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Film Description
"Divine Horsemen" is the name of Maya Deren's 1953 monograph on the cosmology of Voudoun, or Haitian Voodoo. The title was used by Teiji (Maya's husband at the time of her death) and Cherel Ito in their assembled film made from Deren's footage. The film shows the brilliance of Deren's use of choreo-cinema, and shows respect for the ceremonial logic of this beautiful religion.
"In September 1947 I disembarked in Haïti, for an eight-month stay, with eighteen motley pieces of lugage; seven of these consisted of 16-millimeter motion-picture equipment (three cameras, tripods, raw film stock, etc.), of which three were related to sound recording for a film, and three contained equipment for still photography." Maya Deren
"'When the anthropologist arrives, the gods depart.' So declares, I am told, a Haitian proverb. Maya Deren, on the other hand, was an artist: therein, the secret of her ability to recognize 'facts of the mind' when presented through the 'fictions' of a mythology. (...) She went to Haiti as an artist, thinking to make a film in which Haitian dance should be a leading theme. But the manifestations of rapture that there first fascinated and then seized her, transport her beyond the bounds of any art she had ever know." Joseph Campbell
Divine Horsemen" is the name of Maya Deren's monograph published in 1953, an account of the cosmology of Voudoun. The title was used by Teiji ( Maya's husband at the ... more >
Divine Horsemen" is the name of Maya Deren's monograph published in 1953, an account of the cosmology of Voudoun. The title was used by Teiji ( Maya's husband at the time of her death) and Cherel Ito in their assembled film made from Deren's footage.
One of her largest artistic frustrations was her inability to edit 20.000 feet of footage she shot in 1947, 1949 and 1954. This was primarily due to lack of funding and support from orthodox anthropologists where she was considered an encroacher on their revered territory. In a sense the Ito's did editorial work for her after her death but it is important to recognize that this is not Deren's. One does get a sense of her work with this video and what she tried to accomplish. The voice overs and animation are all the work of the Ito's-- ( excerpts are read from Divine Horsemen). Deren's own film was to use the sound she recorded in the field in Haiti and which she released as an album "The Voices of Haiti". The original footage is to be found at Anthology Film Archives in New York. This film shows the brilliance of Deren's use of choreocinema in filming where she tried to respect the ceremonial logic of this beautiful religion.
Moira Sullivan, Ph.d Cinema Studies, Stockholm, Sweden < less
