Original subtitles

[Piano: Classical]

This is like Holy Grail of cinema.

These are where Maya kept her films...

and actually there are films inside...

and we don't even know what they are.

This is one of the archives where...

one can still make discoveries, and one can get...

excited and in ecstasy!

[Chuckles]

There may be some very interesting discoveries.

This is the first picture I took of Maya.

It must have been a few days after we met in Hollywood.

It's already faded a little.

I was fascinated by her face.

Kind of exotic.

Maya wasn't always Maya.

She used to be called Eleanora.

Her mother used to call her Elinka in Russian.

She confided in me that she was unhappy about her name...

and she asked me once to find a name for her.

So I just went to a library and looked through a lot ofbooks...

mainly books on mythology.

I came across the name Maya in different connections...

for instance, with water.

But Maya also was the name of mother of Buddha.

In Hinduism, Maya was the name of a goddess...

who holds a veil in front of our eyes...

a veil of illusion, which prevents us from seeing...

the spiritual reality behind it.

[Maya Deren] I was a poet before I was a filmmaker...

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.

[Woman] She could have been a dancer...

but that would have taken full- time work with us.

And so, she stayed being a kind of a personal secretary.

You know, that sort of thing.

I had to keep my eye on Maya at times, you know...

because I don't think I had a star complex at all...

but I had to remind her now and then...

we were in Hollywood to begin...

kind of a new career for the company.

Frequently I would ask some of the Hollywood people to come in.

And Maya was wonderful at meeting them at the door...

and introductions and seating them, and so forth and so on.

But the gleam in her eye...

when the drummers took their positions and began to play, you know...

And we'd have our exercise. Always the drums we were.

Well, Maya had a habit of... She was extremely well built as far...

robust, you know... and she'd sit there.

Usually her-her little simple frocks were

quite low cut, in the front anyway.

And after a while she couldn't stand it...

and you could just feel it growing and growing in her.

And she turned, I remember... Her favorite thing was to say...

"How can you sit still?"

You know? And then she'd start in on this sort.

I was wild, because I had to find...

Little by little, I had to stop it, of course.

I couldn't have that at all with these impresarios.

But who knows? Maybe she helped us get our Hollywood position.

The drums really took her over.

She was possessed by rhythm.

And you could see it without drums, without sound or anything else...

and in the way she handled her body.

[Deren] If I did not live in a time when

the film was accessible to me as a medium...

I would have been a dancer, perhaps, or a singer.

My reason for creating them is almost as if I would dance...

except this is a much more marvelous dance.

It's because in film, I can make the world dance.

Actually, this picture was not planned for the film.

I just made it in a spur of the moment.

I liked the reflections of the trees...

in the glass in front of her.

Later on we used to call it my Botticelli picture...

because it reminded us of Italian Renaissance.

And this one was taken in New York...

with our cat, Glamour Girl, that came with us from Hollywood.

This was our apartment in Greenwich Village in Morton Street.

We had kind of a studio apartment.

We used it a lot...

as a location for shooting.

It had very nice light.

Large windows to the south.

And our cats were with us, of course.

Maya loved cats.

Maya liked mirrors very much...

and used the idea of a mirror often in her writing.

Also, the film ends with a broken mirror.

Maya was born Eleanora Derenkowski...

beautiful name... in 1917...

the year of the Russian revolution, in Russia...

in Kiev, the great, great capital of the Ukraine.

She came out of a very privileged situation.

MostJews did not live in the cities...

but there were a good number of them.

What was special about the Derens, the Derenkowskies...

is that both parents were so very highly educated...

particularly her father, who was a psychiatrist.

And they then emigrated several years later...

as manyJews did, to New York.

I do know how very deeply, profoundly...

Maya loved her father and was influenced by him.

[Deren] I am not greedy.

I do not seek to possess the major portion of your days.

I am content if, on those rare occasions...

whose truth can be stated only by poetry...

you will perhaps recall an image...

even only the aura of my films.

[Man] She came from the sea.

If you've ever seen her film At Land...

she comes out of the sea.

In her mind, she was a sea creature.

Maya's bedroom was an underwater world.

It was like a grotto under the sea...

and it was full of very beautiful objects...

shells, coral...

and on the ceiling, there was a very unusual large painting...

of underwater creatures.

And in the normal light, you would see that...

but when the lights were turned off...

it turned out it was painted with phosphorescent paint...

and so suddenly it came to life with different colors...

and you really felt as if you were under the sea at night...

surrounded by the other creatures of the sea.

It was an apartment oflove and ofbeauty.

It was predominantly blue.

That was her favorite color.

[Deren] What I do in my films...

is very... oh, I think very distinctively...

I think they are the films of a woman...

and I think that their characteristic time quality...

is the time quality of a woman.

I think that the strength of men...

is their great sense of immediacy.

They are a "now"creature...

and a woman has strength to wait, because she's had to wait.

She has to wait nine months for the concept of a child.

Time is built into her body in the sense ofbecomingness.

And she sees everything in terms of it being...

in the stage ofbecoming.

She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment...

but seeing always the person that it will become.

Her whole life from her very beginning...

it's built into her... is the sense ofbecoming.

Now, in any time form, this is a very important sense.

I think that my films putting as much stress as they do...

upon the constant metamorphosis...

one image is always becoming another.

That is, it is what is happening that is important in my films...

not what is at any moment.

This is a woman's time sense...

and I think it happens more in my films

than in almost anyone else's.

Hella Heyman was a young still photographer...

living in Los Angeles.

She was very close friends with a woman named Galka Scheyer.

And Galka was an art dealer.

She worked with the paintings of four important...

and rather unknown painters at that time in America...

and that was Klee, Feininger, Kandinsky and Jawlenski.

She was also... Galka... a friend of Maya and Sasha.

And that's how the friendship between the three started.

Galka was the focal point, in a certain sense.

Hella came to New York at a certain period...

and stayed with Maya and Sasha in Morton Street.

And at that point, At Land was germinating.

And as always in Maya's films...

one person did not have one function.

One person did as much as was needed.

Hella was camerawoman, coached by Sasha, incidentally...

grip, actress, whatever.

In the scene in At Land at the beach...

where there is a chess game going on...

the human counterparts for those,

the black and the white figure...

Hella is the black- haired woman in that chess game.

They remained friends for quite a long while... in fact...

until the divorce between Sasha and Maya...

and eventually the marriage of Sasha and Hella.

[Deren] I intended it almost as a mythological statement...

in the sense that folktales are mythological...

archetypal statements.

The girl in the film is not a personal person.

She's a personage.

[Arsham] Maya had several projects

that were for some reasons abandoned.

And the one that most interested me...

was to be a film about children's games.

For her, it was...

the ritual involved in these games.

And they are very ritualistic...

and full of the kind of gesture that has specific meaning.

And to learn from Maya...

that this was universal was a revelation.

I was a New York street kid. I knew

nothing about what was happening...

elsewhere in the world.

But I played with great affection...

hopscotch, jump rope, jacks...

Jacks is a game... It certainly has

different names elsewhere in the world...

but it was played, for example,

by my mother in Russia as a young girl.

[Woman] She was unusually dressed for those days.

I think she was just a woman ahead of her time...

because many years later, I would often see

somebody dressed just exactly like her...

even think maybe it was she...

until she turned around and then

realized that this was... this was her style.

The clothes were this- this...

European style of embroidered blouse...

that could be worn off the shoulder...

and it was like folksy folk clothes...

with always... with a long dirndl skirt.

It may be that she had the-the body type...

of sort of like heavy, heavy hips and heavy legs...

and certainly that kind of skirt looked much better on her.

And her hair, of course... She did have very curly hair...

which, instead of cutting it off, as most of us would have done...

shejust let it be.

So � la the '60s, with flower children and stuff.

In other words, she really looked like a flower child...

but this was not the '60s, this was the '40s.

[Hammid] Since Maya had her own experience with dancing...

she wanted to use film to express...

dance ideas in a new way...

by using the film technique of editing...

to free the dancer from gravity...

so that the dancer would seem to be floating...

by his own power.

In New York, she found a young dancer, Talley Beatty...

who was willing to cooperate for free.

In it we used slow motion...

and then we hired a cheap 16-millimeter slow- motion camera...

and used that.

[Deren] It isn't a problem of choreographing a dancer.

It's a problem of choreographing whatever it is...

that you have in that frame...

including the space...

the trees, the animate or even inanimate objects.

And at that moment, this is where the film choreographer...

departs a little bit from the dance choreographer...

and that is what I attempted to do...

in A Study in Choreography for Camera.

I retitled it, actually, Pas de Deux...

because what happens there is that

although you see only one dancer...

the camera is as partner to that dancer...

and carries him or accelerates him...

as a partner would do to the ballerina...

making possible progressions and movements...

that are impossible to the individual figure.

Everything that Maya did in any ofher other films is there...

the condensation, the intensity...

and perfection as a... as a film like a poem...

something that goes...

Maya said the prose is narrative-horizontal...

and poetry, song is vertical.

It reaches detail after detail after detail.

After two minutes and a half it reaches the point...

that is that intensity from which it cannot go any further.

Everything is set, exhausted, the point made, perfect.

[Film Projector Whirring]

[Man] As a kid, first I got a slide projector.

Then I got a 91/2- millimeter projector.

Then I attended the screenings of the cine-club...

at the Urania in Vienna.

So it was pretty clear that...

you know, I was involved with film.

And then what happened was...

when I had to leave Austria...

because Hitler didn't like... didn't like me...

I came to the United States, and again...

really, even though I had to work...

I kept on thinking about what I could do about film...

and whether it wouldn't be a nice idea perhaps to start a cine-club.

But then there was this really, like, a revelation...

namely, there was an announcement in the papers...

that a woman who I never had heard of, Maya Deren...

would present her films at the Provincetown Playhouse.

They had never shown films before there.

The whole idea of taking over regular theater...

was very enticing to me.

And I decided that, yes, I should do the same.

You know, I felt that I was in the presence, really...

of a new kind of talent...

somebody who had absorbed...

the 20th- century revelations and achievements...

in terms of dream theory.

Dreams are essentially silent.

This was a very important element in the films to me...

the silence.

And here was somebody who was able

to represent this dream reality...

this inner reality, on film.

Wonderful.

[Woman] I felt so close with Sasha, more than with anybody else.

Though Hella and I...

used to sit to the side and talk about Sasha...

and say that we were gonna marry him.

So then we finally came to the conclusion

that Hella would marry him first...

and then I would marry him in the next life.

So that was it. But my recollection of Sasha...

is-is indescribable.

He was such a sweet and gentle soul.

She was so busy and so involved in the very essence ofliving...

that many things passed her by, dangerous and otherwise.

And I think that Sasha had...

a more... a more precise way oflooking at things.

So I think he was a great balance for her and a great...

a great source of-of spiritual, you know...

of the true spiritual quality that one needs...

particularly in a person of Maya's temperament.

I came from Trinidad at five years of age...

and later on I found out that Maya had come

from her country at five years of age...

and on a boat also.

So that was a commonality that might not have been expressed...

but was felt...

by some psychic mean between the two of us.

And maybe she saw, you know, in this mirror of one's self...

that she saw this particular person

when she came into this country.

Because coming here at that young age...

unless you have experienced it, you don't know what it is.

Everything is new to you...

and everything is so frightening to you...

people, the places, the way people talk, the way they act.

And then you had to speak English to become an American.

And that was the goal:: That you'd become American, you know.

I don't remember any written material...

that she gave to prepare.

She talked, as usual, and she used words...

to bring forth a certain choreography.

But then she had a- a very experienced dancer in Frank...

and then she allowed us to move freely.

And many people feel that death is a release...

and you go into something else.

I had no feelings about that.

There was never any question in my mind.

All I can think about was the absolute abyss of death.

After death, to me, there is just nothing.

I think it was the scenes where she had sort of a running in it.

That's what I felt like doing.

I felt, if I couldjust outrun death...

if I couldjust get away from it, the whole thought of it.

And I also remember that if you...

wash your face...

you can wash away the memories.

But that is pure myth.

Because I've washed my face to all end of time...

and death was always there in me.

So that was the easiest part...

of any ritual or any dance scene...

that Maya might have wanted for me to totally express...

and that... that was a ritual in time...

and in death to me.

[Singing In French]

[Guitar]

I got stones in my head I got pebbles in my bed

I got stones in my head I got pebbles in my bed

In my head they pound In my bed they rattle

In my head they pound In my bed they rattle

Can't you hear 'em

Hear 'em

Stones in my bed

I got stones in my bed I got pebbles in my head

I got stones in my head I got pebbles in my bed

In my head they rattle In my head they drown

In my bed they rattle In my head they pound

Can't you hear 'em

Stones

Stones

[Vocalizing]

Stones and pebbles

Pebbles

Stones

[Vocalizing]

Stones and pebbles

In 1946, when Maya applied for a Guggenheim grant...

this was the first time anybody in film had applied for it.

Joseph Campbell...

Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, all the people she knew...

who were important in their worlds

wrote letters for her in support of her.

And there was a marvelous, marvelous party

in celebration of the Guggenheim.

And she then used the money to go to Haiti.

Uh, Mead and Bateson had shot...

very, very special footage in Bali having to do with trance...

and this interested Maya enormously,

and of course Haiti is quite famous for this...

and that is why she went to Haiti.

Maya used the device that was being used...

at the time that she was filming... a wire recorder.

Aportable piece of equipment. Quite heavy. Very delicate.

But she could afford it, so when it came time...

to go to prepare equipment to go to Haiti...

she was very, very happy to take this along.

She recorded a great deal of Haitian music.

She also used it at home. And at her parties, by the way...

this was often what she would play...

the Haitian music on her wire recorder.

[Man Singing In Foreign Language]

[Drums Beating]

Well, I'll tell you, my first reaction...

was annoyance, you know...

because she had had the advantage...

of all my correspondence.

Also, she didn't relate to me as she should have.

I got over that, because...

I saw that she was a serious person...

and was received by Haitians.

In 1936, when I went to the West Indies...

it was partly as an anthropologist and partly as a dancer.

And for a while I had a very rough time

holding those two things together.

My interest in Haiti was not only dance, but it was the Vodoun.

But then I knew what I had to do.

I wanted to see what the foot movements were...

and the hip movements and the various things

that would make up what they brought...

what their ancestors had brought from Africa to the Caribbean.

And this comes across quite well.

And then, of course, as I got into it...

I had to see what god behaved in what way...

and what god danced in a certain way...

when the devotee became possessed.

[Chicken Clucking]

[Man] Voodoo is an African word meaning "spirit. "

It is a general name for all deities.

It came down to Haiti with slavery.

It's more than a religion.

That is to say, it's a set of beliefs and practices...

which deal with the spiritual forces of the universe...

and attempt to keep the individual...

in harmonious relation with them as they affect his life.

Haiti is very well known for the Voodoo island...

but it's all the Caribbean Islands.

All practice it, but it's much purer there than in Africa, probably.

But it was very useful for the independence of Haiti...

when the slaves were plotting against their masters.

There was a big ceremony that was done...

especially to gather all of them together...

to make the decision that they were gonna start fighting...

until they won their freedom.

So it had a very strong...

part to play in the revolution of the slaves...

until they became independent in 1804.

[People Clamoring]

The book that she had written, Divine Horsemen...

is really one of the best that I have seen.

For some reason, I myselfbeing Haitian...

when I read the book I wonder, because

how did she accumulate this knowledge?

I mean, how did the people who she was connected with...

how could they open up so easily to a foreigner...

somebody that they didn't know...

and somebody who was supposed to be a-a...

you know, who comes, as you were saying before...

a white person coming to learn about the culture of the black people?

So it was very strange when you read this book...

to see how much they reveal to her.

[Man Singing In Foreign Language]

[Deren] I agree that there are the forces in the universe...

of which Vodoun speaks...

but there are other religions which speak of those forces also.

I do find that the manner in which

it operates in practice, ritually...

the interior miracle, if you will, is very valid.

You see, the Haitians never ask whether you believe in Vodoun.

They say, do you do it, do you serve?

[Man] Maya, do you feel that people in the audience...

looking in tonight...

are pretty skeptical, looking askance

at this talk about Voodoo now?

[Deren] Well, I don't think they would be

if theyjust related a little bit...

to things they have from time to time felt.

For example, those moments when...

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 one's self is really transcended

and everything is clear in another way...

I think one would begin to... to know what I mean.

I think artistic inspiration is in that direction.

I think love is in that direction.

The logics oflove are different than the logics of non- love.

[Singing, Drumming Continues]

[Deren] It's rather like being overcome...

by a transcendent and larger force...

and you don't take to it easily.

[Man] The most personal film I feel Maya ever made...

and people think it's a very strange attitude to have...

is her Meditation on Violence.

She doesn't appear in the film...

but-but she is the camera.

She is moving, she is breathing in relationship to this dancer.

She is composing so that the one shadow...

or the three shadows or at times the no shadow...

of this dancer against the background

are an integral part of the dance.

Every kind of quality of texture...

is a really felt part of the frame.

And so, I feel, this is very personal.

[Flute]

[Deren] Metamorphosis in the large sense...

meant that there was no beginning and no end.

And indeed I found out from the Chinese boy

who performed the movements here...

that this school ofboxing, Wu Tang...

is based on The Book of Change...

and that its theory is that...

life is an ongoing process, constantly...

and that it is based on a negative- positive...

with constantly a resolution into

another negative and positive and so on.

And so my first problem became to construct a form...

as a whole, which would suggest infinity.

Now, the Wu Tang based on the negative- positive principle...

translates that in physical terms into the breathing.

And that's why it's called an interior boxing...

because the movements are governed by an interior condition.

And so I determined to treat the movements as a meditation...

that one circles around an idea in time terms.

This was the Greenwich Village of the '40s...

and it was the center of many artistic activity.

I was just a young man, fresh out of college.

I was entering the dance field as an untrained dancer.

However, my background was in what is now known as martial arts.

I had studied that at home.

And so I was moving around the party circuits...

among the dancers and the writers.

And my favorite dancer...

a lady by name of Teiko, introduced me to Maya.

Maya was already working with body movement.

We met, and Maya is a very intelligent...

or intellectual person...

but she is also a woman full of passion...

and she was a woman with a lot of internal tension.

And we started with many arguments...

because she hadjust come back from Haiti...

and she was all involved with Haitian Voodoo...

and the trance and the shaman culture.

And I was saying that in the Chinese context...

it was quite the opposite.

It was the wise man is the one who controls nature...

rather than allowing nature to possess.

We were all very poor...

so, of course, we had no special space.

We worked in Maya's small apartment.

We pushed all the furniture to the kitchen...

and we tried to hang paper...

photographers' paper backgrounds along the wall...

to give it a clear space.

See, when we want to break out into aggressiveness...

and into an outburst of power...

a contained space is no longer appropriate.

So with onejump, we are high up...

and we had the open sky.

And then, the power can break out...

and directly confront the camera.

She conceived this entire project...

as an emergence from softness into harshness.

I would simply do exactly the sequence that I had learned...

and Maya would film it, cut it.

She reedited it, doubled it, reversed it...

so that it became a continuous interplay...

between her and the raw movement.

[Deren] What I wanted to do here was...

have the climax point of paralysis.

And so that is what happens here.

The movement gets more and more and more violent...

and the extreme of violence tips over...

and goes into its opposite and becomes

a point of paralysis with silence...

right here...

from which the film returned and is photographed in reverse...

all the way back.

Now, the extraordinary thing about

this type of movement is that...

it's as much in balance when you see it backwards...

as when you see it forwards.

It took the Chinese to invent this fight in the fifth century.

[Chao- Li Chi] The term Tai- Chi literally means...

"the ultimate form. "

And what can be an ultimate form?

It's not the most perfect or most beautiful.

That would be a Western concept.

In China, the ultimate form is that which has no form.

This is not supposed to be a paradox...

because what has no form is when a shape is in motion...

is in constant change.

So that which is in constant motion contains all possible forms.

[Deren]

Art actually is based on the notion that...

if you would really celebrate an idea or a principle...

you must think, you must plan...

you must put yourself completely in the state of devotion...

and not simply give the first thing that comes to your head.

[Mekas] I did not want to insult her or provoke her...

by taking, you know, my Bolex to Maya's parties and filming.

She would have gone into one ofher rages.

"What - What is this?" you know.

"Where is your script? This is not serious. "

Maya was for a very careful, "be prepared"kind of filming.

She was not for improvisation or collecting just random footage.

Even if she disapproved of what was happening already in cinema...

still she was by her activities as a pioneer...

that invaded and attacked universities and art institutions...

that you have to show avant-garde film.

She was a pioneer, and she broke the first ice.

[Arsham] Every single thing she said...

was prearranged in her notes, in her mind.

She used to write things on little three- by- five index cards...

and carry them with her everywhere.

I mean, she would kill me if she heard me say this...

but it always made me think of students of the Talmud...

where you take one sentence out of the Bible...

and you can write 50 books...

based on that one sentence.

That's exactly what Maya did.

Every word, every possible meaning.

In other words, she didn't expand what she knew...

but she went down into it.

[Deren] What is important in a motion

picture camera, of course, is its motor.

Just remember that motion picture is a time form.

Just as the telescope reveals the structure of matter...

in a way that the unaided eye can never see it...

so slow motion reveals the structure of motion.

Events that occur rapidly so that they seem a continuous flux...

are revealed in slow motion to be full of pulsations and agonies...

and indecisions and repetitions.

For all her extreme individualism and many stories about her...

her temperament...

and her need to have things her way...

nevertheless, Maya was an artist...

of great collaborative instincts.

She worked... in the films that she made...

you would read a whole list of musicians, dancers...

choreographers, painters...

who were part of her collaboration...

and who inspired her and whom she inspired.

And The Living Theatre was part of that...

these interweaving circles of that time.

And it was a place of encounter...

a place where different spirits...

could set each other on fire.

And Maya was always on fire. She was a burning person.

She had some intensity that, you know, that never stopped sizzling.

- She loved at any social gathering to dance...

[Drums]

To exhibit the exuberance ofher body.

When she danced at a party,

everybody felt it as a special kind...

of religious and sexual act at once...

because Voodoo allows for that

kind of tremendous physical commitment.

She's very close to what Artaud is asking of us...

that we commit our bodies to the experience in the theater.

[Children Singing In Foreign Language]

[Woman Singing In Foreign Language]

[Singing Continues]

[Deren] Their Goddess of Love...

is a very fascinating and complex idea.

She is, in fact, the goddess of all the luxuries...

which are not essential to survival.

She is the Goddess of Love which, unlike sex...

is not essential to propagation.

She is the muse of the arts.

Now, man can live without it, but he

doesn't live very much as man without it.

It is strange that one would have to go to

an apparently primitive culture such as Haiti...

to find an understanding...

in such exalted terms...

of what the essential feminine... not female...

feminine role might conceivably be...

that ofbeing everything which is human...

everything which is more than that which is necessary.

Taken from this point of view...

there is no reason in the world why women

shouldn't be artists, and very fine ones.

I am a little distressed that...

so few women have entered the area of film.

[Percussion]

[Singing In Foreign Language]

[Drums, Chanting]

[Horn Blowing]

[Deren] Possession is the becoming of an identity.

It is not the freeing of one's identity.

It is not people carrying on in a kind of wild state...

but it is the presence of the gods...

and, as it were, the materialization...

of divine essences, divine energies and divine ideas.

[Drums, Chanting]

[Fades]

We'd have these little sort oflike side conversations, saying...

"That Maya, how is she able...

to get such a young guy as her lover?"

It was very shocking that there were 18 years between them.

If there was a party or a meeting or anything...

a room of people... and if Maya was in it...

she was the center of attention.

She was quite short, and you wouldn't quite realize this...

if she was speaking from a podium or dancing...

because she seemed larger than she was.

They got statistics on about every question

Including topics only Kinsey would mention

I can dial to find out whether I can call to find out time

But who's gonna tell me if you're mine

Oh, baby

You're a mystery to me

They've charted the heart of the atom

[Ferguson] After Teiji came to live with Maya...

she took him to Haiti.

And he heard the drumming and

the various rhythms and learned them.

Then when they came back to New York...

they had the idea that they would get

some ofhis friends who were drummers...

and set up a program.

And they took it around to various community centers...

and would do a demonstration of Haitian drumming.

One evening when they were practicing

or rehearsing for that...

I got a few rolls of film and some tape...

and did a few shots.

And there was endless coffee being served.

Maya always was drinking Medaglia D'Oro coffee.

You're a mystery to me

They can't predict how many babies will be born and when

They can't foretell the path of the hurricane

I've consulted psychiatrists gypsies, the stars

But no one can tell me what, when or where about you

You're a mystery to me

Inscrutable you

You're a mystery to me

[Brakhage] So I had the great honor to live

with them as their friend, with her and Teiji.

They took me in like a bird with a broken wing...

which was not far from what I was,

and sheltered me for several months.

So if this film comes out okay...

as I hope it will, I will call it Water for Maya.

This is music for the eyes for Maya...

but it's ritual also.

I will have to take it through to where it is...

that deep sense of water that's transformative...

that's mysterious, that's even down to the river Styx.

[Drums, Chanting]

LarryJordon and I were invited to go

to Geoffrey Holder's wedding...

when he was in the Flower Drum Song byJohn Latouche...

a big Broadway hit of the time.

And they had a big wedding out on Long Island...

and the P.R. people wanted to make a lot of advertisement out of it.

And Holder had invited her as a priestess...

to come and make it a Haitian wedding.

By the time we arrived, they had shambled her aside...

and given her a small room and were not allowing her...

to put up the Vodoun ritual things, and she went into a rage.

This is what would be called a

holy rage...

and it did have the effect of something

that a lot of people don't believe I saw...

but I saw it with my own eyes.

She went into the kitchen...

and she took a refrigerator...

and she hurled it from one corner of that kitchen to the other.

Now, you know, I've tried to say,

well, how could such a small woman...

Maya of all people, lift up a refrigerator?

Well, these are people that forget

mothers have lifted up automobiles...

to get them off of their children.

Maya was in a trance of Papa Loco, the god of ritual...

which was being blasphemed against at this wedding.

And she had the strength of 10.

I mean, maybe she pivoted it on one side, I don't know how.

But what I saw is I saw... [Growls]

She's making such growl noises

that were shaking everybody's teeth.

She slammed this refrigerator up against the other wall...

and broke a lot of dishes.

Everyone went running, screaming from this kitchen.

Then she was led upstairs as she went on with these growl noises.

I was then invited up to this room...

and I was quite terrified... to receive a blessing...

for the pictures that I was taking.

Burning rum was put all over me,

and I didn't know what was happening even.

I thought, this is my only suit, and I was trying

to brush out these blue flames, you know.

Meanwhile, a lot of languages going on here.

And then I was told later, "You got a blessing from Papa Loco"...

and I do well believe it.

And one reason I believe it, however, is because...

once I arrived two hours late to help Maya Deren...

fold and mail envelopes for an event that she cared about.

She put a curse on me, and I did get sick.

And I had reason from another man

that had gone to Haiti that I knew...

Angelo De Benedetto told me, "The only reason you didn't die...

is because you have a very powerful blessing of Papa Loco. "

So that's the two sides of Maya...

and I benefited from and suffered from both of them.

And people that, you know, wanna either make her...

one thing or another thing or any definitive thing...

are not comprehending one, the beautiful complexity of this woman...

and two, they are not understanding artists at all.

She had to be all these many things...

to be the creative person that she was...

to do things in cinema that had never been done before.

In fact, you could say leaving the word "cinema" out of it...

to effect rituals and moving visual...

moving vision that had never been done before.

And-And it took all these powers, you know.

And alas, at some point finally, you know...

when an artist has powers like this, he or she...

If those powers get outside of the work process, it can kill you.

And I fervently believe that that's what killed Maya Deren...

at, you say, 44 years old.

I mean, she died young anyway, whatever age she was...

and it was because somehow...

the powers of Vodoun got outside the work process...

partly because she didn't get the money to finish her last...

you know, The Very Eye of Night.

And even when it was finished, nobody understood it, you know...

but me and a very few others.

The Very Eye of Night has it all.

It's intrinsically Greek. It goes straight up through Shakespeare.

It is the ritual ofher culture.

And everyone said, "Oh, Maya didn't do it. It's over the hill. "

And they think her early psycho- dramas are more important.

Well, this is enough to drive someone crazy and kill them.

They say, "Oh, you can see that the stars arejust sequins...

on a scrim of some kind that are being shakily moved along. "

I've heard people say things like,

"It's like a child's little theater thing. "

That is exactly the point...

that Maya would not make a fakery like Hollywood.

She wants it to be like a- a child's vision.

The somnambulist.

This is a major theme in the history of cinema...

and Maya would have been vibrantly aware of that.

It is in very early M�li�s films, and again and again the dreamer...

the walking dreamer is almost...

is almost what stars are...

because the audience is almost dreaming these dreams together.

The Very Eye of Night was Maya's last completed film...

and a very traumatic experience for her.

She scraped together some money,

rented a studio, had a dolly, luxuries.

She collaborated on that film...

with one of the world's great,

great choreographers, Antony Tudor...

who was fascinated by her dance films.

And he brought in a young troop ofballet dancers for the film.

And it was a great deal of fun on the set...

because people sort of wandered in and out.

There was a young fellow named Harrison Star...

the son of a California friend who shot a great deal.

In other words, there were times when

there were two cameras on this.

Lots of people were crawling all over

the place, wiring, whatever was necessary.

I rememberJohn Cage and a bunch of painters coming onto the set.

[Deren] And for some reason, the image came into my mind...

of a film that I had seen at the Museum of Natural History...

which dealt with the movement of celestial bodies.

And it was a scientific film. It was an astrological film.

It had no pretensions.

But here was the moon, here was the stars

and here was Jupiter and so on...

and all of these things in this great black space were revolving.

It was really the most beautiful abstract

ballet that I have ever seen in all my life...

and it was beautiful because

the bodies were really related by gravity.

They were not falsely related by artistic decisions.

The moon came closer or farther...

for real reasons, not for made- up reasons.

And therefore, the balance of the frame,

you see what I mean, was perfect.

The balance of the relationship of

all these bodies was at all times perfect.

I often saw Maya very vulnerable. She would go...

She would sit down and cry, which most

people don't have a sense of her doing.

She-She also... She'd gird herself for a party.

One of her ways is she would, like, hitch up her dress...

give herself a shot...

of Dr. Jacob's feel-good hypo...

you know, in her rear end, to give her...

And she thought she was taking vitamins.

I guess there were vitamins in there,

but it was mostly speed as we now know it.

This is someone who is forcing herself into the human arena...

from a sense of extreme vulnerability.

She was not only making her own films...

but she was very concerned about the other filmmakers...

and how to get them better known...

and finally came up with the idea...

of Creative Film Foundation...

to provide them with recognition...

publicity, public acceptance...

and money.

So she started to create a board

of directors of very well - known people...

and the idea was, you know, to provide a showcase really for films...

that were not Hollywood films...

but film as art.

[Deren] I would like to recall to everyone...

that the motion picture camera

and the whole motion picture medium...

was developed at about the same period

and in the same climate...

as the development of the telegraph and the airplane...

and all of these other industrial expressions...

of something that was happening in the mind of man...

which wanted to break some kind of confines that reflects in film.

This is its fascination for me.

It would be so much easier to be a painter or a writer.

You don't have to have equipment.

You don't have to do all the things.

You're not at the mercy of the laboratories.

You're not here and you're not there.

It's a terrible pain to be a filmmaker...

because you not only have the creative problems...

but you have financial problems that they don't have.

You have technical problems that they don't have.

You have machines that are breaking down

in a way that paint brushes don't break down.

It's just a terrible thing to be a filmmaker.

And if you are a filmmaker, it's because

there is something in the sheer medium...

that seems to be able to make some sort of statement...

that you particularly want to make...

and which no other medium to you

seems capable of making in the same way.

The actual award that was presented to the filmmaker...

was a very nice document.

But, of course, it was supposed to be accompanied also by money.

And this was one of the unhappinesses...

I would say, in Maya's life.

Namely, she was unable to get money for this award.

[Ito] Uh, I'd like to introduce Maya Deren...

to invoke the particular gods.

[Deren] I don't have a trained voice,

but that makes it very authentic.

[Laughter]

[Deren Singing In Foreign Language]

[Destin� ] The Day of the Dead, and that's the day of Ghede.

So Ghede is a humorous guy.

When somebody is possessed by Ghede,

Ghede is poking fun at death.

To Ghede, people should not cry when we die.

They should celebrate instead, because he believes in reincarnation.

Anybody who would be possessed or connected with Ghede...

would be acting very strangely.

Very, you know, out of the ordinary.

So this was Maya.

And she attached herself to her cat...

and she called the cat Ghede...

That made it more bizarre to have a cat called...

Because nobody would dare do that in Haiti... call a cat Ghede.

It would be an insult to the spirits.

[Vogel] It was after one of...

the Creative Film Foundation award evenings that we got together.

Maya stayed after most people left.

We kind of, like, sat around and played some music.

And she got up and danced and sang a little Russian...

and got a little teary and felt...

I guess she was feeling nostalgic about her life and her past...

and where she came from, and talked about...

She thinks she'd like to go back home to Russia...

where she spent her childhood, I think, till she was five.

Maybe she felt like going home...

because she was getting older and life was getting harder.

And as I think about it subsequently...

I also think that Maya would not have enjoyed...

the aging process too well.

[Ferguson] One evening... it was in October '61, I think...

I had a call from Teiji, and I hadn't seen him or Maya for a few weeks.

And I was horrified because Teiji said...

Maya was sick in a hospital...

and wasn't expected to live the night.

And I had no idea what was happening.

He asked me to come to the hospital.

Teiji was there with Maya's mother, and that was all.

And I think the reason was he had never really believed...

that she was that sick, and he had never told anybody...

that she was in this condition.

And when I arrived, sure enough he repeated...

that the doctor had said she wouldn't live the night.

He hoped, in a forlorn way...

that because it was going to be

Friday the I3th of October at midnight...

he hoped that that would change their luck

and that she would come out after all.

And in the course of the night around

:00 or 3::00 in the morning, she did die.

And I never talked to her. She was in a coma.

I think she probably was rundown from lack of food.

She and Teiji had been poor for a very long time.

His being in the army had been a real blow for them financially.

And I think... I know that there were days...

when they could not eat, and sometimes...

if there was a little money it went to feed the cats.

So I think that she was rundown, and I think that...

she was getting Max Jacobson's cocktails, as she called them...

the shots to keep her going.

It could be there was a side effect from that combination.

Teiji felt that she had died of anger...

at the court problems...

over his-his inheritance.

And there is some possibility... Maya was a person...

of limitless emotional power...

and she was always full of joy or anger or distress.

Things were very far out emotionally for her all the time.

And I think if she was angry...

at the events of the court that day... she was probably very angry...

and a cerebral hemorrhage may have been the result.

I don't credit the Voodoo theory.

[Ito] And I got it confused.

I thought that she had wanted it for her funeral...

Haydn's trumpet rondo.

And then, after it was all over...

I remembered that she wanted it for her wedding.

[Imitating Trumpet]

I took her ashes. She is buried in the side of Fuji Mountain...

in the most busiest section of Tokyo Harbor and the ocean.