MASSIMILIANO MOLLONA
Seeing the Invisible:
Maya Deren’s Experiments in
Cinematic Trance*
The Slaves worked on the land, y, like revolution-
ary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermina-
tion of their oppressors. But working and living
together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar facto-
ries, which covered the North plains, they were closer to
a modern proletariat than any group of workers in
existence at the time, and the rising was, por lo tanto, a
thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement.
By hard experience they had learned that isolated
efforts were doomed to failure and in the early months
de 1791 in and around Le Cap they were organizing
for revolution. Voodoo was the medium of the conspir-
acy. In spite of all prohibitions, the slaves travelled
miles to sing and dance and to practice the rites and
talk; and now, since the revolution, to hear the politi-
cal news and make their plans.
—C. l. R. James
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I
In July 1791, the story goes, a small voodoo gathering in Santo Domingo
sparked the Haitian Revolution, the first black anti-colonial revolution in
history.1 The glorious history of the “Republic of the black Jacobins”2 was often
celebrated by Surrealist artists in New York and Paris in their exposé of the deca-
dent state of colonial powers in the aftermath of the Second World War. Para
instancia, Haiti is central to André Breton’s anti-colonial manifesto, Aimé
Cesaire’s idea of negritude, Rudy Burckhardt’s lyric film symphonies, and Zora
* This article is an expanded and revised version of a paper presented at the conference “Maya
Deren: 50 Years On,” curated by Elinor Cleghorn at London BFI Southbank, in October 2011.
1. Voodoo is a syncretic religion based on the merging of West African beliefs, Arawak religion,
and Catholicism.
2. See C. l. R. James, The Black Jacobins (Londres: Penguin Books, 1938).
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OCTUBRE 149, Verano 2014, páginas. 159–180. © 2014 Revista Octubre, Limitado. y el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts.
160
OCTUBRE
Neale Hurston’s novels on creole culture. In New York, negritude did not have
quite the same revolutionary appeal as in Paris, where Josephine Baker was
hailed as a Surrealist goddess of “natural” beauty and power. But the electric
Haitian voodoo performances of dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham
attracted a diverse community of African-American artists, émigrés, intelectuales,
and communist sympathizers in the off-limits clubs, cafés, and private parties in
Harlem. In its uncontainable, carnivalesque power, open forms, and sexual
energía, Haitian voodoo captured an attraction to the “primitive” that affected
American intellectuals and popular culture alike. Before becoming a Hollywood
estrella, Dunham, of mixed West African and Native American roots, traveled to
Haiti to study voodoo rituals for an anthropology degree at the University of
chicago. Fusing American dance, European ballet, and voodoo movements, she
became a symbol of the black diaspora. In a recent film interview, Dunham
recalls how her young assistant (or “girl Friday,” in the parlance of the time)
Maya Deren was fascinated by Haitian dance and would use it to steal the show
in rehearsals, public performances, and glitzy parties.3 The daughter of Russian
Jewish émigrés and Trotskyite activists, Deren was struck by the power of this syn-
cretic dance, which blended different cultural backgrounds and formed political
consciousnesses while always providing entertainment and energizing dinner
parties and giving voice to invisible deities. In her experimental filmmaking,
Deren infused this magnetic power of dance into cinema.
In the tradition of modernist cinema, Deren describes a centerless and splin-
tered world, populated with fragmented individuals and constructed through
multiple temporalities and fractured stories that reflect on their telling.4 She
explores the relationship between film and consciousness, using cinema as a magi-
cal technology for social change and revolution. Her radical innovation consisted
in reworking this modernist method through an anthropological framework, en
mixing, like a bricoleur, Western aesthetics with Haitian cosmology.
II
The collaboration between avant-garde artists and anthropologists that took
place in New York and Paris in the 1930s is an instance of what anthropologist
James Clifford describes as “ethnographic surrealism.”5 This movement radically
highlighted the contradictions and inequalities of industrial capitalism and was
inspired by socialism and a “primitivist” fascination with tribal cultures.6
Anthropologists spend significant time in “the field” (at least one year); su
method is that of participant observation, which means to take part in the funda-
3. Matina Kudlacek, In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2002).
4. For a recent discussion of modernist cinema, see Ted Perry, Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema
(Bloomington, EN: Universidad de Indiana, 2006).
5. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MAMÁ: Harvard University, 1988).
6. I allude to the movement in nineteenth-century art, which celebrated primal, ancestral, y
regenerative values and forms.
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Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
161
mental activities of the communities that they study: cooking food, working in
fields or in factories, smoking or dancing, and sometimes even getting involved in
religion or local politics.
There are two traditions of anthropology. Scientific anthropology—a residue
of Victorian times—looks at tribal or non-Western societies as bounded, isolated,
and unique. Its ethnographic method relies on the scientific measurement, collec-
ción, archiving, and comparison of cultures and their artifacts according to
notions of “authenticity” based on race, sangre, or biology. Film critic Fatimah
Rony compares ethnography to “taxidermy”: a process of mummification, objecti-
fication, and freezing of cultures in space and time.7
Challenging the scientific anthropological tradition, “ethnographic surreal-
ism” emerged in Paris in the 1920s from the collaboration between anthropolo-
gists of the newly formed Institut d’ethnologie—Michel Leiris, Marcel Mauss,
and Marcel Griaule—and Surrealist artists André Breton, Antonin Artaud, y
Georges Bataille. Surrealist anthropology had a utopian rather than scientific
agenda and aimed at a radical critique of modernity and capitalism based on the
“double movement” of making the familiar strange and vice versa. Working
through juxtapositions, it unmasked the “wild” nature of post–World War I
Paris—showing the violence of its mechanized slaughterhouses, peasant folk
masks, and the rules of bourgeois society—and at the same time made the “sav-
age other” look familiar and civilized, showing how noncapitalist institutions—
gift-giving, reciprocal exchanges, extended families, cooperative work, consensu-
al associations—were more egalitarian and just than the corrupt institutions of
the state, the church, the factory, the political party, and the patriarchal family
that dominated industrial societies.
Defying ethnocentric moral dichotomies, ethnographic surrealism saw
humans as situated in an unstable state of double consciousness: good and evil,
selfish and generous, collectivist and individualist. As in Artaud’s theater, dónde
actors and nonactors mingle, it looked at human identity not as fixed or authentic
but as emerging from the world of the dream, the realms of the erotic and the
unconscious, and played out in strategic rituals and public performances. A diferencia de
traditional social science, surrealist anthropology looks at other cultures aestheti-
cally and sensuously: as living forms and patterns of movement and feeling that
envelop the rich texture of life. This approach pursues not linear narratives but
juegos, synchronicity, coincidence, and chance—the spaces in between, for exam-
por ejemplo, the fixed choreography of the gods and human improvisation. As in the per-
formances of Apollinaire, Cocteau, and Breton in the streets of Paris, Surrealist
fieldwork was a type of public performance staged with the native other. El
famous Dakar-Djibouti mission—an ethnographic expedition that took place
entre 1931 y 1933 and passed through thirteen African countries—was a col-
7. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Carrera, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, CAROLINA DEL NORTE: Duke
Universidad, 1996).
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162
OCTUBRE
lective theatrical endeavor in which ethnographers and natives acted in turn as
sacred initiates, torturers, masochistic lovers, poetas, hoarders, disciples, looters,
liars, shamans, líderes, and initiates.8 Embracing Artaud’s “ethic of cruelty,” the
expedition was violent and brutal, both a performance and an exposé of the atroc-
ity of colonialism. Its aim was not so much to gather scientific evidence or to col-
lect already existing knowledge as to trigger a process of collective reflection and
cultural production.9
En efecto, anthropology and performance share very similar sensitivities. En
their fieldwork, anthropologists tune into hidden human choreographies and
become empathically aware of the patterns of movement and feelings in which
they and their subjects are embedded. Becoming part of such sensuous and mater-
ial choreographic fields, they blur many boundaries—between insider and out-
sider, observer and participant, the individual and the collective, what is taken for
granted and what can be questioned, the flow of reality and critical reflection
upon it—and act as social catalysts, developing creative collaborations, público
negotiations, and critical reflection on “the other.”
With its focus on human consciousness, the relationship between the imag-
inary and the material world, the origin of movement, the consequences of
comportamiento, the value of collaboration, and the making and remaking of social
scripts, the work of Maya Deren connects performance, arte, and anthropology
and resurrects the project of the modernist surrealist utopia in the context of
post–World War II America.
III
Deren received a Guggenheim fellowship to travel to Haiti in 1946. Su
application included a cross-cultural comparison of Haitian and Balinese ritual
and Western children’s games linked through montage.
She applied for the grant after seeing the raw footage of what was to become
the ethnographic film Trance and Dance in Bali (1952), shot by anthropologists
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in a remote Balinese village. The film con-
denses into twenty minutes a ritual that had lasted several hours. At the climax of the
possession ritual, the film depicts a group of young girls being transformed into dan-
gerous witches and men and women threatening to stab themselves with knives.
Annette Michelson has argued that the Balinese footage put Deren into
direct contact with the dimension of the ecstatic.10 In Notebook (1947), a selection of
Deren’s notes, essays, and letters, Deren writes of how she experienced the
8. James Clifford gives interesting insights into the artistic processes at play during the expedition.
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, pag. 37.
9. The poetic conversation that anthropologist Marcel Griaule had with Ogotemmêli, a blind
Dogon hunter, during his field trip in Mali in the 1930s is an example of such syncretism between per-
formance and social science. Marcel Griaule, Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (París: Fayard, 1975).
10. Annette Michelson, “On Reading Deren’s Notebook," Octubre 14 (Otoño 1980), pag. 51.
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Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
163
Balinese footage in a visceral, unmediated way, with a mixture of pain, “muscular
impulses,” and erotic attraction:
The minute I began to put the Balinese film through the viewer, el
fever begun [sic]. It is a feeling one cannot remember from before but
can only have in an immediate sense. I mean, like pain, one remembers
having had pain, and even the reaction to the pain, but the exact pain
itself proper cannot be recreated by memory except rarely.
Psychosomaticism is the re-creation in immediate terms of unrecollect-
ed memory. Anyway, aquí, suddenly, is the strange fever and excite-
mento. Is it because in holding film in one’s hand one holds life in one’s
mano? . . . the immediate physical contact with the film, the nearness of
the image, the automatic muscular control of its speed—the fact that as
I wound, my impulses and reactions towards the film translated them-
selves into muscular impulses and so to the film directly, with no
machine—buttons, interruptores, etc.—between me and the film. All this
seemed to me very important, especially in relation to a film which was
not mine.11
Later she describes the viewing as “copulation.”
In an emotionally charged correspondence with Bateson, Deren tells of how
inspired she was by the Balinese images, particularly the way they revealed “evi-
11. Maya Deren, “From the Notebook of Maya Deren," Octubre 14 (Otoño 1980), pag. 2.
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Left: Maya Deren. Sidewalk chalk
drawings. Ca. 1948.
Top: Deren. Divine Horsemen. 1951.
164
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Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Trance and Dance in Bali. 1952.
dence” of the sacred in the collective movements of the possessed. As a form of
cinematic representation, the Balinese trance dance seems to have offered to
Deren three insights:
(a) It showed the gap between action and inaction—a central trope of mod-
ernist cinema—through choreography, rather than through montage or the
frozen image. Deren reflects on a sequence of the Balinese footage in which we
see little girls in the act of becoming angels. They form a long row and act slowly
in concert. The bodies in the front row move; the ones at the back stand still. Este
slow animation of human bodies created a chrono-photographic effect, a transfig-
uration of still photos into a dynamic film phrase. Deren had experimented with
freezing people’s movements in Ritual in Transfigured Time. In Notebook, she writes:
“This is the feeling that I was trying to get into the section [of Ritual] donde el
party freezes, then cut to Rita moving, then return to the party frozen. It’s that
feeling of suspended sameness between different shots and the suspended same-
ness within the shot, and when the movement ends it is not so much a completion
as a suspension. . . . ”12 Thus the Balinese choreography produced stillness without
12. Deren, “From the Notebook of Maya Deren," pag. 36.
Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
165
the heavy apparatus of the film technology and revealed an animating energy dif-
ferent from that of cinema.
(b) Balinese performance is based on defamiliarization rather than on identi-
fication.13 It does not aim at representing reality, like documentary cinema, pero
conveys the illusion of reality. For Deren, Balinese actors are anonymous, inhu-
hombre, and without memory or consciousness. They are not “characters” or “per-
sons” in the Western sense. They pertain to a different world from the world of the
audience. The audience does not identity with them. De este modo, the second cinematic
effect of Balinese dance is to produce distance without the “shock effect” of mon-
tage and through a skillful fusion of reality and fiction.
(C) Finalmente, Balinese choreography combines chance and structure. Deren
describes how in Bateson’s footage, in the middle of a gripping performance,
someone intervenes to fix the fallen tail of a masked figure squatting on the
13. Fried’s notion of “theatricality” illuminates this point. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:
Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (chicago: University of Chicago, 1988).
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Deren. Ritual in Transfigured Time. 1946.
166
OCTUBRE
ground. The accident does not appear to cause any embarrassment among the
spectators. For Deren this lack of embarrassment is a sign that “the exposure of
falseness is the very condition of the Balinese theatrical.” She continues: “Certainly
the Balinese are skillful enough craftsmen to make the clothes stay together if they
wanted to. This is almost, I think, a deliberate negligence, the creation of a condi-
tion in which a certain accident can occur.”14 From this theatrical instance, Deren
understood how the random irruption of reality into the fictional plot could
infuse it with a sense of the transient. En efecto, her films are also full of accidents:
falling keys, chess pawns, and knives and phones left off hooks. They are traces of
a presence that transcends and even threatens the film structure, inviting the audi-
ence to look beyond the film narrative.15
In conclusion, the Balinese footage showed Deren that dance or “human
choreography” could expand the technical repertoire of cinema, creating dis-
tance, suspension, and chance through choreography rather than through
montage. Deren wrote at the time that she intended to incorporate this anthro-
pological and choreographic dimension into her cinema to create “a new
branch of film.”16
The film Trance and Dance in Bali that Deren watched with such enthusi-
asm was financed by the Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox as a
comparative study of the impact of childrearing techniques on the development
of schizophrenia.17 For Bateson, Balinese culture was nonhierarchical, noncom-
petitive, and in a perpetual state of equilibrium because of “the way the
mother-child relationship functioned.”18 Bateson argued that, lacking social
release and climax as it did, Balinese culture was schizophrenic and sexually
repressed. Thus for Bateson and Mead dance trance was therapeutic because it
allowed the free play of the individual self and the public display of sexuality
while keeping the edifice of Balinese culture intact. The terrifying sight of
young women turned into witches—a projection of future motherhood—both
threatened and restored the male ego. Bateson and Mead suggested that dance
should be introduced among American children to reduce the incidence of
schizophrenia because, in their view, the externalization of unconscious drives
outside the body acted therapeutically.
In her fieldwork on the voodoo possession ritual in Haiti, Deren challenges
Bateson and Mead’s suggestion of dance as therapy along with their scientific episte-
14. Frito, Absorption and Theatricality, pag. 36.
15. Turim reads these games and ludic structures in terms of Deren’s open “ethics of form.”
Maureen Turim, “The Ethics of Form,” in Maya Deren and the American Avant-garde, ed. Bill Nichols
(berkeley: Universidad de California, 2001) páginas. 77–102.
16. Ibídem., pag. 25.
17. Dementia praecox is how schizophrenia was previously known.
18. Gregory Bateson, “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(Londres: Paladin, 1972), páginas. 80–100.
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Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
167
mology. Set in circular compounds, Haitian voodoo possession rituals are carefully
choreographed interactions between priests (hongun), gods (loa), and the commu-
nity. During the ritual, music is played, animals are sacrificed, and worshippers enter
into a state of trance, during which they are sexually mounted by the gods. El COM-
munity witnesses the worshippers being mounted and helps them recover from the
exhaustion that follows. Each loa has its own drumbeat, personality, costume, sym-
bol, and domain of spiritual revelation. In her beautifully written book Divine
Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953), Deren describes them in vivid detail.
Ghede is the master of the abyss, the king and the clown, the corpse and the phallus.
“As Lord of eroticism he embarrasses men with his lascivious sensual gestures, como
God of the grave he terrifies them with evidence of the absolute insensate.”19
Erzulie—the goddess that mounted Deren in Haiti—is the goddess of the sea; el
divinity of love, dream, and imagination; the lady of luxury. Deren writes: “She
demands champagne and perfume with a delicate soprano voice and beguiling
coquetry. She who is the most complimented, the most beloved, the most often wed-
ded in the sacred marriage between devotees and divinity—she who is the goddess
of Love—protests that she is not loved enough. She is the cosmic tantrum.”20
In contrast to Bateson and Mead’s focus on the therapeutic function of dance,
Deren looks at voodoo dance as an artistic form and as a choreographed reenact-
ment of Haitian religion. In the Haitian cosmos, humans have an invisible, immortal
essence. At death this essence transforms itself first into the soul of the ancestor and
then into the divine matter of the god. Each loa, each god, was once a human being.
Loas are archetypes: mirror images of the humans, living in a mirrored surface. El
metaphysical world is a cosmic mirror, inhabited by the immortal reflections of all
those who have ever confronted it. The Haitian possession ritual is a ritual of mirror-
ing and of temporal reversal. Gods travel backwards to the time when they were
humanos, and humans see themselves reflected in the eyes of the gods. The ritual cel-
ebrates this fusion of two worlds: the human and the divine, the subjective and the
objetivo, the real and the imaginary, the mental and the physical.
In Divine Horsemen, Deren embraces the perspective of the Haitians while also
demonstrating an impressive fluency in anthropological theory, turning the
Balinese Freudian complex of sexuality, violence, and individualism inside out. En
the voodoo ritual, we see not sexually repressed individuals struggling with alien
spirits but a sacred energy connecting humans, sacrificial animals, and living gods
through a sensuous choreography. In the Haitian world, objects, gente, and gods
are not self-contained, individualistic, and atomized entities with an inner psychol-
ogia, intelligence, or volition, as in the Western worldview. They are material traces
of collective dreams and forces, embodied fantasies, living archetypes.
19. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Londres: Thames & Hudson, 1953), pag.
107.
20. Ibídem., pag. 142.
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168
OCTUBRE
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Deren. Divine Horsemen. 1951.
A non-Western form of human choreography, voodoo allowed social struc-
tures and identities to be fluid, paradoxical, and open, while at the same time
producing a cohesive effect for the community.
Michelson argues that the depersonalization effect and the privileging of
form over individual psychology in Deren’s film is a consequence of her early
involvement in communism and anthropology.21 It is true that Deren’s fascination
with Haitian magic had roots in the political. The voodoo possession ritual
brought Deren into contact with a world without the fixed psychology, rigid moral-
idad, and rational volition of the alienated subjects of industrial capitalism, uno
populated instead by fluid and contradictory characters—both rational and irra-
tional, good and evil, selfish and altruistic.
In An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946) Deren laments the loss of
magic in industrial societies ruled by Christian religion and science. The world of
religion is fixed and hierarchical. Our bodies and actions belong to the gods. En
the world of capitalism—another form of religion—we think that we are in full
21. Michelson, “On Reading Deren’s Notebook," pag. 142.
Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
169
control of our actions/bodies through the tools of science and technology. Somos
the gods. For Deren the Haitian world represented a space in between these poles
of possessive individualism: impermanent, performative, and fluid. This is a space
with an open choreography, one in which the power of the shaman grows out of
creative improvisation, empathy, and virtuoso performances and where hierar-
chies are reversible: Gods depend on shamans for returning to life and shamans
depend on the witnessing community for evidence of their power. For Deren, el
“Haitian way of living” was infused with “grace”22: in people’s fluid movements and
colorful life-patterns, in the electric rhythm of their activities, and in the soft
sound of their interactions. This thick, multisensory human choreography con-
trasted with the flat, disembodied life in industrial cities.
In her fascination with everyday fantasies, “sacred sociology,” and the human
unconscious, Deren embraces the project of surrealist anthropology of familiariz-
ing “the other” and cannibalizing the familiar.23 Her feeling of intimacy with the
Haitian “natives” should be read against her ghostly filmic reflections on middle-
class America in the form of split personalities, cruel actors, broken architectures,
urban possession, and the savage ritual of the dinner party.24
22. Deren’s idea of “grace” as both an aesthetic and social principle was probably inspired by her
reading of Bateson’s “Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(Londres: Paladin, 1972), páginas. 101–129.
23. Annette Michelson, “On Reading Deren’s Notebook," pag. 50.
24. Ver, por ejemplo, the ghostly dinner party in Ritual in Transfigured Time.
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Deren. Ritual in Transfigured Time. 1946.
170
OCTUBRE
Deren’s “trance films” in particular—Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land
(1944), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)—mix art, magic, and social analysis,
describing bourgeois rituals as being socially structured but also open to dream-
like reconfigurations. As for the Surrealists, Deren’s films strove to bring back the
unity of magic and science that the modern world had lost. But unlike the
Surrealists, Deren operated in between spaces rather than through violent juxta-
positions, and through unique and personalized performances rather than
collective manifestos. Like the Amazonian shaman described by Lévi-Strauss or
like Titian, the famous hongun that initiated Deren in Haiti, she translated the raw
matter of life into universal archetypes, ghostly images, and shared feelings
through a mixture of magic, amateur science, and virtuoso performances.
IV
Deren belongs to the tradition of modernist cinema, a tradition rooted in the
“magical” belief that films—made of immaterial phantoms, reflections, and optical
illusions—can radically transform reality. All of Deren’s work, and especially her
“trance films,” explores the relationship between the aesthetic, cognition, and con-
sciousness and the modernist trope of cinema as a technology of enchantment
turning the invisible, imaginary, and abstract into visible, material, and tactile forms.
Además, Deren treated filmmaking as a magical technology of movement, infusing
energy into inanimate objects and interrupting the flow of life and freezing human
movimiento. Kracauer25 discussed this trope in relation to the fluid motion of leaves,
agua, and clouds; Balazs26 with regards to the infinitely absorbing landscape of the
human face; Vertov27 through living architectures; and Eisenstein with the choreo-
graphed movements of the crowd. Like Vertov and Moholy-Nagy, Deren believed in
the revelatory power of cinematic techniques and saw cinema as a scientific as much
as an aesthetic process.28 But unlike them, she identified more with the skills of the
voodoo priest than with those of the industrial worker. For instance, like Jean
Epstein, Deren uses cinematic slow motion to create a sense of mysticism rather than
to trigger political consciousness.
Deren’s radical innovation consisted in reworking this modernist trope
through an anthropological framework. Endorsing the point of view of the
Haitians, Deren insists upon the intersection of fiction and reality rather than
upon their juxtaposition (as with the Surrealists) or their dialectical relation (as in
Eisenstein), and in so doing she erases the existing boundaries between documen-
tary, commercial film, and visual art. She does so in two ways: through optical
illusion and through performativity.
25. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (Nueva York: Universidad de Oxford, 1960), pag. 27.
26. Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter (Nueva York:
Oxford, 2009), pag. 11.
27. Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera.
28. The suggestion that Dziga Vertov, László Moholy-Nagy, and Jean Epstein conceived of film as a
powerful technology of social change is made by Michelson in her introduction to Kino-Eye: The Writing
of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (berkeley: Universidad de California, 1984), páginas. xxxvii–xlv.
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Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
171
Optical Illusion
Deren’s cinema is a technology of enchantment, a form of cinematic trance. Él
can be thought of as a hall or mirrors—like the Haitian cosmological mirror—that
creates three optical effects: depersonalization, time reversal, and space crossing.
Depersonalization. The Haitian voodoo ritual, as I have described above, obras
like a mirror in which humans and gods see themselves reflected in one another.
Gods become humans and humans are depersonalized as archetypes and images
of the gods. Similarmente, Deren depersonalizes her characters by splitting them into
double or triple personalities, reflections on mirrors or windows, living shadows,
mirroring gestures, multiple camera angles. Deren’s characters are not personae in
the Western sense of autonomous, individualistic, and self-contained beings.29
They are fluid, multiple, and dismembered; they overflow the boundaries of the
body and reveal themselves in body parts, landscapes, or objects. As with the pos-
sessed initiates in the voodoo ritual, Deren’s actors have no individual agency or
volition. What motivates them is the energy of the camera, which is akin to the
sacred energy of the Haitian gods.
Time reversal. In Haitian cosmology the cosmic mirror—the world in between
gods and humans—has an important temporal dimension. There is a time delay
between when humans die and when they reach the surface of the mirror and
29. On the Western notion of persona, see Marcel Mauss, “The Category of the Person:
Antropología, Philosophy, Historia,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 68 (1938).
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Mead and Bateson. Trance
and Dance in Bali. 1952.
172
OCTUBRE
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Jo Ann Kaplan. Invocation: Maya Deren. 1987.
reveal themselves as gods. This time delay is due to the difficulty human beings
have in forgetting. It is only when their death is forgotten that people become
ancestors; it is only when ancestors have lost their humanity that they become
archetypes and gods. This temporal interval, in which humans and their reflec-
tions travel from source to surface, is a dangerous moment in which the communi-
ty faces the possibility of its own extinction. The Haitian possession ritual is an
attempt to synchronize the time of gods and the time of humans. In the ritual,
gods travel back in time towards their beginning as humans and humans travel for-
ward towards their oblivion and their future state as gods. The cinema of Deren
also works at the intersection of two temporal movements—a backward movement
of remembering and regeneration, es decir., the perspective of the gods; and a forward
movement of forgetting and oblivion, es decir., human time. The temporality of the for-
mer emerges in still images, slow and reverse motion, delays, repetitions, and edit-
Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
173
ing that both fragments and magnifies human movements and shows characters—
usually female—in the act of becoming. Human time, por otro lado, emerges
in linear actions, close-ups, and editing that spatialize time. In a few instances, el
time of the gods and that of humans overlap, as in Ritual in Transfigured Time,
where Deren and her actress Rita Cristiani together face death underwater, fused
together into one overexposed white negative image, or at the end of Meshes of the
Afternoon where the frozen features of the central male character are cut open by a
sensuous ocean floating through the cracks of a broken mirror.
Space-crossing. Finalmente, the crossroads is the metaphor of the mirror’s depth.
In Haitian cosmology, the gods inhabit the vertical plane of the mirror—the abyss
of the oceans, the underground, and the “higher skies,” where gods live. Humanos
inhabit the horizontal plane of the Earth. The Haitian voodoo ritual works at the
crossroads, at the intersection of the horizontal plane of the living and the vertical
plane of the gods. Deren’s cinema also operates at the axial crossing, intersecting
the horizontal plane of narrative cinema and the vertical plane of art, observación,
and abstraction, facts and fiction. It is especially the film edit that replicates this
magic journey to the crossroads, breaking up the horizontal plane of film into
multiple vertical intervals. These sharp cuts connect spaces that are not only dis-
tant from each other but also of a different scale and density: the ocean and the
crowded dining table, the open field and the room, the human eye and a windy
landscape. Deren herself appears in the film, leading the journey between sacred
and profane spaces using cosmological entry points—trees, agua, and clouds—
well known to the Haitians.
In At Land (1944), she climbs up a tree trunk on a beach and emerges into
a table in the middle of a formal dinner party. She then crawls horizontally
along the dinner table, a threshold between the bourgeois and the natural
worlds. Later she descends back into the natural world following a chess pawn,
which has fallen into a river stream. These journeys have no hierarchy or sense
of moral direction. In Ritual in Transfigured Time the gods reveal themselves as
much in the violent choreography of the bourgeois dinner party as in the sacred
winding of the yarn that precedes it. Deren’s edits are not meant to create
dialectical ruptures, as they are in Eisenstein. Intercutting incommensurable
spaces, multiple crossings, parallel planes, and soft angles, they distill the
essence of cinema in intricate weavings and delicate paper folds.
Deren incorporated the ethnographic point of view in her films, but she was
nonetheless very critical of the realist aesthetics of ethnographic films and docu-
mentaries based on observational styles, minimal editing, “indigenous” characters,
Performative Cinema
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174
OCTUBRE
and authentic locations. As in Westernized portraits of tribal leaders, staged reen-
actments of working-class life, or close-ups of indigenous bodies, these depict
cultures frozen in space and time, “mummified.”
Deren’s cinema is choreographic rather than ethnographic. It is not focused
on the “micro” and “unedited” details of specific cultures, but in the broad sensu-
ous choreography—the rhythms, sounds, and patterned shadows—that is shared
across cultures, between Haiti and New York, street children and religious initi-
ates, artists and the bourgeois.
Her films are performative in two ways. Primero, her “cine-trance”30 blurs the
boundaries between the film process, the ritual, and the real world, on the one
mano, and between the choreographed movements of the actors and the choreo-
graphed movements of the camera on the other. The dreamlike quality of her
cine-trance derives from this blurring of reality and performance. En segundo lugar, her
films are performative because they incorporate the primitive and magic world-
view within the very film process. Like the Haitian priest, Deren as filmmaker was a
performative leader, a shaman. Her films are spaces without fixed hierarchies and
are open to creativity, reflection, and transfiguration. They present alternative
political scenarios.
Criticizing ethnographic films and documentaries and their realistic aesthet-
circuitos integrados, Deren argues in Anagram that since every film involves the manipulation of
reality, “there is not such a thing as a documentary film.”31 But she also believed
that the film form ought to emerge from the context of, and not be detached from,
reality. For instance, she was mesmerized by the “realist” style of Bateson and
Mead’s film: “For the quality of Balinese posture, attitudes, quietness, combined
with the extremely long shots, end by giving everything almost a ritualistic charac-
ter. . . . Nothing happens in the developmental sense, the shots keep lasting, el
scene crosses some strange boundary from ‘activity’ into ‘state’ . . . the extremely dis-
interested length of these shots and the slow, easy pan is—whether it is so intended
or not—a kind of Balinese subjective camera. One has the feeling that one is watch-
ing the way a Balinese watches, that kind of quiet, sustained staring, or rather
gazing, since there is no intensity in it.”32 For Deren, in the magic context of Bali,
the unedited everyday is magical.
Deren’s performative filmmaking, combining ethnographic observation and
formal abstraction, overcomes altogether the opposition between realism and fic-
ción. As in the figure of the anagram, “vertical abstraction” and “horizontal
description”33 are equally weighed as dream and reality are woven together by the
real performances of the characters, often Deren herself.
30. The word “cine-trance” is famously associated with anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch’s
controversial film Les Maîtres fous (1954), a mixture of surrealist theater, cinematic ritual, and ethno-
graphic film.
31. Maya Deren, Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (Nueva York: Alicat Bookshop, 1946), pag. 35.
32. Deren, “From the Notebook of Maya Deren," pag. 39.
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Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
175
Deren often frames this relation between vertical abstraction and horizontal
description as a dialectics between photographs and film. For instance, she
acknowledges that her Study for Choreography for the Camera (1945) is set up as a dia-
logue between photography “by which the reality—is recorded and revealed in its
own terms—and editing—by which those elements of reality are reframed at an
imaginative level creating a new reality.”34 In Ritual in Transfigured Time, Deren
incorporates the tension between photography and film within the very film struc-
tura. Similarmente, the dialogue between frozen photos and film, and between
simultaneous and linear forms of consciousness, is the central trope of Chris
Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Freeze-frames halt the linear, horizontal logic of the char-
acters (por ejemplo, they immobilize the Dionysian movements of dancer Frank
Westbrook) and open up a vertical dimension of infinite possibilities, incluido
that the characters will die and—when the image recovers its motion—regenerate.
This articulation of photography and film in Ritual in Transfigured Time replays the
cinematic ritual of remembering and forgetting highlighted above. Connecting
again to Haitian cosmology, freeze-frames are reflections of the gods’ magical con-
sciousness set in motion in the act of remembering. Films are traces of the
material that humans assemble in a state of amnesia. Deren explores the photo-
graphic effect in her films through slow motion. “Slow-motion is the microscope of
tiempo,” she argues in Anagram.35 With Epstein, she sees slow motion as the camera’s
animistic power to magnify the microscopic, animate the inert, and reveal the play
of forms.36 The power of slow motion is evident at the beginning of Ritual in
Transfigured Time, when the fast-shaking movement of her head is slowed down,
leaving the hair floating in a parallel world of water.
Deren’s innovative filmmaking combines two kinds of movement—the move-
ment of the actors and the movement of the camera—and two ways of looking: el
perspective of the characters and the perspective of the artist. The former move-
ment and ways of looking are inward, intimate, tactile, and analytical
approximations towards reality. The latter are outward, abstract, creative, and dis-
ruptive shifts away from reality. Deren uses the camera to carve out a visual space
for these two movements to coexist, like a sculptor who cuts up visual spaces for
the physical reality to reveal itself. Combining the “hall of mirrors” and choreogra-
phy—two well-known technologies of enchantment—Deren creates a
hallucinatory utopia in which humans are freed from space and time, as well as
their own bodies, and in which reality and dance merge.
33. In Anagrams Deren associates the horizontal dimension of cinema with real-time observation,
and description and the vertical dimension with synchronous and anti-realistic abstraction. Deren,
“From the Notebook of Maya Deren," pag. 93.
34. Ibídem., pag. 40.
35. Ibídem., pag. 47.
36. Deren reflects on Epstein’s inspiring ideas on slow motion in his L’intelligence d’une machine
(París: Éditions Jacques Melot, 1946). Ibídem., pag 47.
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176
OCTUBRE
In its oscillations in time and space—between movement and stillness, mem-
ory and forgetting—the cinema of Deren has a rhythmical quality, resembling
música. Indeed the beat of the drum is the divine energy that sets in motion the
Haitian cosmos, conveys the polymorphic voices of the gods, and synchronizes the
collective movements of the initiates. Loas are attracted to different rhythms,
which they will dance accordingly: “The rounded roll of Yanvalou sends the body
in a slow serpentine undulation; the impervious drive of Nago Chaud stiffens the
spine into the tension of pride . . . the special tension of Petro, en el cual, instead of
supporting the dancer, the beat seems to drive him before it.”37 Drums create
polyrhythmic landscapes inhabited by gods in the act of dancing; they cut and
“break” (like film edits) between action and inaction and mark “the spiritual heart
of the cosmos.”38 Most of Deren’s work is silent, but all of her images are woven
together by a strong sense of rhythm and folded in a sensuous, musical membrane
that transcends and expands the film form.
V
In depersonalizing and problematizing the Western individual, Deren turns
this critique onto herself, reflecting on the marginal status of both women and
artists in postwar America. Her films are self-ethnographies as much as they are
ethnographies of middle-class America. Together with her multiple doubles and
female companions she appears to have identities that are fluid and problematic,
difficult to categorize, and in continuous transformation. Por ejemplo, in Ritual in
Transfigured Time, Deren and her “double” Cristiani struggle against claustrophobic
relaciones, controlling male characters, and over-formal dinner etiquette and
appear to move at the margins of bourgeois society. As in the fusing of the bodies
of Cristiani and Deren at the end of Ritual in Transfigured Time, in the erotic chess
play among women in At Land, or in her autoerotic play in Meshes, Deren’s women
challenge the heterosexual logic of the nuclear family, endorsing instead bisexual-
idad, promiscuous love, and erotic fantasy. Deren’s self-deconstructions are often
cruel, as in Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty: We see her body heavily falling down a
staircase, grotesquely transfixed in puppetlike movements, running in ridiculous
fast motion, gasping for breath and drowning. Each self-transformation feels like a
letting-go, a self-sacrifice, as at the end of Ritual in Transfigured Time.
For Maria Pramaggiore there is a conflict between Deren’s decentering of the
female subject and the way she crafted a commercialized public persona for herself in
the style of Hollywood divas.39 But this star persona was another cinematic transfigu-
ration emerging from Deren’s animistic cinema, which blurred the life of films and
the life of people—friends, colegas, partners, lovers, admirers, and protégés—and
37. Deren, Divine Horsemen, pag. 236.
38. Ibídem., pag. 238.
39. Maria Pramaggiore, “Performance and Persona in the U.S. Avant-garde: The Case of Maya
Deren,” Cinema Journal 36, No. 2 (Invierno 1997), páginas. 17 –40.
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Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
177
overflowed the boundaries of the film form through public screenings, discusiones,
promotions, advertising, and alternative distributions. For Deren, the star system was
a condition of the cruel logic of Western spectacle. In Notebook she reflects on how
Western cinema is based on the viewer’s identification with the actor. This identifica-
tion is competitive because the viewer strives to outperform the “model,” but
nonetheless, “identification, the idea of becoming something else, is democratic”
because it triggers self-improvement, cambiar, and even social mobility.40 On the con-
trary, in Balinese theater, as I described earlier, there is a hierarchical distance
between the performer and the spectator. But as much as they inspire, film stars are
consumed and emptied out—like sacred icons—by the fetishistic glance of the com-
munity.41 Like the shamans, who are consumed by their social function and
charismatic power, Deren “the film star” was made vulnerable by her power of inspir-
ing dreams and fantasies. Rejecting the classical Western myth of femininity, Deren
identified herself with Erzulie, the capricious and promiscuous goddess of love, cre-
ativity, and fantasy that mounted her during her fieldwork in Haiti. Because of their
powerful imagination, Erzulie and Deren are eternally betrayed and wounded. Deren
writes: “Erzulie is the loa of the impossible perfection which must remain unattain-
capaz. Man demands that she demands of him beyond his capacity. The condition of
her divinity is his failure: he crowns her with his own betrayal. Hence she must weep,
it could not be otherwise.”42
VI
Along with Michelson, I see Deren’s fascination with Haitian culture as a
political statement. Deren’s politics were not radical, but revealed a melancholic
reflection on the disruptive powers of humanity in the years following the Second
guerra mundial.
In the Haitian voodoo ritual the community sees the possibility of its own
extinction and survives the oblivion by collaborating with the gods in the making of
new images and archetypes. Likewise Deren’s films set up a space of reciprocity
between humans and gods, where gods renounce their disruptive powers and
humans overcome their natural imperfections by channeling the dark shadows and
dehumanizing forces of the gods in the making of new images and archetypes.
As mediator between the world of images and the real world, between gods
and humans, Deren struggled with the natural imperfections of the film medium.
In spite of her craftsmanship in optical illusion, Deren experienced the film cam-
era as a typically male, bulky technology, intrinsically limited in translating her
unmediated visions.43 At the end of Divine Horsemen, Deren describes how, mientras
40. Pramaggiore, “Performance and Persona in the U.S. Avant-garde," pag. 29.
41. On the sacred icon and the cult of cinematic identification, see Annette Michelson, "El
Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System," Octubre 52
(Primavera 1990), páginas. 16–52.
42. Deren, Divine Horsemen, pag. 144.
43. In Notebook, she writes, “As artist, woman is her own medium, whereas men use the camera to
impregnate something.” Ibid., pag. 2.
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178
OCTUBRE
being possessed by Erzulie, she sees “the pure white light of darkness.”44 Her
description of this pure white light is a metaphor for her striving for the unmedi-
ated light of cinema. She writes, “How clear the world looks in this first total light.
How purely form it is without, for a moment, the shadow of meaning. I see every-
thing all at once, without the delays of succession, and each detail is equal and
equally lucid before the sense of relative importance imposes the emphasis of
eyes.”45 In her striving towards artistic perfection and towards conveying the
unmediated vision of the gods, Deren was betrayed by the imperfection of the
human medium. She writes: “The wound of Erzulie is perpetual: she is the dream
impaled eternally upon the cosmic cross-road where the world of men and the
world of divinity meet and it is through her pierced heart that man ascend and the
divinity descend.”46
Deren never completed her Haitian film.47 There are two possible explana-
ciones.
(a) The unfolding of history. Michelson suggests that Deren’s Haitian project
collapsed when she became aware of historical change in relation to the voodoo
ritual, which made it too complex to fit into Deren’s aesthetic project.48 But his-
tory violently intruded on Deren’s personal experience of Haiti too. En 1947, el
year of her arrival, Haiti had just elected its first democratic constitutional assem-
bly after a very long period of military dictatorship. This new democratic
revolution raised hopes of emancipation among intellectuals and activists world-
wide, including André Breton, who in 1946 gave an inspired anti-colonial speech
to university students in a cinema in Port-au-Prince.49 But Deren had to leave Haiti
after a new military coup by a corrupt, pro-Western political elite. It is well known
eso, especially after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Deren was deeply critical
of US foreign policy. It is possible that the Haitian project collapsed when the
coup shattered her sense of identification with the marginal “natives” and fully
revealed her status as colonizer.
(b) The limitations of the film medium. For Michelson, Eisenstein’s Mexican project
and Deren’s Haitian fieldwork were motivated by a sense of alienation from Western
society and by a search for a new sense of community grounded in the sacred. Ambos
Eisenstein and Deren were interested in how films affect the senses via perception. En
their ethnographic journeys, they searched for non-Western forms of representation
with direct access to the ecstatic. This ecstatic was a radical political project, opened by
44. Ibídem., pag. 259.
45. Deren, Divine Horsemen, pag. 261.
46. Ibídem., pag. 145.
47. The film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti was edited posthumously by Cheril and Teiji
Ito in 197—paradoxically, in “ethnographic realist” style.
48 Michelson, “On Reading Deren’s Notebook," pag. 52.
49. René Depestre, one of the founders of the revolutionary Haitian journal Le Ruche, gives a
detailed account of Breton’s speech in René Depestre, Pour la revolution pour la poesie (Quebec, QC:
Editions Lemeac, 1974), páginas. 204–13.
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Maya Deren’s Experiments in Cinematic Trance
179
new cinematic dimensions, of transcendence of capitalist forms and limitations.
Eisenstein found this “new dimension” in the serape, the striped blanket of the
Mexican indio;50 Deren found it in the Haitian “hall of mirrors.” Before her
Haitian fieldwork, she had used such halls of mirrors—and their temporal and
spatial distortions—to reflect
on the flatness of middle-
class America.
But the mirror shat-
tered when placed in front of
its own source. If Bateson and
Mead’s observational tech-
nique match ed the artifice of
Balinese life, what kind of
film would capture the multi-
layered fantasies—drawings,
música, dance, and songs—
and polyphonic voices of the
Haitian gods? Unlike cinema,
Haitian voodoo possession
triggered “pure” representa-
tions traveling directly from
source (gods) to surface
(their human reflections) without technological mediation. The camera was not as
powerful a medium in conveying the unmediated vision of the Haitian gods.51 With
their skillful spatial and temporal cinematic deconstructions, Deren and Eisenstein
were reaching out for a “fourth dimension” in film,52 opening spaces of higher con-
sciousness. For both of them, the encounter with other aesthetic traditions that
embraced the fourth dimension without the mediation of the camera was both reve-
latory and disruptive.
Kaplan. Invocation: Maya Deren. 1987.
Deren’s Haitian film lies in fragments: in the African-American songs and
children’s games in the streets of Harlem, in Broadway’s vaudeville dances, en el
desultory conversations of bourgeois dinner parties, and in the twenty thousand
feet of 16mm film, one thousand stills, and fifty hours of audio recording that
remain of her fieldwork.
In an influential article, anthropologist George Marcus argues that mod-
ernist cinema, especially in its deconstruction of spatial and temporal categories
through montage, should be a source of inspiration for anthropologists to
50. Anne Nesbet describes Eisenstein’s Mexican experience as an encounter with a two-dimensional
pictorial world in which the psyche was revealed as an “external unconscious.” Anne Nesbet, Savage
Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (Nueva York: Tauris, 2003) pag. 129.
51. The Vertovian “kinetic icon” would not work in the polydimensional world of Haitian voodoo.
52. Nesbet, Savage Junctures, páginas. 48–75.
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180
OCTUBRE
embrace polyphony, dialogism, and bifocality.53 The work of Deren shows how
“other” aesthetic traditions can contribute to the “magic” of Western cinema.
Besides, Deren’s displacement from her Haitian encounter with living images and
a cinematic choreography unmediated by the filmic apparatus shows how power-
ful images become when, departing from their original source or intention, ellos
fluidly circulate across different human and nonhuman mediums.
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53. George Marcus, “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic
Metaphor of Montage,” in Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, ed.
Leslie Devereaux and Richard Hillman (berkeley: Universidad de California, 1995).
