku.”63 The form seemed to Deren to complement the theme of the convergence of 235

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strangers in one place, holding something in common with each other (whatever brought them to the same place at the same time) while diverging in every other way. The haiku mode provided a self-contained schema for balancing the simultaneous diversity and similarity of identities. As Deren explained, the inn contains “elements or entities which are 1. not related to each other and 2. . . . being deprived of their history and their own context, appear or exist in terms of their instantaneous essence.”64 Deren related this phenomenon to how images, memories, and thoughts accumulate and resonate in the mind: “the mind is host to a thousand such memories,” in which a vivid image of a friend, always in the same pose, replaces any number of other poses through which the eye has observed her. Random, unconnected thoughts subsist in the mind and they intermingle with each other, also at random, building memories and meanings (e.g., “an image of three men, whose faces I cannot recall, arriving on the threshold of a hall I do not remember, but the brief ballet of their cocksure, conquering arrival—a statement perfect and complete in itself—is imprinted forever on my mind.”). While several details are missing from the memory (“a hall I do not remember”), the essence of an image is intact. Thus these thoughts gather their meaning from a concentrated, formal energy: “an image which is the heart of a meaning, not a fragmentary part of it.”65 This turn (back) to poetry brings Deren full circle from her pre-cinematic training with the Symbolists and Imagists—echoes of the latter in particular resonate in her plan for this filmic haiku. The haiku form is apt for Deren’s formal concerns, but she also intended to use the haiku literally, quoting lines of a haiku she had written for the film. Her sense of how to represent actual poetry (written or spoken) alongside the realities that visibly accompany the language of the film hinge on another, slightly different sense of the camera’s relationship to reality and to expression. As she describes it, “just as the haiku consists not of the butterfly but of the way the poet thinks and speaks of the butterfly, so my filmic haiku could not consist of moments of reality but had to create a reality, most carefully, out of the vocabulary and syntax of fi lm image and editing.” Tapping into the suggestive power of the haiku, the film’s language must generate qualitatively new images and ideas, not comment on already existing ones. Deren turned to the spectator for help with these operations: “And just as the three lines of a haiku do not con236

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tain the conclusion but act as a trigger for the mind of the reader—the bow which sends the arrow of the mind toward the target—this dynamic thrust could be rendered, in fi lm, by a long fade, a long visual pause after each film haiku, to give the viewer’s mind time to reverberate.”66 Because she intended to include spoken lines of poetry, issues with sound—what role it would play in generating such resonances and how it would allow Deren to include the language of a poem proper—come to the fore in Deren’s discussions with her workshop group. Again, they highlight the spectator’s role in generating meaning. Renata Jackson explains that Deren’s view of sound for the project relate to an Eisensteinian contrapuntal use of sound, the terms of which Deren described in terms of her oft-repeated example of a person witnessing a game of hopscotch outside while inside women behind her talk of hats. As Deren explains, “You stand at the place where these two come together by virtue of your presence. What relates these two moments is your position in relation to the two of them.” Jackson examines Deren’s fi lm as an articulation of this principle: “if we think of an inn as a collection of strangers, and if we observe these people from our own perspective (that of another stranger), we see them as if plucked out of the ‘horizontal’ continua of their lives: they appear to us within a decontextualized or ‘vertical’ moment of time.”67 The sound elements are indeed an important feature of this fi lm: Season of Strangers represents the first time Deren intended to use words (rather than sound effects, music, or nothing at all) to accompany the images, and she struggled to imagine what the relationship would yield in terms of the film’s meaning. In their session screening rushes during the workshop, Deren spoke with the group about how to layer the sound elements of the haiku she had written (“Seeing them as they had never seen themselves / My gaze was a small wind from an alien sea / Like gulls they turned into it”) with the visual elements of the fi lm. The visuals incorporate a sequence she describes in the transcript as a zoom shot from the balcony (fig. 4.6) of several actors turning on cue to look up at the camera. Deren describes this look as one of a slight startle, as in a mirror when one is possibly surprised to find herself the object of her own look. She wondered whether she should put the words before, during, or after the image. Each choice would give the images a different emphasis; most of all Deren didn’t want the images to feel like illustrations of the words. On the contrary, despite 237

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FIGURE 4.6 Still from Season of Strangers, unfinished film by Maya Deren, circa 1959.

(Courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

wanting to include spoken text, in all of her work on the film, she privileges the visual, remarking at one point that she cannot describe the project any further, because “It exists so much in fi lmic, visual terms that to attempt to verbalize it any more explicitly would be a distortion.”68 However they were to be included, the role of words was to be minimal. She compares her work with the trends in poetry of the late 1950s into the early 1960s, noting that her work focuses instead on being a concentrated distillation of a universal idea: I find it very interesting that while the poetry readings are going on in New York with people howling and howling and howling, my current fi lm in progress is a series of fi lmic haiku, which take about three minutes each. Now, this is the opposite end—a haiku is the seventeen syllable Japanese form of poetry in which there is one essential image that is 238

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chosen to trigger the mind for the ideas that come from it. Originally it had five lines, it now has three, because the concluding two lines, as a couplet, almost, are to occur in the mind of the spectator. So, what is said is a trigger for the action of the mind. This is somewhat the plan that I have for the fi lm.69

That “trigger for the [action of the] mind” leaves room for the spectator to fill in the blank—to complete the image suggested by what comes before it. To allow the impression of such an image (one that doesn’t exist except in the mind of the spectator), Deren suggests that she will leave room in the film—gaps in which the image may emerge.70 The howling of contemporary poets leaves too little to the imagination for Deren; it fi lls any gaps with sound. She sees herself opening up an empty space in the center of the work for the spectator to participate in completing the phrase she has begun. But note that the phrase on its own is suggestive—incomplete and not whole in itself. Deren was still working on the film the year she died, applying for grants to supply the funds to complete it. As it exists now, in fragments and outtakes, it is difficult to tell whether any of Deren’s ideas are accomplished even in rough form. In her applications, Deren requested funds to start over, so that the existing outtakes would serve as a rough draft for the final, complete, more definitive version that never came into being (not unlike the working method of her workshop fi lm Ensemble for Somnambulists becoming The Very Eye of Night). She did not discuss the fi lm often, and the workshop for her students tended to focus on the process of making a film rather than a worry about completing one.71 Still, almost fift y minutes of film exist from the workshop footage in fragmentary form. Figures move in and out of the central space—what used to be the lobby—of the inn; some interact with each other although most seem relatively oblivious of each other (see fig. 4.6). Often Deren shoots them in slow motion, from high angles, or from varying distances. A man tosses a hat from the balcony and a woman below catches it. A line of women crosses the room, moving away from the camera, each one turning briefly to confront the camera directly (probably the image Deren described to go with the poem’s words). Teiji Ito strums a guitar in the front of the frame; a girl walks over to him, stops, and looks at him for a 239

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lingering moment. A couple of girls bounce balls. One shot Deren repeats several times, a woman gliding across the large, open room with her arm held out before her. There are a couple of swing pans; there is a wind effect shot (a woman’s hair blows in the breeze inside the inn). A woman grimaces and looks directly into the camera with wild eyes. A woman fans herself in close-up. Several shots are out of focus; others are exceptionally fragmentary. These fleeting images of the individual or intermingling guests of the inn suggest varying possibilities of influence and connection among strangers. Their incomplete journeys across the space reflect the fi lm’s accumulating set of fragmentary images and, ultimately, the frustrated course for Deren’s undone projects. Her last fi lm is a loose strand left untied.

240

Conclusion In Completing a Thought, A Last Word (for now . . . )

The trajectory of Maya Deren’s career is intersected by the ethos of incompletion, usually discernible in tension with its complementary idea of completion. Even the films generally accepted as whole and complete— Meshes of the Afternoon, for instance—are marked by incompletion, so that Deren could radically shift the registers of its meaning by adding a soundtrack some fifteen years later. We might further note the openness of the film if we think about what Lucy Fischer has termed its “afterlives.”1 In Fischer’s provocative keynote address for a symposium marking the fiftieth anniversary of Deren’s death, she outlined the manifold ways in which Deren’s legacy continues into the present, including through reconstructions and re-creations of Deren’s film. Afterlife treatments of Meshes of the Afternoon include montages using images directly from Deren’s film for other purposes (e.g., a film-noirish “trailer” for Meshes that changes the valences of interpretation against what Deren’s program notes and writings have impressed upon us) or restaging recognizable actions/elements of the mise-en-scène (e.g., Milla Jovovich’s reenactment of the scene at the table with multiple Maya Derens from Meshes in her music video for “Gentlemen Who Fell”). As Fischer suggests, revivifying these moments from the original film constitutes more than offering a remake of or a tribute to the film: at a minimum, such projects also extend the life of Deren’s

CONCLUSION

original work in more or less productive, invigorating, aggravating, or wholly problematic ways. A galvanizing example comes in the form of Barbara Hammer’s fi lm Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), which deals with the material existence of objects from Deren’s life in connection with her fi lms. Working through material and archival traces of Deren’s legacy as a pathway to understanding Deren’s work, Hammer introduces the idea of incompletion from another angle. As the introduction to this book suggests, the temptation of making something out of the material remnants of Deren’s life (and work) is strong, especially considering the relative dearth of completed films, the glut of unfinished projects, and the compelling personality of a woman who seemed ever-poised to incorporate any of the many strands of her experience into her art.2 Issues related to materiality, presence, and preservation are bound to the notion of incompletion: the incomplete oeuvre, the incomplete life, those parking tickets. Such issues come to life in Hammer’s especially evocative extension of Deren’s work. Starting with Deren’s actual sink, the one Deren used during her life on Morton Street in Greenwich Village, Hammer explores the absence of Deren alongside the presence of her things: her sink, various shooting locations (the bungalow on King’s Road in the Hollywood hills where Meshes was filmed, her apartment on Morton Street), her sewing machine, papers, and other traces of her existence and her work. Hammer describes the way her film takes an active interest in exploring the environments in which Deren worked as an indication of the whole ethos of her filmmaking: My film is about projections. Maya Deren’s Sink holds everything, like a kitchen sink. I feel, myself, that what I shoot, and what I’ve made, depends upon the environment in which I live. [ . . . ] What were [Maya Deren’s] environments like? And what did she film in them? So I take those architectural details and re-project them into the space today . . . in which she has lived, inhabited, and worked. Ghosting—Ghosting Maya Deren: maybe that’ll be the title. Right now, it’s Maya Deren’s Sink.3

The sink—as material coincident with Deren’s existence—becomes the subject and the central image of Hammer’s cinematic investigation of the 242

CONCLUSION

FIGURE C.1 Still from Maya Deren’s Sink (Barbara Hammer, 2012). (Courtesy Barbara

Hammer)

lived environment that contributes to Deren’s work—“what were her environments like?” Such a question derives from Hammer’s acknowledgment of the importance of environment in her own fi lms—she tells her interviewer that she is sure her whole oeuvre would be different had she lived in a larger studio, for instance. Thus Hammer’s project with Deren’s work dovetails with her own sense of the importance of lived environment to the construction of a film world. Hammer revivifies Deren’s world at least partly to help her make sense of her own aesthetic. As she suggests, Hammer raises the ghosts of Maya Deren, channeled through and projected onto the sink—a material, useful, left-behind object from Deren’s life. The ghostliness she depicts is a reminder that cinema operates always not in the present tense, but according to the syntax of the past and now absent. Hammer literalizes it by “ghosting” Deren’s body in several different ways, including doubling her with an actor, casting Deren’s own film images into the spaces she once inhabited but no longer does, and summoning her ghost through the testimony of people she knew. The ghosting brings Deren (sort of) back to life, reminding the audience, too, 243

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how simply watching Deren’s appearances in her own fi lms temporarily revivifies her long after she has gone. Hammer uses cinematic effects, especially superimposition, frame within a frame, and such “projections,” to raise the ghost of Deren in her film through images and through memories of those who knew her. These latter accounts of Deren recall Deren’s account of Season of Strangers and the random snapshot images of memories we all carry with us of things we have seen and people we have known, which exist out of time, on the vertical axis. It is telling that Hammer is at a point of indecision about whether to call her film Maya Deren’s Sink or Ghosting Maya Deren: one emphasizes the materiality of the past that is embodied in the archive (her sink), and one emphasizes the immateriality of the past that is embodied in film (her ghost). Her fi lm raises again several of the issues that have been important to this study of Deren’s work: what are the ramifications of what is saved (incidentally/intentionally) or salvaged from a fi lmmaker’s life? What impact do different kinds of materials have for understanding a filmmaker? How do particular strains of filmmaking practices—here, a feminist, alternately documentary/experimental aesthetic—respond to earlier, pioneering examples? How do they develop, work in homage, interdependence, and/or independence from one another? In fact, a highly productive intersection between material objects and creative work exists in the Deren archive, which Hammer draws out and which other scholars and artists have been drawn to in a continuation of the aesthetic of incompletion heralded by Deren’s work: the Legend of Maya Deren editors; Robert Steele’s planned volumes on Deren’s life, work, and cats; Martina Kudláček’s revisiting of the many places where Deren worked and the people she knew. Through Hammer’s example, we can see that a palimpsest of artistic activity might be developed where meaning accrues through proximity and projection, reanimating the artifacts of an artist’s life and oeuvre. Hammer claims kinship with this aspect of Deren’s aesthetic, claiming: “It is a poetic construct of developing moments, each one held together by an emotion or meaning they have in common rather than logical action.”4 Hammer’s and Deren’s films hold together in this type of logic—a logic of non-forward movement, of an interrupted or incomplete gesture receiving illumination by comparison with another that shares kinship with it. The kind of work exemplified by these approaches points toward a different 244

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manner of engaging with parts of fi lm history and a film artist’s oeuvre, one that values the incomplete and ephemeral aspects of cinema. Deren’s work provides a dynamic example of these aspects, a point of departure for further investigation of such matters. One final example from Hammer’s film illustrates the kind of longing for the absent, always-passing moment briefly captured by the making of a film. Hammer returns to the King’s Road bungalow, and the current occupant offers a tour of the house and property. That occupant points out the “original tree,” from Deren’s time in California, outside the house; she urges Hammer to look at it from a particular perspective to see it properly. In postproduction, Hammer fades it into black and white, suggesting its past state (potentially filmed in Meshes of the Afternoon) as well as its presence in the present. But of course, at best, it is only like the trees when Deren was there, because this tree was much smaller then. It has aged, just as Deren would have done had she lived. Instead, the tree serves as a surrogate for the other trees that appear in Meshes, and Deren’s youthful figure in her films, too, revitalizes the past again through an image double. Hammer’s film reminds the spectator that cinema constantly demands an act of imaginative faith in the image presented to her. The image is engendered by fragments of a reality always in inconstant, transitory transition; it is only lent the air of fi xity and reality by composition, editing, framing, and so forth—the illusion of completion. Ultimately, Hammer draws on the materials of Deren’s work life to ask questions about the status of multiple types of realism, liveness, authenticity, and experience as part of a film practice. By considering film fragments in which reality is embedded, as well as material objects (like the sink) in which a more tangible reality asserts itself within imaginative terrain (what was it like for Deren to use this sink?), Hammer points toward a peculiar authenticity in the reality embodied by traces of Deren’s work. This authenticity finds the exemplary case in Deren’s film project in Haiti, where she grappled with both artistic impulses and the documentary demands she perceived in preserving the objects, rituals, and footage of her confrontation with Voudoun. As we have seen, this material was itself repurposed in the Ito version of Deren’s film, in which the footage is refashioned after Deren’s death into a film she never did make, an afterlife of sorts for work Deren once began. 245

CONCLUSION

Hammer engages this past in her film about Maya Deren—as this book has also aimed to do—paying homage to her through the revivification of bits of her life and work, while always keeping in mind the partial—the incomplete—nature of the knowledge gained by studying them. Such a sense of incompletion inherent in a necessarily fragmented image of a rich life and body of work is perfectly consistent with Deren’s mode of making films and should give no one pause—unless that pause allows space for the imagination’s expansion of her legacy’s images.

246

Notes

The following abbreviations and shortened titles are used in the notes: Anagram DH ED LMD I.1

LMD I.2

MDAA-G MDC

Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (Yonkers, NY: Alicat Bookshop Press, 1946) Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953) (rpt., Kingston, NY: Documentext, 2004) Bruce McPherson, ed., Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film (New York: Documentext, 2005) Vévé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, eds., Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, Vol. I, part 1: Signatures (1917–42) (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1984) Vévé A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, eds., Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, Vol. I, part 2: Chambers (1942–47) (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1988) Bill Nichols, ed., Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) Maya Deren Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University Special Collections, Boston, Massachusetts)

INTRODUCTION: UNFINISHED BUSINESS

I NT R ODU C TION : U N FIN ISHED BUS INES S 1. Transcript of an interview with Ito. Robert Steele fi le, MDC. 2. “Tension plateau” comes from Deren’s notes about Balinese rituals, taken in early 1947 in preparation for her first trip to Haiti later that year. Maya Deren, “The Notebook of Maya Deren, 1947,” October 14 (Autumn 1980): 26. 3. The Orphans Symposium, among other outlets, has made such work its central mission. 4. Description of Wu-Tang movements in Meditation on Violence. Deren, “New Directions in Film Art,” ED, 214–17. My interpolations to quoted material in this book appear in brackets and include ellipses. 5. Lady in the Lake, a 1947 fi lm noir directed by Robert Montgomery, takes as its central conceit a subjective camera view, so that we see only what the protagonist sees. 6. Deren, MDC. 7. Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia UP, 2010). 8. I take this figure from the panel discussion of the fi lm at an event commemorating and honoring the work of Robert Sklar, who was in the process of writing about the fi lm before his untimely death in 2011. “In Honor of Robert Sklar: Let There Be Light,” New York University, Oct. 19, 2013. 9. Patrick Fuery, The Theory of Absence: Subjectivity, Signification, and Desire (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). 10. Patrick Fuery, Theories of Desire (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1995), 46–47. 11. These points will become folded into Deren’s theorizations about cinema in her participation in the Cinema 16 Symposium on Cinema and Poetry, New York, October 1953. 12. Robert Haller has documented much of the decades-long difficulties with the second volume of this project, which is due to come out sometime in the future in either two or three parts, for a total of around 1,200 pages. More can be learned by perusing several fi les in the Maya Deren paper collection (and the related fi les pertaining to The Legend of Maya Deren) at Anthology Film Archives. 13. Among other approaches to this question, genetic criticism has offered another resource for thinking about the shadow of earlier versions of a text or roads not taken but still haunting any given text. I am grateful to Anton Kaes for alerting me to this point of reference. 14. Deren especially admired Welles’s Touch of Evil. She also kept a press clipping about Citizen Kane. MDC. 15. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1996). 16. Vincent Canby, “It’s All True: Based on an Unfi nished Film by Orson Welles (1993): Review/Film Festival; Reconstructing the Tale of a Wellesian Disaster,” New York Times, Oct. 15, 1993. See http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9FOCE7 DA1139F936A25753C1A965958260 (last accessed June 26, 2013).

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17. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “When Will—and How Can We—Finish Orson Welles’ Don Quixote?” I quote from the version of Rosenbaum’s text that appears as chapter 26 in his Discovering Orson Welles (Berkeley: U of California P, 2007). In keeping with his topic, Rosenbaum’s own essay also appeared in multiple versions: as a lecture at a conference in Valencia, Spain (from which the chapter in his book is taken), which was itself originally commissioned as an essay by The Guardian, which he has posted on his website: www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=20788. 18. Orson Welles, Filming Othello (1979). 19. Marguerite Rippy, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2009), 113. 20. Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 305. 21. Ibid., 307. 22. The discovery was of such interest that it was reported on widely and internationally: e.g., Dave Kehr: “Early Film by Orson Welles Is Rediscovered,” New York Times, Aug. 8, 2013. 23. Excerpt from the live commentary delivered at the world premiere of Too Much Johnson at the Giornate del Cinema Muto [Pordenone Silent Film festival], Verdi Theatre, October 9, 2013. My thanks to Paolo Cherchi Usai for generously sharing the text with me. 24. Ibid. 25. The rediscovery of portions of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in Argentina, which have been in recent years presented in new premieres of the “complete, restored fi lm,” also serves as a case study in maintaining or highlighting the incomplete nature of fi lms and, in this case, their often multiple existing versions, while also presenting them as more complete. 26. Christine Froula, “Groundwork for an Edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1977). See, too, her To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (Yale UP, 1984) and Ronald Bush’s extension of her arguments in “Excavating the Ideological Faultlines of Modernism: Editing Ezra Pound’s Cantos,” in George Bornstein, ed., Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1991). 27. Leah Flack, “ ‘Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!’ (20/90): Pound’s Modernist Difficulty.” Paper delivered at Ezra Pound International Conference, Dublin, Ireland, July 10, 2013. 28. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve (New York: Norton, 2012). Greenblatt’s famous essay “Resonance and Wonder” is also clearly preoccupied with these issues albeit from another slant: resonance building on associative structures of meaning (looking outside of the text) and wonder fi xating on the formal perfection of the text as it inheres within itself. 29. I take this reading from J. L. Butrica’s overview of influences on editions of Propertius, “Editing Propertius,” The Classical Quarterly 47.1 (1997): 176. I am grateful to Kerill O’Neill for pointing me in its direction. 30. Deren, Lecture at Smith College, Apr. 11, 1961. MDC. 31. Ibid.

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32. Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” ED, 110. 33. This formulation might well remind us of Jean Cocteau’s Sang d’un poète (and Orphée), which Deren counted as a favorite. 34. MDC. Some of the lines I am quoting are crossed out or, conversely, added into the space of the margins. 35. Deren, DH, 99. 36. Notable examples include Moira Sullivan, “An Anagram of the Ideas of Filmmaker Maya Deren” (PhD diss., University of Stockholm, 1997), Renata Jackson’s The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 2002), and Alain-Alcide Sudre’s Dialogues théoriques avec Maya Deren: Du cinéma expérimental au film ethnographique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). Several books about cinema devote a chapter or more of their purposes to Deren, such as P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, 3d ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), Lauren Rabinovitz’s Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 2d ed. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003), and Erin Brannigan’s Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011). 37. See for example the way Deren opens her essay “Cinema as an Art Form,” ED, 19–20. 38. Deren, transcript from the Mike Wallace interview on Night Beat, May 30, 1957. MDC. 39. We should remember, too, that this sampling is affected by someone else (Teiji and Cherel Ito) having edited it, not Deren. 40. Taken from Eisenstein, the phrase refers to the “resistance specific to [the shot].” In this statement, Eisenstein, like Deren, is concerned with the shot’s “immutability . . . rooted in its nature,” and how montage (for Deren, a “creative tool” of the cinema) represents “the mightiest means for a really important creative remolding of nature.” I am grateful to John Belton for having reminded me of this, one of the many connections between Eisenstein’s and Deren’s ethos. Quotations here and above are from “Through Theatre to Cinema,” in Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977), 5. Also see Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form” (ED). 41. In part, the question of incompletion may be aligned with a modernist impulse and a general concern with the limits of one’s chosen artistic medium. Multiple examples across media assert such an impulse, including in poetry, one of Deren’s strongest interests, where Laura Riding Jackson spends the second half of her career essentially unwriting the poetry of the first half of her career, or in another way, Marianne Moore, who cut all but the opening lines of her already famous poem “Poetry” in revised editions of her work. 42. Deren, MDC. 43. See Katherine Dunham’s Island Possessed (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994) and Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1985). 44. Deren, letter to James Laughlin, Aug. 7, 1943, LMD 1.2: 311–12.

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1. DON E A N D U N DONE 1. Some of the important sources picking up and developing Deren’s legacy include Robin Blaetz, ed., Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007), and the essays found in Bill Nichols, ed., MDAA-G. 2. Deren, “From the Notebook of Maya Deren, 1947,” October 14 (Autumn 1980): 27. 3. Deren, program notes, “Three Abandoned Films,” in ED, 248. 4. Wendy Haslem, “Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema,” in Senses of Cinema, first published December 12, 2002 (last accessed June 10, 2012). 5. Quoted in LMD I.2, 347. 6. Hammid quoted in LMD I.2 from interviews conducted on Sept. 4, 1975, and Aug. 3, 1976. Deren continued to write poetry even after she begins to identify as a fi lmmaker, though less often than before. 7. Maya Deren, quoted in Martina Kudláček, In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Austria/ Switzerland/Germany: Navigator Film: 2003). 8. This idea serves as the foundation of Deren’s notion of “camera reality,” which will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. In her writings, see for instance “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” ED, 110–28. 9. Deren quoted in LMD I.2, 57. 10. Jackson, The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 2002). 11. Deren laments this failure in “Cinema as an Art Form” (ED, 20). Nevertheless, as Laurent Guido, Christophe Wall-Romana, and others have shown, the debates on cinema and poetry in France in the 1920s often merged in important ways, for instance around the idea of rhythm. See Laurent Guido, L’Age du rhythme: Cinéma, musicalité et culture du corps dans les théories françaises des années 1910–1930 (Lausanne: Éditions Payot, 2007), and Christophe Wall-Romana, “Cinepoetry: Making and Remaking the Poem in the Age of Cinema” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2005). 12. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002); Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974); Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995). Each offers accounts of this development. 13. Deren cites T. E. Hulme’s formulation of Romanticism against Classicism, for example, stating: “He applauds the fi nite world of the Classicist and condemns the infinite world of the Romanticist. He wishes to abolish the conception of man as a god and to eliminate vagueness and reliance on the infi nite.” Quoted from Deren’s master’s thesis, “The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry” (Smith College, 1939), chap. 3, “The Imagist Movement,” MDC. 14. Deren, Anagram, 35. 15. Deren, “The Influence of the French Symbolist School” (chap. 3), MDC. 16. Ibid. 17. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What Is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968).

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18. Deren traces Pound’s artistic development, beginning with the impact of writers like Yeats and Browning on his earliest work, moving to his direct involvement in the Imagist movement, and ending with his break with Imagism and refashioning of some of its tenets in, first, Vorticism (“an attempt to retain the precision, the concern with form, and the direct and realistic quality which he felt was being abandoned by the Imagists”), and lastly, in the modified “Symbolism” of the Cantos (of which only three books were published at the time). 19. The source for these views is often the same for Pound and Eliot as it is for Deren: the poet and theoretician T. E. Hulme. Deren’s own writing often very closely echoes statements in Hulme’s Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936). For example, in his essay “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” Hulme spends time discussing Henri Bergson and the impulse toward universality in the artwork (quoting Bergson: “Art should endeavour to show the universal in the particular ”): 141–70. 20. LMD I.1, 274. 21. Quotations from Deren’s letter to Dunham reprinted in LMD I.1, 431. 22. According to an article “How to Make Your Own Movies on a Shoestring” printed in P.M. magazine, by Louise Levitas (Mar. 19, 1946). LMD I.2, 388–89. 23 . Maya Deren, in her application for the Guggenheim grant she was eventually awarded in 1946. Her first application was put together in November 1944. MDC. 24. Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 185–87. 25. Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” ED, 19. 26. LMD I.2, 74. 27. LMD I.2, 77. 28. LMD I.2, 98. 29. Sitney, Visionary Film, chaps. 1–2. 30. Rabinovitz then asserts that Meshes may be read as Deren’s reassertion of power over the female image. See Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, 2d ed. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003), chap. 3. 31. Ibid., 56. 32. Catherine Soussloff, “Maya Deren Herself,” MDAA-G: 104–29. 33. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 34. Deren’s photographic series, “Experimental Portraiture,” plays on the idea of fragmented parts of the image of woman through its disarticulated mannequin whose parts are artfully strewn around rooms. 35. Deren, program notes, MDC. 36. The question of the body/mind of the spectator in terms of it constituting or simply receiving images has been articulated by Francesco Casetti as “the fi lmic experience,” which resonates with Deren’s thinking on the matter. Francesco Casetti, “Filmic Experience,” Screen 50.1 (Spring 2009): 56–66. 37. Deren, “Magic Is New,” ED, 203. 38. Publicity for fi lm screenings, MDC. 39. Deren, letter to the editor, The Nation, Mar. 3, 1946. Reprinted in LMD 1.2, 383. 252

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40. See Jackson, The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren for a fuller discussion of Deren’s interest in Gestalt theory, in which the whole adds up to a sum much greater than the individual parts would seem to imply. In this area, Deren is influenced by her reading of T. E. Hulme for her master’s thesis. 41. Maureen Turim, “The Ethics of Form,” MDAA-G, 82, 93. 42. Deren recollected that they chose the flower based on purely circumstantial contingencies: they couldn’t afford fresh flowers throughout the shoot, so they went to the “nearest five and ten cent store” where the only flower they had that was big enough to register in the mise-en-scène was a fake poppy; Deren complained that they never heard the end of interpretations of that flower (recounted in LMD I.2, 106–107). 43. Deren, “Letter to James Laughlin,” Aug. 7, 1943. LMD I.2, 311–12. 44. Ibid., 312. 45. Ibid. 46. Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” ED, 29–30. 47. Deren, “Film Ideas.” MDC. 48. Deren, journal notes, Feb. 1947, MDC. 49. The myth of Medusa, which directly engaged Deren’s imagination particularly later in her career, speaks in a similar way to the violent power of reflection. 50. In his book on the fi lm, John David Rhodes remarks on Deren’s near paranoiac determination to steer the fi lm’s reception. Meshes of the Afternoon, London: BFI Classics/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 51. Elinor Pearson (Cleghorn), “Mute Movement: Score and Silence in the Work of Maya Deren,” London Consortium, Apr. 23, 2008. 52. Notes for a draft of a program of “Chamber Films by Maya Deren” (no date), MDC. 53. Quoted in Rhodes, Meshes of the Afternoon, 102. Originally from an interview with Robert Steele. 54 . Deren’s acquaintance with Duchamp included her work photographing the “Lazy Hardware” exhibit he had helped create with André Breton in the window of Gotham Book Store in 1945. Anne (Pajorita) Matta Clark was an artist who had exhibited at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938, the year she became the wife of Surrealist painter Roberto Matta Eschaurren (known as Matta , a regular in the art scene surrounding Guggenheim’s gallery). A year before  fi lming parts of Witch’s Cradle, Anne Matta Clark became mother to twins (both eventually artists themselves), Gordon and Sebastian Matta-Clark. LMD I.2 , 145–47, 152. 55. There is some discrepancy between Deren’s shooting log and the surviving footage. 56. For example, Deren strived to complete work with dancers and dance troupes (e.g., Frank Westbrook, Rita Christiani, Talley Beatty, Katherine Dunham, and Antony Tudor), writers (e.g., Anaïs Nin, André Breton), musicians (e.g., John Cage, Teiji Ito), artists (e.g., Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter), and architects and designers (e.g., Alvin Lustig, Frederick Kiesler). 57. Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” ED, 19. 253

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58. For a fuller description of this tendency, see for example Marjorie Perloff ’s account in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003). 59. Susan Davidson and Philip Rylands, eds., Peggy Guggenheim & Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004). 60. Davidson and Rylands, Peggy Guggenheim & Frederick Kiesler, 40–41. 61. Deren, “Letter to James Laughlin,” LMD I.2, 312. 62. Solomon Guggenheim’s (Peggy Guggenheim’s uncle) new gallery trenchantly entitled its catalogue “The Art of the Future,” contrasting its aims against Peggy’s “art of this century.” He inadvertently pointed to the principles of containment and prediction mobilized in the museum/gallery spaces in Susan Stewart’s formulation of those spaces in her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1993). See especially chap. 5, “Objects of Desire.” 63. Stewart, On Longing, 154–66. 64. Some exist in still frames that are not part of the outtakes. MDC. 65. LMD I.2, 162. 66. See note 40. 67. Shooting script, Witch’s Cradle, MDC. 68. T. J. Demos, “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: ‘First Papers of Surrealism,’ 1942,” October (Summer 2001): 104. In Demos, the unadulterated space of Kiesler’s gallery promotes an almost “uterine” form which he attributes to the Surrealist longing for home as equated with “(André) Breton’s mythical ‘realm of the Mothers,’” Anna Matta Clark, as the young mother of twins, both seems to epitomize this form and to reject its initiating symbol, since she is caught in that space herself. 69. Demos, “Duchamp’s Labyrinth,” 94. 70. Ibid., 110. 71. Tom Gunning, “The End Is the Beginning: The Labyrinth in American AvantGarde Films.” Lecture given at the Louvre, Paris, 2007. 72. Minotaure was an important Surrealist journal (later it included a more catholic range of modernist artists as well) edited by André Breton and Pierre Mabille, published in Paris from 1933 to 1939. See Irene E. Hofmann, “Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 22.2 (1996): 130–49. Picasso made several pieces that featured the Minotaur, including several in his Vollard Suite. 73. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 313. 74. William Seabrook, Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940). Seabrook also discusses the idea in an essay in one of View ’s rivals, the art almanac VVV. 75. The way Deren responded to an art world (including cinema) dominated by male artists is exemplified in her tense interaction with Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas at the Cinema 16 Symposium on Cinema and Poetry in New York, October 1953. Miller in particular strikes repeatedly at Deren’s status as a woman, summoning sexual innuendo and derogatory remarks to his aid in attacking her ideas. 254

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76. While it is unclear whether Deren and Duchamp remained close after the fi lm, Deren’s fi les show she followed his career. 77. Indeed, he inspires such play—for instance, in his disavowal of art: échec in French is a failure or a setback; to play chess is jouer aux échecs. (Duchamp’s art practice becomes an échec par échecs.) 78. For expansion on these ideas, see The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1989). 79. Deren, grant application, MDC. 80. Deren was familiar with Seabrook’s work, as notes in her archive suggest. His book on witchcraft may have informed some of Witch’s Cradle. Moreover, in the June 1943 edition of View, an account of Seabrook’s experiments with a young woman seeking to regain the space of silence and stillness experienced in her youth—experiments which lead them both to “go through the door” of consciousness—appeared alongside images in Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, possibly a source for Deren’s interest in fi lming in that space. 81. Shooting script, Witch’s Cradle, MDC. 82. Poem by Maya Deren, MDC. 83. Quoted in Thomas Singer, “In the Manner of Duchamp, 1942–1947: The Years of the ‘Mirrorical Return,’ ” Art Bulletin 86.2 (June 2004): 346–69. 84. Tom Gunning, “The End Is the Beginning.” 85. Ibid. 86. Deren’s interest in this particular message extends well beyond this fi lm. For instance, in her book Divine Horsemen, she outlines the Voudoun tradition’s way of thinking about death and life in the following terms: “it is in the moment of its ending that the limits of life, hence life itself, are manifest. Death, as the edge beyond which life does not extend, delineates a first boundary of being. Thus the ending is, for man, the beginning: the condition of his first consciousness of self as living. Death is life’s first and final definition.” DH, 23. 87. Shooting script, Witch’s Cradle, MDC. 88. They are William Fowlie, “Narcissus”; Parker Tyler, “Christ, Socrates and Stalin in the Role of Narcissus”; and Nicolas Calas, “The Monstrous Narcissus.” All in View, no. 2, 4th ser. (Sept. 1943). 89. Herbert Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance. Trans. John Brogden. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. The pivotal years in which Molderings is interested are 1913–14, during Duchamp’s development away from painting and toward “art as experiment.” 90. Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, 72. 91. See for example P. S. Sri’s “Upanishadic Perceptions in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Drama,” Rocky Mountain Review 62.2 (Fall 2008): 34–49. 92. Shooting script, Witch’s Cradle, MDC. 93. Deren, handwritten note, MDC. 94. Deren, from a letter to John Adams, cited in LMD I.2, 151. 95. LMD I.2, 152.

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2 . TOWA R D C OMPLETION AND CONT ROL 1. Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” ED, 19, 31. 2. Th is quotation comes from the essay Deren is quoting in her thesis: Pound, “The Serious Artist,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968), 51. 3. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Mariner/Houghton Miffl in, 1975), 37–44. 4. Ibid., 43. 5. Annette Michelson briefly notes the coincidence of Deren’s and Eliot’s versions of a depersonalized classicist aesthetic in her “Poetics and Savage Thought: On Anagram.” MDAA-G: 33. 6. Deren, Note to renters of her fi lms, MDC. 7. Deren, “Ritual in Transfigured Time,” Dance, Oct. 1946. In ED, 227. 8. Ibid., 227. 9. Deren, “Notes on Ritual in Transfigured Time,” MDC. 10. See note 3. 11. These concerns will be extended into several other directions as Deren’s fi lm and theoretical work develops, including in the expression of verticality vs. horizontality so thoroughgoing in her analysis of Haitian ritual drawings (the vevers) and her notion about poetic vs. analytic/narrative expression most thoroughly articulated in the Cinema 16 Symposium in October 1953. 12. LMD I.2, 201–205. 13. This total does not account for contingencies like the maintenance of her camera or the use of space in her apartment for editing and storage of equipment and reels, which she details in a document entitled “Production Costs” in MDC. 14. Continuing with her interest in enlisting /collaborating with other artists and members of New York’s intellectual elite, two of these men are played by John Cage and Parker Tyler. 15. Conversely, Wendy Haslem reads this moment as centered on a critique of the guests: “This ‘civilized’ world ignores Deren as she crawls along their dinner table. By depicting herself as invisible to the diners, Deren highlights the myopia of the guests.” Haslem, “Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema,” in Senses of Cinema, first published December 12, 2002 (last accessed June 10. 2012). 16. See chapter 4, pp. 214–16. 17. Deren describes these difficulties in “Planning by Eye,” ED, 157. 18. The hurricane hit Long Island on Friday, September 15, 1944. After the hurricane, Heyman and Alexander Hammid recollected how much the beach had changed: so much so that Deren had to recut some of the sequences to maintain continuity. LMD 1.2, 189. 19. LMD I.2, 173. 20. LMD I.2, 189. 21. Deren, “At Land Scenario,” LMD I.2, 175. 22. Deren mentions Bergman at least once in an interview, but in that context expresses dislike for his aesthetic: “I find it difficult to empathize with Nordic drama. 256

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And all Swedish fi lms are still preoccupied with the same problem—how woman is going to get back at man” (quoted in Frank Gagnard, “No Footage Here,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 9, 1960). Bergman, for his part, claimed the inspiration for the image of the knight’s chess game with Death derived from mural images in Täby kyrka painted by Albertus Pictor. 23. Marcel Duchamp, interview by Truman Capote in Observations, Photographs by Richard Avedon, Comments by Truman Capote (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 55; cited in Ian Randall’s “Re-evaluating the Art & Chess of Marcel Duchamp,” toutfait.com: The Marcel Duchamp On-line Journal, first published Dec. 2007; see www. toutfait.com/online_journal_details.php?postid=46836#N_38_ (last accessed June 10, 2012). 24. Bresson, of course, often eschewed such access to motivations. Robert Bresson, Notes from the Cinematographer (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1997), 81. 25. Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” ED, 22. 26. Anagram, 108. 27. Deren, Materials for At Land, MDC. 28. Francesco Casetti, “Filmic Experience,” Screen 50.1 (Spring 2009): 27. 29. Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” 31. 30. Deren, handwritten note dated Jan. 6–12, 1947, MDC. 31. Including her preplanning and editing of the fi lm, the time she was occupied with the fi lm was, by her account, six months total. 32. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (New York: Oxford UP, 1960), 49. 33. Unfortunately, Beatty wound up being a somewhat uncompromising partner: problems ensued between Deren and Beatty regarding their collaboration and credit Beatty felt he was due for his role. Deren wrote to him in 1945: “I am a little disappointed, too, in the attitude which, in your moody anger, you revealed towards the movie. I never imagined you felt like an employee who was supposed to get paid.” LMD I.2, 281. 34. Originally, the fi lm was also to have had an original score by John Cage, a possibility Deren may have discussed with him when he appeared the year before in At Land. Letter to Sawyer Falk, Mar. 3, 1945, MDC. The editors of LMD I.2 note that John Cage did not recollect planning to write this score: the letter to Falk dates from the month prior to fi lming, during the planning phase of the production. 35. Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” 29. 36. Ibid. 37. Maya Deren, “Choreography for the Camera,” Dance, Oct. 1945. Draft in MDC. 38. Ibid. 39. Erin Brannigan, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), 103. 40. Ibid., 104. 41. Publicity materials for Deren’s program of “Choreographies for Camera,” MDC. 42. “Choreography for the Camera by M.D,” Dance, Oct. 1945. Copy in MDC. 43. Deleuze discusses the creation of such spaces in Cinema 2. Renata Jackson points out the connection between Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 and Deren’s 257

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horizontal and vertical “fi lmic structures” in greater detail. Jackson, “The Modernist Poetics of Maya Deren,” MDAA-G: 66–67. 44. Deren, “Original Plan for A Study in Choreography for Camera,” MDC. 45. This second apartment belonged to the painter Buffie Johnson. 46. The sequence also predicts Deren’s desire to experiment with variations on a theme, such as her project with the rituals of Voudoun, the dances of Bali, and children’s games, across which she saw a common thread. 47. Deren’s intention to include the mirror is definite: Hella Heyman recollected how difficult it was to keep the camera out of the shot because of the mirror’s presence. MDC. 48. Deren, Thesis notes, MDC. 49. Deren describes the genesis of this shot in an article for Dance magazine in 1945. Reprinted as “Choreography for the Camera,” ED, 220–24. 50. Ibid., 223. 51. P. Adams Sitney, “Imagism in Four Avant-Garde Films,” in Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 188. Sitney takes the term “compositional” metaphor from Eisenstein; see for example “Laocoön” (in Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, ed. Richard Taylor, 2:124). 52. Deren, “Original Plan for A Study in Choreography for Camera,” MDC. 53. Deren, “Choreography for the Camera,” 224. 54. Anagram, 35. 55. LMD I.2, 280. 56. LMD I.2, 281. 57. Ibid. 58. Anagram, 26. 59. Alfred J. Andrea and James H. Overfield, The Human Record: Sources of Global History, vol. 1: To 1700. 5th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth/Houghton Miffl in Harcourt, 2004): 189. 60. Deren, “Prospectus for a 16mm, Two-Reel Motion-Picture on the Egyptian Material of the Metropolitan Museum,” in LMD I.2, 294. 61. Deren, Notes, MDC. 62. Deren, “Planning by Eye.” ED, 158. 63. Deren, Notes, MDC. 64. Deren, “Prospectus for a 16mm, Two-Reel Motion-Picture on the Egyptian Material of the Metropolitan Museum,” in LMD I.2, 294. 65. I describe this scene in greater detail in the introduction (see pp. 4–6). 66. Karl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1951). 67. See p. 6. 68. Reprinted in LMD I.2, 458. 69. See, for example, “Maya Must Brood on This,” LMD I.2, 466. 70. Deren, “Letter to Sawyer Falk,” LMD I.2, 250. 71. Deren applied for funds from the Rockefeller Foundation in August 1945 and to the Guggenheim Foundation for the first time in November 1944 (and for several years following that: her successful application was submitted in 1945, awarded in April of 1946). 72. Interview with Frank Westbrook, Sept. 1, 1976, LMD I.2: 525. 258

2. TOWARD COMPLETION AND CONTROL

73. Ken Kelman, “Widow into Bride,” Filmwise 2: Maya Deren (1962): 21–23. Reprinted in LMD I.2, 463. 74. “With Maya Deren I: An Interview with Elizabeth (Rockwell) Raphael,” by Robert Haller, 1979. Reprinted in LMD I.2, 527. Raphael further recollected that Deren had shot the sequence at her parents’ house in Pittsburgh, but that someone had opened the door to the dark room and “the section was solarized.” According to the editors of Legend, Raphael claimed: “this accident provided Deren with the idea for using the negative image at the end of the film.” 75. Ibid. 76. “Maya Must Brood on This,” LMD I.2, 466. 77. LMD I.2, 478. 78. Deren, Guggenheim applications, MDC. 79. Note the accounts of Deren navigating segregated hotels for the troupe, in LMD I.2, 27–28. For instance, Anaïs Nin noted in her Diaries that Gore Vidal, also fi lmed in Ritual, had issues with the intermixing of races during that time. LMD I.2, 534. 80. Christiani, interviewed by Vèvè Clark and Millicent Hodson, May 30–31, 1977, LMD I.2, 519. 81. Deren, “Rockefeller application,” LMD I.2, 465. 82. Deren, “Program notes,” LMD I.2, 461. The audience was invited. 83. Deren, “Ritual in Transfigured Time,” LMD I.2, 458). 84. Nin, Diaries, in LMD I.2, 535–36. 85. Ute Holl, “Moving the Dancers’ Souls,” MDAA-G: 174. 86. LMD I.2, 534. 87. Ibid., 535. If that question doesn’t sound familiar, we might well review Maxim Gorky’s response to the earliest fi lm screenings in Paris. Maxim Gorky, “Kingdom of Shadows,” cited in Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (London: Routledge, 1994), 36–37. 88. Holl, “Moving the Dancers’ Souls,” 175. 89. For detailed analyses, see Annette Michelson, “Poetics and Savage Thought: About Anagram,” and Renata Jackson, “The Modernist Poetics of Maya Deren,” both in MDAA-G: 21–45 and 46–76, respectively. 90. See, for example, Anagram, 79, 92–93. 91. Anagram, 37. 92. Sculpture serves as a dynamic depiction of movement that has been arrested within its course, as examined in Ritual ’s statue/twirling scene. Consider, too, Hulme: “Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end.” T. E. Hulme, “Mana Aboda,” in Speculations (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1936), 266; see https://archive.org/details /speculations031991mbp (last accessed Apr. 6, 2014). 93. Deren, in a lecture to the Woodstock Workshop, 1959. Reprinted in LMD I.2 , 529. 94. LMD I.2, 205. 95. Deren is describing “complications” in Ritual. “Planning by Eye” (c. 1946–47), LMD I.2, 532. 96. LMD I.2, 467. 259

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97. Several of Deren’s scenarios or notecards for ideas demonstrate her interest in children, here in part because the child she proposes for the fi lm allows her to fold childhood and adulthood together as part of the same phenomenon, and the protagonist’s ritual fi xates on the translation of one (the child) into the other (the adult), representing some of the transitional stages in between, including being initiated into social and sexual affairs. 98. LMD I.2, 466–67. 99. Anagram, 58. 100. Ibid. 101. Herb Tank: “ ‘Cinema 16’ Sponsors Experimental Film Shows,” The Worker, Sunday, Nov. 9, 1947. MDC.

3. HA ITI 1. DH, 5. 2. Martina Kudláček vouches for its presence in the Anthology Film Archives collection, but as Moira Sullivan notes: “It is unclear from archive material if and when this was aired.” Sullivan, “Maya Deren’s Ethnographic Representation of Ritual and Myth in Haiti,” MDAA-G, 231. 3. On her visa application, Deren was asked for names of persons she knows in Haiti. Her answer: “No one personally, but I have letters of introduction to Hon. Dantés Bellegarde, and Dr. Camille L’Herissau, from Mr. Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation.” Also, on the back of the form, she lists Bateson and George Amberg, of the Museum of Modern Art, as references. 4. Deren, Haiti Journal, MDC. 5. Dunham conducted her research there for her degree in social anthropology from the University of Chicago and wrote her thesis “Dance in Haiti” on issues of Voudoun and dance. Furthermore, at one time, she and Deren discussed collaborating on a book for children about dance, a project that similarly intersects with Deren’s Haitian fi lm’s interests. 6. Dunham bought an estate in Haiti in 1949; Deren reached out to her as a resource in her later visits to the country. 7. Moira Sullivan notes that Bateson gave Deren $2,000 in 1947 for her travels. Further, the Institute for Cultural Study, with which Bateson and Mead were affi liated, allotted her money for her 1949 trip. Sullivan, “Deren’s Ethnographic Representation,” MDAA-G, 230. 8. This workshop is where the Medusa fi lm originated. 9. For instance, Renata Jackson suggests that “The unfinished status of Deren’s Haitian fi lms must be blamed upon her ever-present fi nancial woes.” The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 2002), 189. 10. Deren, transcript from the Mike Wallace interview on Night Beat, May 30, 1957. MDC.

260

3. HAITI

11. Catrina Neiman, “An Introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren, 1947,” October 14 (Autumn 1980): 4. 12. Annette Michelson, “On Reading Deren’s Notebook,” October 14 (Autumn 1980): 47–54. 13. Michelson, “On Reading Deren’s Notebook,” 48. 14. Ibid., 52. 15. DH, 6. 16. DH, 97. 17. See chapter 4, pp. 214–16. 18. As part of her preparation for her original Haitian fi lm idea, Deren took photographs of children’s sidewalk chalk drawings. One represents a bride standing over a groom, looking like an uncanny parallel to the widow into bride vertical descent in Ritual. See Neiman, “An Introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren,” 6. 19. Deren, interview with Mike Wallace, MDC recording. 20. Russell, “Ecstatic Ethnography: Filming Possession Rituals,” Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999), 272. 21. Deren discusses these issues in her master’s thesis (“The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry,” Smith College, 1939) and a paper on metaphysics also written for her coursework. MDC. 22. Clipping in Deren’s fi les, MDC. 23. A. J. Liebling, “The Wayward Press: Caribbean Excursion,” New Yorker, Apr. 10, 1948, 60–67. 24. Truman Capote, “Haitian Notes,” Harper’s Bazaar, Dec. 1948, 120, 166. 25. Clipping in Deren’s fi les, MDC. 26. For instance, in one particularly egregious example, an article about the sculptor Jason Seley, who had made Haiti his home for four years, remarks about how all the Americans who live in Haiti can live in luxury, with three or four servants who work happily for a pittance. 27. From a draft of recommendations drawn up by Deren for a proposed “Campaign for a Tourist Trade,” submitted to the Institute for Cultural Affairs. MDC. 28. Deren, Haiti Journal, MDC. 29. DH, 55–56. 30. Deren notes that a greater affi nity between the Catholic faith and Voudoun allows Voudoun to flourish in Haiti, while the incompatibility of Protestantism has threatened it to a greater extent. 31. Such tensions persist to this day; in 2005, Max Beauvoir founded the National Confederation of Haitian Vodou, in part to counteract recurring acts of discrimination and violence against practitioners of Voudoun by Christian evangelicals. 32. Deren, notes on Haiti, MDC. 33. DH, 14. 34. Her first (unsuccessful) Guggenheim application was made in November 1944, when she was just finishing Study in Choreography for Camera. 35. LMD I.2, 373. In any event, including this information did not hurt her application. She writes to Henry Allen Moe that “the reception [the fi lms] have been accorded

261

3. HAITI

has been extremely gratifying.” Deren submitted the application on October 31, 1945, but added her press clippings in the letter to Moe after the fact, in February 1946, before the decisions for grants were announced. 36. The reply from John Marshall at the Rockefeller Foundation must have been discouraging to Deren: without clarifying what exactly he felt Deren should do instead (ostensibly another kind of fi lmmaking) he writes: “after a good deal of thought and some further discussion, Miss Barry [Iris Barry, Head of Film at MoMA] and I both feel that [a chance for you to make more fi lms] would not actually be so advantageous as it seems.” 37. LMD I.2, 47. The editors cite complications due to the outbreak of the war as the reason for her not having gone to Haiti in 1941. 38. Deren, Renewal application to the Guggenheim Foundation, MDC. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Deren, “Summary of Activities since Fellowship Award in 1946,” Guggenheim Application from 1953, MDC. 43. Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” ED, 111. 44. Deren, Proposal to Haitian officials, MDC. 45. Anthology made a quick duplicate negative, which has served as the screening copy there since then. This information comes per the project proposal for restoring the footage, from the Maya Deren paper collection and related fi les at Anthology Film Archives. 46. Analyses by Moira Sullivan and Catherine Russell are particularly influential to this study. Sullivan, “Deren’s Ethnographic Representation,” and Russell, “Ecstatic Ethnography.” See, too, Kudláček’s prospectus for restoring the footage in the Maya Deren Papers archive at Anthology Film Archives and Sullivan, “Notes on Deren’s Haitian Footage,” at www.algonet.se/~mjsull/haiti.html. 47. David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998), 178–79. 48. Jeanette DeBouzek, “A Portrait of the Artist as Ethnographer,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 5.2 (1992): 7–28. 49. Sullivan, “Deren’s Ethnographic Representation,” 214. 50. Deren, manuscript drafts, MDC. 51. Ibid. 52. For example, Deren solicited money from the Parapsychology Society. Correspondence, MDC. 53. Deren’s drafts and transcripts of her conversations with Campbell may be viewed in the MDC, principally box 3. 54. Deren, Transcripts of interviews with Joseph Campbell, MDC. 55. MDC (box 3, folder 25: III/84, reel 6 and 7). 56. DH, 48. 57. Deren, “The Artist as God in Haiti,” Tiger’s Eye 6 (Dec. 1948): 115–24. 58. DH, 20. 59. DH, 76 262

3. HAITI

60. DH, 6. 61. DH, 15–16. 62. DH, 187. 63. Ibid. 64. DH, 94–95. 65. DH, 101. 66. DH, 195. 67. DH, 129–30. 68. DH, 36. 69. DH, 34, 205. 70. DH, 91. 71. DH, 194. 72. DH, 241. 73. DH, 227–28. 74. DH, 8. 75. DH, 9. 76. DH, 7. 77. DH, 37. One again hears strong echoes of Deren’s vertical/horizontal binary here. See chapter 4, pp. 214–16. 78. DH, 249. 79. DH, 253. 80. DH, 258. 81. DH, 259. 82. DH, 260. 83. Russell, “Ecstatic Ethnography,” 280. 84. Ibid., 271. 85. Deren mentions plans and ideas for sound in fi lms prior to this, but never manifests them. 86. Recall that Meshes of the Afternoon did not gain its sound until over a decade later. 87. Deren, notes for fi lm plans, MDC. 88. This category was parallel to Folkways Records, which had released all of Harold Courlander’s recordings of Voudoun songs and ceremonials, with which Deren was familiar. 89. This rare album may be heard in its entirety on ubuweb: see www.ubu.com/ sound/deren.html. 90. The March 16, 1957, Billboard contained a notice: “Cadence is said to be preparing six albums of native Haitian music, recorded on the island by writer Maya Daren [sic], an authority on Haitian culture . . . Focal point of the promotion will be a painting by Teiji Ito of a Haitian landscape. The painting was executed so that it can be broken up in six sections, with each segment depicting the subject of one of the six LPs in the series.” 91. Martina Kudláček has noted in the prospectus for restoring the Haitian fi lm footage that the quality of these originals on wire recording are very fine. 92. DH, 36. 93. Deren, Notes for the manuscript, MDC. 263

3. HAITI

94. Margaret Mead, letter to Deren dated Jan. 22, 1953, MDC. 95. For details about Mead’s methodology, see Ira Jacknis, “Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film,” Cultural Anthropology 3.2 (May 1988): 160–77. 96. Mead defended the idea of the anthropologist’s interpretation and perspective as part of fieldwork, but emphasized that those interventions needed to be made as plain as possible in order for the work to be admissible. The results were not purely objective, but could function as conduits for multiple interpretations so long as the methods of collecting the research were laid bare. See Jacknis, ibid. 97. Feb. 23, 1947, from “The Notebook of Maya Deren, 1947,” October 14 (Autumn 1980). This is prior to her first visit to Haiti. Also note Métraux’s comment about the book (NB, not the article, to which Deren is referring here): “In this very brief catalogue of our principal sources a very particular place must be reserved for a book written by the American camerawoman, Maya Deren, who in Divine Horsemen proved herself to be an excellent observer, though her book is burdened with pseudoscientific considerations which reduce its value.” Cited by Neiman in her footnotes to “An Introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren,” 21, 24). 98. Deren, transcript from the Mike Wallace interview, MDC. 99. Ibid. 100. DH, 260. 101. LMD I.2, 522. 102. DH, xv (my emphasis). 103. DH, 7–8. 104. Deren, from part III. MDC.

4. FU LL C IR C LE 1. Miriam Arsham, personal interview, Aug. 4, 2011. 2. Thomas Mayer, “The Legend of Maya Deren: Champion of American Independent Film,” Film News (Fall 1979): 8. 3. Ibid., 10. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. This may have something to do with the Legend of Maya Deren texts, which have provided such invaluable and readily accessible research tools for scholars: as of this moment, only Deren’s fi lms from Meshes through Ritual are included in the published volumes of that project. Notable exceptions include Renata Jackson’s book on Deren (The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren) and the contributors to Bill Nichols’s Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, both of which include significant reflection on the later and/or unfinished fi lm work, primarily effected through archival research. 7. From a transcription of Terry’s review of Meditation on Violence, Dec. 5, 1948. MDC. 8. Transcript of an interview with Ito by Robert Steele, MDC. 264

4. FULL CIRCLE

9. “The Notebook of Maya Deren, 1947,” October 14 (Autumn 1980). 10. See pp. 128–30. 11. Deren, Notes on Meditation on Violence, MDC (my emphasis). 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. “Credits, Titles and Notes for The Very Eye of Night,” MDC. 20. Deren describes her complex methods for making The Very Eye of Night in “Adventures in Creative Film Making,” published in the amateur filmmaking journal Home Movie Making in 1960. 21. David Warwick, “The Affection Image—Qualities, Powers and Any-space-whatevers.” Blog posted under “Notes from Reading Group on Cinema 1” by Jon Lindblom, PhD Student in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, for his blog “Intensive Thinking: Constructing a Speculative Philosophy of Technology.” Posted Friday, Nov. 16, 2012; see http://intensivethinking.blogspot.com/ (last accessed Jan. 24, 2013). 22. Incidentally, the drawing itself features mirror writing, both literally, and by appearing above and below the image (when folded, the text would match up the top half when laid over the bottom half, if imperfectly). 23. Miriam Arsham has recounted an argument with Deren about artists working at night: Deren apparently claimed true artists worked at night. Personal interview, Aug. 4, 2009. 24. Renata Jackson’s The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren goes into detail describing the visual design of this credit sequence. 25. “Sputnik” also emphasizes the connection between humankind and heavenly bodies, as well as the vertical articulations of the fi lm. 26. Copy of letter to Filmlabs, MDC. 27. Deren, “Letter to John Latouche,” Sept. 1953, MDC. 28. Ibid. 29. Deren, “Letter to Rosalind Rock,” June 3, 1957. MDC. 30. LMD I.2, 281. 31. Stan Brakhage, interviewed in Kudláček’s In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Zeitgeist Films, 2002). 32. “Poetry and the Film: A Symposium with Maya Deren, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Parker Tyler. Chairman, Willard Maas. Organized by Amos Vogel” (hereafter, “Symposium”). A transcript appears in P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 173–74. 33. One might not guess it by the nature of the “Symposium” transcript, but Thomas claimed friendship with Deren: they seem to have very much respected one another, to the extent of one evening at a party arousing the violent jealousy of Thomas’s wife, who reportedly objected to his apologizing for cursing in front of Deren. A terrific brawl ensued. 265

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34. Willard Maas, “Memories of My Maya,” Filmwise 2, a publication of Cinema 16, Inc. (1963). Thomas drank himself to death just over a week later. 35. “Symposium,” 173–74. 36. Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2005), 28. 37. Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’instant (Paris: Livres de poche, 1991). 29. Parker Tyler, Underground Film (New York: DeCapo Press, 1995), 148. 39. “Symposium,” 179. 40. Deren, “Creating Movies with a New Dimension: Time,” in ED, 136–37, and “Creative Cutting,” ED, 145. 41. Deren, Film ideas, MDC. 42. See pp. 123–24. 43. David Budd, correspondence with Deren, MDC. 44. Deren, correspondence with David Budd, MDC. 45. Ibid. 46. Robert Steele, Marie Deren Interview, MDC. 47. Erdman, “The Dance as Non-Verbal Poetical Image, Part I,” Dance Observer (Apr. 1949): 48. 48. Ibid., 66. 49. Erdman, “The Dance as Non-Verbal Poetical Image, Part II,” Dance Observer (May 1949): 64. 50. Note that it’s more likely she was taking credit for work accomplished during this period rather than expressing a desire to keep working on the project. In any case, the footage she took would have been unlikely to yield a fully conceived fi lm, and she does not seem to indicate any plans to do more fi lming. 51. Erdman, “The Dance as Non-Verbal Poetical Image, Part II,” 64. 52. DH, 144. 53. See pp. 41, 98. 54. Deren, Film Ideas: Magic Flute, Spiral. MDC. 55. Article in MDC. 56. Deren, “Film ideas,” MDC. 57. An interesting parallel may be made to Jean Epstein’s essay “Le Regard du verre.” Epstein describes the fi lm experience as being like a mirrored, spiral staircase descent, combining two of Deren’s preferred symbols and resonating with her description of Medusa’s journey. Further, his description leads to a kind of vertigo remarkably similar to the way Deren would eventually describe cinema’s capacity to serve as a bridge between the material and immaterial parts of the self. 58. Deren, Film notes, MDC. 59. Deren, Notes, MDC. 60. Deren, Woodstock Discussion-Lecture. Recording in MDC. 61. Ibid. 62. Deren, letter to the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, Feb. 29, 1960. MDC. 63. Deren, “Description of project: Season of Strangers,” MDC. 64. Ibid. 65. Deren, Workshop description, 1. MDC. 266

CONCLUSION: IN COMPLETING A THOUGHT

66. Deren, “Description of project: Season of Strangers,” MDC. 67. Jackson, The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren. 68. Deren, Woodstock Discussion-Lecture. Recording in MDC. 69. Deren, Haiti Journal, MDC. 70. Workshop description, 2. MDC. 71. Deren, Woodstock Discussion-Lecture. Recording in MDC.

C O NC LU SION : IN C OMPLETING A T H OUGH T 1. Fischer’s inspired work extends far beyond this fi lm to all of Deren’s oeuvre, and has significant ramifications for consideration of the incompletion/extension of work we have considered complete/closed as texts. See Lucy Fischer, “Afterlife and Afterimage: Maya Deren in ‘Transfigured Time.’ ” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 28.84 (2013): 1–31. 2. Maria Pramaggiore, in her essay “Performance and Persona in the U.S. AvantGarde: The Case of Maya Deren,” makes a case for Deren’s persona as a strong force shaping the reception of her fi lms. Cinema Journal 36.2 (Winter 1997): 17–40. 3. “Barbara Hammer on Maya Deren,” interview for The Museum of Modern Art, “Modern Women: Women Artists at MoMA” (accessed Aug. 4, 2010). 4. Barbara Hammer, Making Movies Out of Sex and Life (New York: Feminist Press, 2010), 86.

267

Index

bold denotes photos and illustrations; n denotes notes abandoned works: of Deren, 23, 25, 55, 61, 78, 79, 92, 100, 105, 131, 132, 149, 153, 166, 180, 190, 204, 232; of Duchamp, 22, 67–68; in general, 7, 10, 17. See also unfi nished work abandonment, 62, 140 absence: as part of creative process, 218; as theme, 62; theories of, 7–8 absence/presence, 85, 185, 197, 242. See also presence/absence abstract/concrete, 167 accident, 4, 17, 18, 79, 86, 91, 102, 130 acting, analysis of, 47 aft erlives (of Deren’s fi lms), 241, 245 Agee, James, 47 agency, 45, 49, 71, 75, 83, 84, 86, 91, 95, 102, 105, 106, 118, 134, 151 Agwé, 153, 168 Alicat Bookshop Press, 82, 127 “Alive String” (segment of Witch’s Cradle), 59, 70 alternate titles for Deren’s fi lms, 103, 118, 199–201 Amad, Paula, 7 American Ballet Theatre, 205 The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 –1968 (Sarris), 10 anagram form, 127, 128 An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (Deren), 35, 82, 85, 121, 127, 128, 132

ancient/modern, 128 Anémic Cinéma (fi lm), 68, 69 Anthology Film Archives, 56, 159 anthropological establishment, censuring Deren’s methods, 178, 180, 264n97 anthropological investigation, 82 anthropology: Deren’s hope to bring creative approach to, 160; Deren’s interest in, 33, 37; Hammid’s encouragement for Deren to pursue, 180; visual anthropology, 150, 178 anti-Romanticism, 35 any-space-whatever, 185, 203 Aphrodite, 206 Ariel, 205, 206 Aries Productions, 205, 209, 211 Arp, Jean, 58 Arsham, Miriam, 130, 189, 265n23 ars re infecta, 62, 67 “The Artist as God in Haiti” (Deren), 165 Art of Th is Century gallery, 31, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 67, 74, 77 artworks, nature of, 140 ascent/descent, 98–99, 171, 216 “As in a Mirror Darkly” (alternate title for The Very Eye of Night), 199–201 Athena, 221, 222

INDEX

At Land (fi lm), 24, 26, 47, 62, 69, 82, 85, 86, 87–103, 89, 106, 114, 115, 116, 117, 151, 166, 191, 204, 216, 256n13 “At Land Scenario,” 91 Atropos/Morta, 119. See also the Fates auteur studies, 10 authenticity, 171, 178, 245 avant-garde, 22, 25, 34–35, 54, 59, 65, 205 “Ayizan Marché” (song), 175 Bachelard, Gaston, 215 “Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis” (Deren), 150 Balinese footage, 151, 152, 153, 157 “Balloon, Birds, Eye” (segment of Witch’s Cradle), 60 Bardacke, Gregory, 36 Bateson, Gregory, 24, 137, 150, 152, 178, 231, 260n7 Bazin, André, 36 Beatty, Talley, 37, 103, 104, 106–111, 110, 112, 113–16, 118, 123, 204, 213, 216, 257n33 Beckett, Samuel, 67 Bergman, Ingmar, 93, 256–57n22 Bergson, Henri, 215 Billboard magazine, 175, 263n90 binaries: merging of, 172; navigation of/ negotiation of, 22, 23, 41, 53, 98, 100, 119, 122, 127, 167, 171, 196, 206, 212, 233; reflection on interaction between/among sets of, 2–3, 6; shift ing balances between, 32 biographical explanations, 15, 48, 86–87, 138 Biskind, Peter, 11 black/white, 122, 123, 127, 197, 207, 212, 213 Bodhisattva head, 111, 113, 116 body/mind of spectator, 252n36 Brakhage, Stan, 1, 21, 149, 214 Brancusi’s Bird in Space, 77 Brannigan, Erin, 105, 106 Bresson, Robert, 96 Breton, André, 38, 58, 144 “Brevoort and Terrace” (segment of Witch’s Cradle), 59 Brooklyn Heights, fi lming location for Study, 114 Budd, David, 218, 219, 220 Buñuel, Luis, 77 Bursch, Mr. (Filmlabs), 208 Cabin in the Sky (fi lm), 37, 103 Cadence Records, 135, 173, 175, 263n90 Café Brevoort, 59 Cage, John, 256n14, 257n34 Calder, Alexander, 58, 62

camera reality, 18, 25, 26, 27, 49–52, 56, 79, 140, 185 Campbell, Joseph, 24, 27, 137, 163–64, 186, 222–23 The Cantos (Pound), 15 Capote, Truman, 144, 145 Carrefour, 167 Carver, Raymond, 15 Casetti, Francesco, 98 Castor and Pollux, 205, 206 CBS, 23, 135, 150, 160 Ch’ao-Li Chi, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 232 Cherchi Usai, Paolo, 13, 14 chess, 22, 30, 64, 67, 68, 69, 86, 88, 93–94, 99, 100, 102, 131, 132, 152, 218 children, Deren’s interest in, 260n97 children’s games, 38, 147, 152, 153, 157, 218. See also hopscotch “Chinese boxing,” 132, 190, 192–96, 198. See also Shao-Lin martial art; Wu-Tang martial art choreographies for camera, 107 Christiani, Rita, 4–5, 6, 37, 86, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 186, 204, 213 Christianity, Voudoun as assimilating principles from, 141, 146–47 cinema, debates on, 251n11 Cinema 16, 214, 248n11 “Cinema as an Art Form” (Deren), 41, 51, 57 cinematic subjectivity, 36, 46, 86 circles, 33, 44, 60, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 82, 230 circularity, 4, 48, 53, 61, 62, 68, 69, 75, 76, 78–79, 86, 192 circus, 189, 218–21 Citizen Kane (fi lm), 10, 13 Clarke, Shirley, 1 classicism/classicist, 35, 36, 83, 84, 85, 165, 251n13, 256n5 Cleghorn, Elinor (Pearson), 55 Clotho/Nona, 119. See also the Fates Cocteau, Jean, 250n33 collaboration: Deren’s collaborations, 31, 36–38, 42, 56, 87, 91, 103, 131, 202, 205, 209, 218, 221–24, 228, 256n14, 257n33, 260n5; general, 15, 17 collective consciousness, 48, 94 completion/incompletion, 9, 22, 82, 86, 100–103, 140, 210. See also incompletion/completion “Composing the Celluloid Memories” (workshop), 234 computers, 17 containment and prediction, principles of, 254n62 continuity/discontinuity, 102, 109, 127, 229

270

INDEX

control, 18, 49–52, 102 control/contingency, 17, 18, 27, 32, 82, 83, 90–94, 100, 130, 143 controlled-accident principle (of photography), 233 control/letting go, 19, 85 Cotten, Joseph, 13 coupling/doubling, 202 Courlander, Harold, 162, 263n88 creative cutting, 4 Creative Film Foundation, 2, 189, 220 credits, 202, 205, 206, 207 “Creole O Voudoun” (song), 175 Cristiani Bros. and Bailey Bros. Combined Circus, 218

drugs, 21; family background, 41; father (Solomon Derenowsky), 2, 41, 218; feud against initiated by Nin, 125–26; health issues, 138; husbands (see Bardacke, Gregory; Hammid, Alexander; Ito, Teiji); initiated into Voudoun practice, 138, 170; master’s thesis, 8, 33, 34–36, 216, 253n40, 261n21; as part of émigré culture, 57; personal and professional difficulties, 101, 138, 210–12; photos of, 89, 213; as poet, 33–34; relocation to New York (1943), 38, 55, 56; residences, Greenwich Village (Morton Street), 56, 87, 108, 242; residences, Hollywood (see Hollywood Hills bungalow; King’s Road bungalow [Hollywood] ); response to art world, 254n75; role in At Land, 87–88, 95, 97, 98–99, 100, 102; role in Ritual, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128; roles in Meshes of the Afternoon, 32, 42–44, 49–50; at Smith College, 17, 33, 34 Derenowsky, Solomon, 2, 41, 218 directions, investigation of, 114, 118 discontinuity, 111. See also continuity/ discontinuity disjunction, 107, 108 Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Deren), 19, 27, 135, 138, 140, 146, 153, 154, 161–73, 163, 178, 180, 185, 186, 210, 223 Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (fi lm), 135, 159, 160–61 documentary: creativity and, 20, 22, 24, 27, 38–39, 96, 140, 156, 179; Deren on value of, 20; experimental and, 22; “reality” effects, 50 domestic space, 109, 110 Don Quixote (fi lm), 12, 13, 22 Dos Passos, John, 144 double ending, 43, 44 doubling, 32, 39, 43, 44, 48, 51, 89, 94, 102, 106, 123, 167, 171, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 243 dreams, 32, 47, 103, 107, 128, 172, 229 dualism/dualities, 119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 169, 207, 212, 222, 231 Dubois, W. E. B., 144 Duchamp, Marcel, 22, 25, 30, 38, 56, 58, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67–71, 72, 74–75, 77, 93, 99, 255n76 Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance (Molderings), 74 Dunham, Katherine, 24, 37–38, 103, 124, 136, 150, 212, 260n5, 260n6

Dali, Salvador, 77 Damballah, 146, 167 dance: Deren’s interest in, 25, 33, 38, 139; fi lm-dance, 104; and its relationship with anthropological pursuits, 37, 38, 150, 224; as medium for verticality, 114–15, 216; and possession, 180; primitive dancing, 37; Study as embracing methods of, 103, 115; as subject of The Very Eye of Night, 205 “The Dance as Non-Verbal Poetical Image” (Erdman), 223 dancefi lm, 105 dance fi lms, 37, 103, 106, 116, 220. See also Ensemble for Somnambulists (fi lm); A Study in Choreography for Camera (fi lm); The Very Eye of Night (fi lm) Dance Observer magazine, 223 dance performance, 105 “Dances of Haiti, Their Social Organization, Classification, Form and Function” (Dunham), 37 da Vinci, Leonardo, 206, 207 death/life, 122, 167 DeBouzek, Jeanette, 161 defi nitive editions, 16 de-individualization, 125 Deleuze, Gilles, 185, 257–58n43. See also any-space-whatever Demos, T. J., 64, 254n68 depersonalization, 84, 86, 125, 127, 128, 151, 170, 171, 224 Deren, Maya: artistic/intellectual interests prior to fi rst fi lm, 33, 38; boarding school in Switzerland, 33; as cursed by Haitian fi lm project, 21, 138; death of, 1, 2, 21, 24, 135, 160, 220, 221, 233–40; dependency on vitamin

Eastern religions, 76 Educational Dance magazine, 37, 162

271

INDEX

Egyptian Hall (Metropolitan Museum of Art), 110, 117 Egyptian project, 117, 121, 123 8x8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (fi lm), 69 Eisenstein, Sergei, 17, 139, 215, 237, 250n40, 258n51 Elektra Records, 175 Eliot, T. S., 8, 36, 45, 76, 83–84 Ellis, Havelock, 162 Ensemble for Somnambulists (fi lm), 24, 107, 200, 201–204, 205, 207, 209, 213, 217, 218, 228, 235, 239 entanglement, 62, 64, 68 “The Entrance and the Winding of the Wool” (Ritual in Transfigured Time sequence), 5 environment, importance of, 231–32, 242–43 Epstein, Jean, 266n57 equilibrium, 41, 52. See also unstable equilibrium Erdman, Jean, 143, 221, 222–29, 227, 230, 231, 232 Ernst, Max, 58, 77 Erzulie (goddess of love), 183, 206, 221, 229 Etant Données (Duchamp), 22 ethnography, 20, 22, 24, 27, 37, 160, 161, 178 experiential reality, 52, 96 experimental, fi rst stages of Deren’s fi lmmaking practice described as, 20, 22, 81 “Experimental Portraiture” (photographic series), 38, 39, 40, 41, 252n34 Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, and Modernity (Casetti), 98 “The Eye in the Mirror” (alternate title for The Very Eye of Night), 201

fi nances: fi nancial difficulties, 138, 212; precarious fi nancial situation, 209, 212. See also funding; money “First Papers of Surrealism” (exhibition), 62, 63, 64 Fischer, Lucy, 93, 241 Flack, Leah Culligan, 15 flower (fake), 45, 253n42 form as a whole, 97, 192, 219 forward/backward movement, 89, 90, 98–99 Four Quartets (Eliot), 76 fragmentation, 8, 44, 45, 94, 111 fragments, 2, 3, 10, 17, 23, 26, 28, 44, 79, 102, 113, 239, 245 France, cross-mediality, 34–35 French Relief Society, 64 Froula, Christine, 15 frustration, 52, 61, 62, 67, 78, 85, 130, 136, 140, 190, 199, 215, 232 Fuery, Patrick, 7–8 fugue form, 137, 151, 217, 219 funding: applying for grants, 239 (see also Guggenheim Foundation grant applications/ grants; Ingram-Merrill Foundation; Rockefeller Foundation; Viking Fund grant; West Indian Research Fellowship grant); Aries Productions, 211; for fi lming of Haitian Voudoun rituals, 140, 149, 150, 153, 154; lack of, 132, 160, 162, 210–11, 220; various sources of, 149, 150, 153, 189; from workshops, 235. See also finances; money Gemini, 200, 205, 206 “Gentlemen Who Fell” (song), 241 George Eastman House, 13, 14 Ghede (god of the dead), 153, 168 Ghosting Maya Deren (original title of Maya Deren’s Sink), 244 Giacometti, Alberto, 58, 62 The Golden Apple (musical), 206 Graham, Martha, 222, 225 Great Atlantic Hurricane, 91 Great Northern Hotel, fi lming location for At Land, 87, 91 Greenblatt, Stephen, 249n28 Grove Press, 159 Guggenheim, Peggy, 31, 56, 57, 58, 64, 65, 66, 67, 74, 78 Guggenheim Foundation grant applications/ grants, 26, 121, 131, 134, 135, 136, 143, 148, 149, 150, 151–54, 155, 161, 195, 258n71 Guggenheim, Simon, 254n62 Gunning, Tom, 65, 72

failure, 2, 6, 20–21, 27, 67, 138–39, 142, 144, 173, 191 Falk, Sawyer, 149 the Fates, 119, 128, 129 female body, in Meshes of the Afternoon, 44–49 female subjectivity, 44–49 feminist ethnographers, 161 feminist fi lm theory/criticism, 45, 54, 244 fi lm-dance, 104–106 fi lming: costs of (in Haiti), 154–55; mechanical problems in, 208, 211; problems with practical matters of, 78, 91, 100, 117–18, 130–31, 136 “Filming an Image through the Camera-Eye” (workshop), 234 Filming Othello (fi lm), 12 Filmlabs, 208 Film News, 191 “Films in the Classicist Tradition” (screening), 84

272

INDEX

haiku fi lm, 189, 221, 233–40 Haiti: Ito fi lm using Deren footage, 159, 161; making contacts/arrangements, 136; persons Deren knew in, 260n3; as similar to Deren’s own culture, 145, 147; still photography from, 156–57, 158; tourism in, 145–46; trips to, 81, 85, 131, 134, 136, 137, 144, 154, 156, 162 Haitian fi lm project: development, 149–50, 152–55, 159, 261n18; influences, 140 Haitian Voudoun rituals: Deren’s investment in as personal, 170; experience of as ethnographic project, 27; fi lming of as intended for three-tiered project, 157; fi nding authentic rituals, 146, 147–48; funding for fi lming of, 140, 149, 150, 153, 154; as recounted in Divine Horseman, 164; relation of to other traditions, 177; research on, 144; spirals as leading to possession, 231; use of recordings in other projects, 150, 155, 174, 195; wire recordings of, 132, 175. See also Voudoun Haller, Robert, 248n12 Hamadryad (dance piece), 223 Hammer, Barbara, 28, 242–46 Hammid, Alexander, 26, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 42, 43, 49, 53, 55, 56, 57, 61, 82, 87, 88, 90, 91, 99, 139, 180, 192, 231 Harper’s Bazaar, 144 Haslem, Wendy, 32 Hawkins, Erick, 225 The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell), 163 Herskovitz, Melville, 162 Hevajra, 113, 116, 117, 118, 121, 123 Heyman, Hella, 87, 91, 97 Hindu initiation ritual, 78 Holl, Ute, 125, 126, 127 Hollywood Hills bungalow, 31, 242. See also King’s Road bungalow (Hollywood) Homage to Sextus Propertius (Pound), 16 hopscotch, 131, 152, 237 horizontality/verticality, 90, 99, 114, 115, 141, 168, 171, 172, 185, 199, 203, 214–17, 226, 229, 237, 256n11, 257–258n43, 263n77 Horst, Louis, 225, 228 houngans (Voudoun priests), 147, 148, 164, 168 Howard Gotlieb Research Center (Boston University), 9 Hulme, T. E., 45, 215, 251n13, 252n19 human/divine, 207, 217, 224 Huston, John, 7 Hyppolite, Hector, 145

idea-driven fi lms, 180, 192, 200 identity, 38, 125, 126, 151. See also individual identity “Idol Sequence” (segment of Witch’s Cradle), 60 image: balance between reality and image, 52–56; negative image, 26, 120, 122, 127, 190, 199–200, 201, 203, 212, 217, 259n74 “Imaging a Film in the Mind’s Eye” (workshop), 233 Imagists, 34–36, 236, 252n18 income, photography as important part of, 156 incompletion: ars re infecta, 62–67; as artistic strategy, 10; Haitian project drawing on, 185; materiality, presence, and preservation as bound to, 242; modernist impulse and, 250n41; as modus operandi for Deren, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 20, 78–79, 190, 218, 241; as part of creative process, 218; positive attributes of, 22; presentation of, 44; as productive force, 86, 138; as theme, 60; as theme, method, and result, 20; as underscoring cinema, 17; as way of expressing nature of art, 67–68; in Welles’s work, 11, 12, 13, 14. See also completion/ incompletion; incompletion/completion incompletion/completion, 19, 31, 32, 90, 115, 185, 241. See also completion/incompletion indirect modes, 142 individual, effacement of, 84 “The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry” (Deren’s thesis), 8, 33, 34–36, 216, 253n40, 261n21 Ingram-Merrill Foundation, 235 inner board of directors, 219 intention, 130, 138, 140, 154, 160 interior/exterior, 6, 86, 217 interpersonal tensions, 138 In the Mirror of Maya Deren (fi lm), 9, 21 invisible/inaccessible states, 8, 123, 140–42, 165, 167, 169, 185, 187, 197–98, 223–24 irresolution, 9, 49, 86, 138 Ito, Cherel Winett, 159 Ito, Teiji, 2, 55, 137, 159, 160, 161, 207, 210, 234, 235, 239, 245, 263n90 It’s All True (fi lm), 11, 12 Jackson, Renata, 34, 237 journals, Deren’s Haitian, 162, 165 Jovovich, Milla, 241 Kahn, Albert, 7 Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theater Arts, 150

273

INDEX

Kiesler, Frederick, 58, 64, 65, 70 Kinetic Gallery (Art of Th is Century), 58, 68 King’s Road bungalow (Hollywood), 42, 242, 245 knife, in Meshes of the Afternoon, 32, 42–43, 44, 53, 71, 79 Kracauer, Siegfried, 103 Kudláček, Martina, 9, 21, 160, 220, 244, 260n2, 262n46, 263n91

magic, 51, 59, 72, 75, 79, 131 The Magic Flute, 216, 218, 230 The Magic Island (Seabrook), 136 The Magnificent Ambersons (fi lm), 11 Mahayana Buddhism, 117 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 162 Manhattan (New York), fi lming locations, 59, 87, 91, 110, 117, 130, 242 Mardi Gras, 153, 159, 177 martial arts, 190. See also Shao-Lin martial art; Wu-Tang martial art materiality, 128, 242, 244 Matta, Roberto, 65, 253n54 Matta Clark, Anne, 56, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 78, 253n54, 254n68 Maya Deren’s Sink (fi lm), 28, 242–46 Mayer, Thomas, 191 Mayne, Judith, 39 Mead, Margaret, 24, 137, 150, 152, 159, 160, 178, 179, 180, 264n96 Meditation on Violence (fi lm), 3, 24, 27, 89, 105, 116, 143, 174, 189, 190, 191, 192–99, 194, 198, 232 Medusa, 126, 143, 189, 221–33, 253n49 Medusa (fi lm), 27, 218, 221, 225, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232, 235 Mekas, Jonas, 159 Méliès, Georges, 39 Mercury Theatre, 13 Meshes of the Aft ernoon (fi lm), 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 32–33, 38, 39, 41–56, 54 , 57, 59, 66, 69, 71, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88–89, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103, 106, 116, 120, 142, 151, 155, 185, 191, 195, 204, 241, 242, 245, 252n30, 263n86, 264n6 metaphorical relationships, 111, 116, 120, 142 metaphysics, 8 Métraux, Alfred, 180 Metropolis (fi lm), 249n25 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 110, 116, 117, 121 Michelson, Annette, 21, 139 Miller, Arthur, 214, 215, 254n75 Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 25, 39 Minotaure (journal), 65, 254n72 mirrors/mirroring, 19, 39, 43, 53, 60, 72, 74, 79, 82, 86, 92, 97, 109, 110, 113, 126, 128, 167, 168, 185, 201, 206, 207, 222, 223–24, 226, 237, 258n47 mirror writing, 265n22 mise-en-abîme, 60, 199, 226 modernism/modern art and poetry, 8, 16, 34, 57, 58–59, 65, 74, 76, 216, 250n36, 250n41, 254n72 Molderings, Herbert, 74, 75

labyrinth, 65–66, 70, 71, 76 Lachesis/Decima, 119. See also the Fates Lady in the Lake (fi lm), 248n5 Lady of the Wild Th ings (Transformations of Medusa), 226, 231 Lang, Fritz, 249n25 “L.A. Reportage” (photographic series), 38, 39, 40, 41 The Large Glass (Duchamp), 74 Latouche, John, 37, 205, 206, 209, 211, 220 Laughlin, James, 50, 51 “Lazy Hardware” (window display), 38, 253n54 lectures, 17, 22, 54, 55, 135, 143, 153, 155, 156, 177, 179, 184, 189, 220, 233, 235 Legba (god of the life source), 19, 140–41, 166, 167, 168 The Legend of Maya Deren (Clark, Hodson, and Neiman), 9, 61, 150, 160, 244, 264n6 Leja, Michael, 66 Le Minotaure (Picasso), 65 “Le Regard du verre” (Epstein), 266n57 Let There Be Light (documentary), 7 Liebling, A. J., 144 light/dark, 122, 123, 171, 191, 200, 217 Lilith, 221 linearity, 4, 90, 127, 192 liner notes, 175, 176–77, 178 lines, 72, 74–75 L’Intuition de l’ instant (Bachelard), 215 Lish, Gordon, 15 literary, mythical characters, 217 literature: Deren as student of, 8; Deren’s interest in, 33 “Little Gidding” (Eliot), 76 loa (Voudoun gods), 19, 141, 142, 146, 153, 159, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 177, 182, 187, 206, 229 looking relationships, 95, 96 Lumière brothers, 39 Lustig, Alvin, 88, 253n56 Maas, Willard, 210, 214 MacDougall, David, 160

274

INDEX

Mondrian, Piet, 58 money: asking friends for, 220; from Bateson, 137; devoted to unused sequences, 132; investment of in Haiti, 154–55, 162; from photography, 155–56; request for from Latouche, 211. See also fi nances; funding moon, 19, 167, 205 Morton Street apartment (Greenwich Village), 56, 87, 108, 242 Mount Misery Point, fi lming location for At Land, 87, 91, 256n18 movement/stasis, 6, 100, 122, 128, 196–97. See also stillness/motion Mr. Arkadin (fi lm), 11 multidirectionality, 99, 114, 123 multiple media: for Haitian material, 175, 187; navigation of, 57 multiplicity, 94, 113, 206 Mulvey, Laura, 45 Muses, 119 Museum of Natural History, 159, 160 music: addition of to Meshes of the Afternoon, 55, 241; Deren’s connections to, 218; soundtrack for Meditation on Violence, 116. See also sound; soundtracks myth: Deren’s connections to, 126, 218; of Medusa (see Medusa) Myth and Man (series), 163

Odyssey (news and arts program), 135, 160 On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (Bachelard), 215 open-endedness, 2, 4, 52, 68, 160, 196 oppositional cutting, 195 “Oratory and Rhetoric of Drums” (workshop), 235 Othello (fi lm), 12 Ovid, 221 Palisades, fi lming location for Study, 114, 115 parabolarity, 190, 193, 194 Paradise Lost (Milton), 206 paradox, 8, 20, 60, 82, 86, 124, 128, 171 pas de deux, 103, 115, 195, 204 Passin, Herbert, 162 Peck, Gregory, 144 Perseus, 222 Pevsner, Antoine, 58 philosophy, Deren’s interest in, 33, 34 photographic series, 38, 135, 155–56. See also “Experimental Portraiture” (photographic series); “L.A. Reportage” (photographic series) Picasso, Pablo, 65, 254n72 planning: Deren on need for, 18; and play, push and pull between, 23, 93; pre-fi lmic planning, 132 play, emphasis on, 99 “Plunge and Animation” (segment of Witch’s Cradle), 59–60 poetry: as artistic touchstone, 8, 83; combined with ethnography in Haitian recordings, 178; debates on cinema and poetry, 251n11; Deren’s interest in, 25, 33, 34, 35, 38, 82, 221; Deren’s turn (back) to, 236; drawing on ideas about, 235; haiku fi lm (see haiku fi lm); images, 34; incorporation of in Study, 104; as influence, 33, 36, 38; as mechanism for accessing spiritual states, 24; as poor man’s cinema, 34; tensions with fi lmmaking, 83; as vertical art, 215 “Poetry and the Film” (symposium), 214 Pollock, Jackson, 58 Pollux, 205 Pope, Alexander, 206 Port Jefferson (New York), fi lming location for At Land, 87 Poseidon, 221 positive/negative, 122, 127, 167, 191, 196, 199, 204 possession, 139, 141, 142, 152, 159, 162, 164, 168, 170–71, 180, 182, 187

Narcissus motif, 74, 126, 222 narrative logic, 102, 107 National Theater Conference, 149 negative/positive images, 26, 120, 122, 127, 190, 199–200, 201, 203, 212, 217, 259n74 Neiman, Catrina, 139 New Directions, 50 news-reel methods, 50 The New Yorker, 144 Night Beat (television program hosted by Mike Wallace), 179–84 Nin, Anaïs, 5, 119, 125, 126, 128, 130 Noctambulo, 200, 205, 207 “Nocturnal Reflections” (alternate title for The Very Eye of Night), 201 non-dual dualisms, 19, 117, 118, 122, 169 non-resolving arc, 190 nonverbality, 34, 116 Obeah, 124 Oberon, 205, 206 objective/subjective, 32, 86. See also subjective/ objective

275

INDEX

poteau-mîtan (center post around which ceremonies revolved), 174 Pound, Ezra, 8, 15, 16, 36, 102, 252n18 Powell, Dawn, 144 pre-fi lmic planning, 132 preproduction notes, on Ritual, 131 presence/absence, 44, 242. See also absence/ presence preservation, 13–14, 160, 242 primitive dancing, 37 program notes, 2, 46, 54, 124, 241 Propertius, 16 “Proportions of Man” (da Vinci), 206, 207 Provincetown Playhouse, 84, 140, 149, 191 publicity materials, 32, 84, 85, 124 push-pull: between artistic invention and reinvention, 67; between potential closure and resolute openness, 4; in work process, 213 Queen Kelly (fi lm), 17 Queen of Gorgons, 226 Que Viva , Mexico (fi lm), 17, 139 Rabinovitz, Lauren, 45 race, 122, 123, 124, 212 racial memory, 124 “The Rape of the Lock” (Pope), 206 Raphael, Elizabeth (Rockwell), 259n74 Ra-Ra Festival, 153, 177 real/image, 92 realism, 96, 97, 245 reality: balance between reality and image, 52–56; camera reality (see camera reality); cinematic reality, 77, 102; experiential reality, 52, 96; hard reality, 51, 194–95; interior reality, 195; manipulation of, 50; new realities, 59, 76–79 reality effects, 52, 101 reality of show-it-to-me, 51, 166 Reassemblage (fi lm), 25 rebellious women, 225 record projects, 175–77, 178 recursion, 4, 33, 44, 61, 68, 76, 98, 115, 127, 185, 192, 215 reflection, 33, 39, 48, 168, 207, 226 rehearsal planning, 132 “Relating Sound and Sight” (workshop), 234 “Religious Possession in Dancing” (Deren), 37, 136, 162, 187 remnants, value of, 7, 10, 56 repetition, 4, 79, 86, 88, 126 “Resonance and Wonder” (Greenblatt), 249n28

reversal, 70, 72, 76, 102, 199, 234 reviews, 47, 123, 134, 139, 191–92, 200 Richter, Hans, 69 ritual activity, 152, 166–67 Ritual and Ordeal (original title of Ritual in Transfigured Time), 118, 149 ritual form, 24, 86, 118, 122, 126, 127, 128, 132, 134, 141, 142, 212 Ritual in Transfigured Time (fi lm), 4–6, 24, 26, 37, 62, 82, 84, 85, 86, 105, 118–34, 121, 129, 133 , 142, 149, 151, 155, 172, 186, 191, 192–93, 199, 204, 213, 216 ritualization, 151 ritual performance, 168–69 Rockefeller Foundation, 121, 149, 258n71, 262n36 Rolleiflex camera, 155 Romanticism, 125 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 11, 12, 13, 249n17 Rotoreliefs, 69, 72 Russell, Catherine, 21, 142, 173 sand drawings, 131 Sarris, Andrew, 10 Sarton, May, 221 saving everything, 23, 136 Scheyer, Galka, 38, 87 screenings, 14, 24, 47, 54, 84, 85, 105, 130, 140, 149, 159, 162, 191, 210 sculptural art, 77, 104, 110–13, 112, 120, 128–30, 259n92 Seabrook, William, 66, 70, 136, 255n80 Season of Strangers (fi lm), 27, 218, 221, 233–40, 238, 244 segregated hotels (for troupe), 259n79 Seley, Jason, 261n26 self, de-emphasis of, 35, 85, 124, 125 self/other, 53, 60, 122, 184, 206 “Sequence E: The Mirrors” (At Land ), 92 serviteurs (those who practice Voudoun), 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 173, 183 The Seventh Seal (fi lm), 93 sexual initiation, 131–32 shadows, 44, 46–47, 50, 75, 109, 157, 164, 173, 193, 196, 197, 203, 226 Shakespeare, William, 206, 215 Shao-Lin martial art, 190, 192, 193, 196, 198, 232 shot/reverse shot pattern, 5, 6 “Signalé Agwé Arroyo” (song), 175 silent fi lms, 13, 116, 174 simultaneity, 100, 113, 127, 128, 130, 138, 185, 215 sink, Deren’s, 242–43, 243 Sitney, P. Adams, 44, 111, 139

276

INDEX

“Sixteen Miles of String” (Duchamp), 62, 63, 64 Sklar, Robert, 248n8 Smith College, 17, 33, 34 social psychology, Deren’s connections to, 218 sorority, 99 sound: in original forms of Meditation on Violence and The Very Eye of Night, 190; plan for use in Ritual, 131–32; recording of in Haiti, 173–75; for Season of Strangers, 237. See also soundtracks sound-recording equipment, 150, 174 soundtracks, 55, 116, 174, 241 South Asian fi lm, 17 spaces: any-space-whatever, 185, 203; connection of disparate spaces and times, 101; domestic space, 109, 110; how ritual interacts with, 127 spiral, 216–17, 229, 230–31 spiritual journey, 231 Sputnik, 208, 265n25 Steele, Robert, 9, 244 Stewart, Susan, 60 stillness/motion, 197 strangulation, implication of, 66 string, use of in Witch ’s Cradle, 56, 59–60, 62, 64, 65, 66–67, 70, 74, 75, 79 “String Travel” (segment of Witch’s Cradle), 59 A Study in Choreography for Camera (fi lm), 24, 26, 37, 47, 62, 82, 103–118, 124, 151, 191, 195, 204, 213, 223 subjective experience, 46, 161 subjective/objective, 90, 172, 217. See also objective/subjective subjectivity, 36, 45, 48, 86, 161. See also cinematic subjectivity; female subjectivity subject-less cinema, 27 subject/object, 45, 60, 74, 82, 86, 92, 94–98, 167, 172, 197, 224 Sullivan, Moira, 161 sun, 19, 167, 168, 196 surrealism, 54, 58, 62, 64, 67, 84, 134 Sword Shao-Lin, 192, 193, 194 symbolic interpretations, 71 Symbolism, 252n18 Symbolists, 34, 35, 36, 236 symbols, 59, 60, 71–76, 82, 116, 131 synecdochic framing, 44 Tanning, Dorothea, 58 Tantrism, 117 Temple Virgin, 226 temporality, 89, 107, 127, 131

tension plateau, 3, 23, 32, 52, 53, 62, 85, 248n2 tensions: maintenance of, 109, 115, 134; navigation of/negotiation of, 19, 44, 48–49, 82, 84; refusal to resolve, 83, 85, 90, 99 Terry, Walter, 191 Thames and Hudson, 163 Theater De Lys, 210 “Th is Way to the Islands,” 144 Thomas, Dylan, 214, 215, 265n33 3 Standard Stoppages (Duchamp), 74, 75 “Th ree Abandoned Films” (exhibition), 2, 84 time: connection of disparate spaces and times, 101; creative possibilities of, 114; how ritual interacts with, 127; nature of, 89 Titania, 205, 206 Too Much Johnson (fi lm), 13, 14 Toronto Film Society, 200 tradition: Deren as advocating for classicist tradition, 85; Deren’s connections to, 218 trance, 69, 141, 152, 161, 204 Trance and Dance in Bali (documentary), 150 The Transformations of Medusa, 143, 221–33 Tudor, Anthony, 37, 205, 209, 210, 216, 230 Turim, Maureen, 48 twinning, 201, 205, 206. See also doubling two-dimensionality, 225, 229, 232 Tyler, Parker, 214, 215 Umbriel, 205, 206 Un Chien Andalou (fi lm), 77 Underground Film: A Critical History (Tyler), 214 unfi nished work: of Deren, 2, 3, 14, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 56, 71, 78, 79, 82, 87, 135, 138, 139, 140, 143, 159, 160, 173, 185, 189, 196, 200, 217–40, 242; of Eisenstein, 139; in general, 7, 10, 14; of Welles, 11. See also abandoned works unresolving arcs, 44 unstable equilibrium, 41, 83, 98, 229 Urania/Uranus, 205, 206, 207 utopian vision, of what cinema can do, 25, 57 Valéry, Paul, 2 vertical arts, 214, 215 verticality, 90, 99, 107, 114, 115, 141, 214–17, 229, 230, 237 The Very Eye of Night (fi lm), 24, 27, 37, 143, 153, 185, 189, 190, 191, 199–201, 202, 204–214, 208, 216, 217, 220, 222, 224, 235, 239 vevers (chalk drawings), 60, 141, 159, 168, 169 View magazine, 65, 74

277

INDEX

Viking Fund grant, 150, 174 violence: between camera and man, 195; and inaction, 192; threat of, 66, 99 visible/invisible, 3, 6, 141, 142, 143, 167, 185, 197, 203, 224 visual anthropology, 150, 178 Vitruvian man drawing, 206 Vogel, Amos, 214 Voices of Haiti (recording), 27, 135, 173, 175, 176 von Stroheim, Erich, 17 Vorticism, 36, 252n18 Voudoun: as assimilating principles from other religions, 141, 146–47, 261n30; Deren as bringing public attention to, 179; Deren’s advocacy for practice of, 181; Deren’s respect for, 146; Divine Horseman as recounting details of, 164–73; Obead as related to, 124; roots of, 141; sense of familiarity as fundamental to Deren’s perception of, 186–87; as sharing features of several religious traditions, 181–82, 186–87; thinking about death and life, 255n86; universality of, 141, 177, 182, 187. See also Haitian Voudoun rituals

Wallace, Mike, 179–84 Webster Wire Recorder Company, 174 Welles, Orson, 10–15, 17, 22, 242, 248n14 Weltanschauung, 117 Westbrook, Frank, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132 West Indian Research Fellowship grant, 150 white darkness (possession), 171, 231 Whitelaw Reid mansion, 64, 66, 75 Whitman, Walt, 82 widow/bride, 3, 26, 119, 120, 121, 122, 126, 127, 199, 204, 216, 261n18 wire recordings, 132, 175 witchcraft , 70, 255n80 Witch ’s Cradle (fi lm), 3, 22, 25, 31, 50, 61, 62, 72, 73 , 81, 100, 101, 103, 116, 225 workshops, 137, 200, 202, 221, 224–25, 228, 233–35, 237, 239 Worstward Ho (Beckett), 67 Wu-Tang martial art, 190, 192, 193, 198, 232 yin-yang, 206, 207 YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association), 137, 225

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