2010-01-12T17:33:00.000-08:00

Maya Deren's films were surreal and experimental. She is a legend in postwar American independent cinema and the American avant-garde movement. She became enamored with modern dance traditions and traveled to Haiti to finish her film "Meditation on Violence." Her interest in dance traditions evolved into a passion and interest in the world of Vodoun and Haitian rituals. Her works often focused on the possession that went on during ritual dances or 'Trance Dancing' -and her film "Divine Horsemen-The Living Gods of Haiti" shows the secular and religious rituals of the Haitian people. While documenting Maya became personally involved in the rituals and was said to experience possession herself by the goddess Erzulie.

" During a ceremony described at the end of her book, Erzulie began to "ride" Maya Deren. According to the erotic metaphor of voodoo possession, a deity "mounts" the entranced dancer as a rider seizes hold of a reluctant horse and overcomes the spirit of the animal (Zora Neale Hurston's account of Haiti in 1937 is called Tell My Horse). "This is it!" writes Deren, as she evokes the dramatic scene when she became possessed. "Resting upon that leg I feel a strange numbness enter it from the earth itself and mount, within the very marrow of the bone, as slowly and richly as sap might mount the trunk of a tree. I say numbness, but that is inaccurate. To be precise,I must say what, even to me, is pure recollection, but not otherwise conceivable: I must call it a white darkness, its whiteness a glory, and its darkness, terror."

A mystical oxymoron, this "white darkness" envelops Deren until she loses all consciousness of self: "The white darkness moves up the veins of my leg like a swift tide rising, rising; it is a great force which I cannot sustain or contain, which, surely, will burst my skin. It is too much, too bright, too white for me; this is its darkness.'Mercy!' I scream within me. I hear it echoed by the voices, shrill and unearthly: 'Erzulie!' The bright darkness floods up through my body, reaches my head, engulfs me. I am sucked down and exploded upward at once. That is all." "

She spent eighteen months and took over 18,000 feet of footage on a simple hand held camera. The film was never finished as Deren passed away from cerebral hemorrhage as a result of malnutrition and abuse of sleeping pills. The footage was put together and narrated in a style that greatly contrasts the intended style and feel Deren's films. You can learn more about her perspective on the Haitian and Voudon culture, her role as a female artist, and more in the book Maya Deren and the American avant-garde By Bill Nichols

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2009-12-28T23:59:00.001-08:00

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