Dresden Codak

Katherine Dunham and Eleanora Deren

At the beginning of the 1940s, Deren, then still known as Eleanora, was with the Katherine Dunham Company acting as secretary, editorial assistant, and companion to Dunham. After finishing a successful run on Broadway with Cabin in the Sky, the Company took the show on a North-American tour. All the while, the industrious Dunham was finishing up her dissertation on Haitian dance and rituals. Dunham had made her first excursion to Haiti shortly after the end of U.S. occupation, kicking off a life-long commitment to researching and practicing Haitian Voudoun. Eventually Dunham became both a Haitian citizen and a Mambo (Voudoun priestess).

Katherine Dunham was an artist, a dancer, and a scholar of ethnography. As Dunham elaborated in her Haiti memoir, Island Possessed, she discovered early that she didn’t have to choose a single, discrete career and continued pursuing both her scholarly and creative loves. She found that these pursuits could/should be intertwined—each deeply influencing and enriching the practice of the other. Much of Dunham’s ethnographic study centered around ritual and dance. The performances she conceived and developed for herself and her Company were inspired and informed by her research into Black-Atlantic cultures. Dunham was a master of synthesis, displaying a sympathetic rhythm to the eminently syncretic religion she studied/practiced.

from Divine Horsemen

In early 1941, Deren reached out to Dunham to offer her services. Though Deren was only 24, she had already begun developing a deep interest in ritual and dance working as a journalist and editorial assistant and had established connections with literary agents and publishers. Deren did a little bit of everything for and with Dunham, even collaborating on a few writing projects. For nine months, as the Company toured, they would work together closely, keeping hours that are exhausting even to read about. Decades later, when interviewed for the biography The Legend of Maya Deren, Dunham recalled their time together lasting two years rather than nine months.

Deren wrote “Religious Possession in Dancing” (published in Educational Dance)based on second-hand sources in that same nine months. “Religious Possession” is limited by its lack of first-hand experience, but it shows early formulations of Deren’s later approach—an interdisciplinary psychological one that would normalize and humanize a cultural group and practice that was (and often still is) demonized and exoticized. Obviously, Deren wished to travel to Haiti to do first-hand research in this vein but WWII had reached America’s doorstep, and Deren was unable to arrange the trip.

In my view, this high-energy, productive period taught Deren as much about the nature of being a participant-observer in anthropological work as it did about being a polymath. A lesson that would soon pay off for Deren.

Becoming Maya Deren

Still with the Company, settled for the time in Los Angeles, Deren met Moravian-American cinematographer and filmmaker Alexander “Sasha” Hammid. The two married and Deren abruptly left the Company. Dunham dancer Talley Beatty (who would later appear in Deren’s film A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)) recalled it being the “scandal of the season” since Sasha had previously been seeing another member of the Company, Dorothy Gray.

The fallout of Deren’s unceremonious departure from the company suggests one factor in the under-representation of Dunham in the discourse on Deren. That is that the complex feelings tied to the women’s estrangement may have deterred Deren from talking about Dunham directly while building up her public image as a filmmaker.[1] According to Hammid, communication between the two women became sporadic after Deren quit. Surprisingly, Deren doesn’t even mention Dunham in Divine Horsemen![2]

from Divine Horsemen

Now settled in California, the next phase of Deren’s creative life began. Deren’s relationship with Hammid and their friendship with experimental filmmaker Oskar Fischinger became her entree into independent filmmaking.

Reflecting back on this period in 1954, Deren described it as:

“...like finally finding the glove that fits. When I was writing poetry, I had, constantly, to transcribe my essentially visual images—always of movements, incidents, events—into verbal form. In motion pictures, I no longer had to translate. Fortunately, this is the way my mind works, and I could move directly from my imagination onto film.”

With this new avenue for intellectual and creative exploration opened, Deren took on the moniker Maya. Though she may have re-christened herself, Deren’s films reflect a distinct continuity with the ideas that had already been simmering in her keen mind. In film, Deren found her ideal outlet for investigating ritual and movement, the constructions of illusions and reality, and how they manifest and intertwine across cultures. Filmmaking provided a means for devoted examination into how time and space are constructed or deconstructed by movement. Deren had, like Dunham, found a formula for synthesizing an integrated artistic and scholarly life.

That said, this synthesizing of ideas isn’t just present in Deren’s filmmaking, but also in her writing on film and on Voudoun. Researching for this article led me to recognize this echo:

Deren’s interest in Haiti was not shaken while she built her reputation as an independent filmmaker. As Deren mentioned in the introduction quoted above, that very reputation is what landed her the Guggenheim fellowship the mid-1940s. The terms of the fellowship were based on the expectation of a film but, once Deren had settled into her research on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, those plans changed. As she put it in Divine Horsemen:

“I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by recording, as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations.”

The depth and richness of Deren’s experiences in Haiti and her practice of Voudoun there led her to set aside the planned film project. Deren opted to write a book instead with the encouragement of Joseph Campbell. Deren’s express purpose in Divine Horsemen was to humanize and de-exoticize Haiti, Haitians, and Voudoun. Deren set a goal to make Voudoun seem as common-sensical to her readers as it is to its practitioners. In my own estimation, Deren does a remarkable job of that, and Horsemen has remained influential.

from Divine Horsemen

Deren also arranged her sound recordings into a record, which was released around the same time as Horsemen. Even if an ethnographic monograph and an album of music were unexpected products of Deren’s Haitian work, they still represent the culmination of a decade of work in dance, journalism, ethnography, filmmaking, and poetry.

Taking all that into account, now you’re probably still wondering how we ended up with a movie. To answer that question, let’s jump forward by about two decades.

Teiji and Cherel Ito’s Divine Horsemen

Though Deren stated in Divine Horsemen that she had abandoned the idea of making a film, she carefully saved and notated all the film materials and sound recordings that she had made.

Years after Deren’s untimely death, her third husband, musician Teiji Ito, and his wife, film editor Cherel Ito, decided to take the footage, held by Anthology Film Archives, and edit it into a finished film. Using some of the material from Deren’s book, they constructed a rote ethnographic documentary with a “voice-of-god” narrator, which added simple context to the ceremonies and dances presented. They also added a soundtrack of music from the sound recordings made on Deren’s trips.

Divine Horsemen is sometimes presented as a Deren film, but, basically, it is as much, if not more, the Itos’ film. Unfortunately, this misrepresentation runs contrary to Deren’s attitudes toward filmmaking as an art, which places editing on equal terms with shooting. More importantly, it overshadows and obfuscates the compelling nature and humane motives of Deren’s work in the book.

The film does not attempt to recreate many meaningful aspects of Deren’s book, instead focusing on basic informational content. While the ceremonies shown are not overtly sensationalized, the pairing of “voice-of-god” narration with the images does little to make Voudoun or its practitioners seem less exotic or strange to a Western viewer. Additionally, there’s little to no poetry to the narration, movement, or editing of the film to reflect the beauty, intellect, or humour of Haitian culture—all aspects Deren emphasized in her writing.

One potentially significant point that carries over from the book is the use of the limited footage Deren shot of the Rara and Mardi Gras festivities to compare dancing for ritual purposes with dancing for amusement/performance. It suggests contrast but, the film does not execute it effectively. In fact, I’ve seen reactions to the film that fully misinterpret this point, indicating that the Itos’ presentation lacked clarity.

from Divine Horsemen

On the other hand, as someone who appreciates both Haitian cultural history and Maya Deren’s work, the fact that some of her footage is publicly available in any form is a gift. While I personally know that I can trust the work of Anthology Film Archives, who knows how or if any of that 18,000 feet of footage would have been made accessible if the Itos’ hadn’t undertaken this project, ill-advised as it may have been. The footage of legitimate ceremonies[3] from this period is unique and rare. Glimmers of Deren’s insight come through in what she chose to film and how she chose to film it and she had an impressive amount of access.[4]

Deren’s films I typically recommend freely. But, with Divine Horsemen, it should come as no surprise that I don’t recommend it without a healthy array of caveats. However, now that you’ve read my rant, you have a modicum of context for how Horsemen fits (or doesn’t) into Deren’s body of work. Perhaps you now have a better understanding of the influence of Katherine Dunham on Deren’s work, and it might be worth watching/re-watching Deren’s films with a more focused critical eye. For me, learning more about Dunham and reading her writing has certainly changed the way I look at Deren’s experimental films. The hybrid creative/scholarly chain of recitation is present, even though their relationship was estranged and their main modes of expression differed.

All of Deren’s work reflects a conscientious, continuous artistic and intellectual pursuit—if you know where to look for it.

from Divine Horsemen

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Additional content warning: Divine Horsemen includes footage of the use of animals in ritual practices including animal sacrifice. So, there’s no shame is passing on watching this film if you can’t stomach that.

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Footnotes:

[1] Additionally, there is less documentation of Deren’s life before partnering with Hammid and becoming a filmmaker than after. And, it’s worth noting that many scholarly disciplines tend to favor highlighting the influence of white people (especially white men) on their subjects.

[2] Questioning Deren’s lack of citations to or mentions of Dunham led me to do a bit of digging. Complicated feelings aside, it may in part be due to the fact that Dunham’s work was not published in monograph form in the U.S. until after Deren’s death. Dances of Haiti, Dunham’s dissertation, had been published in Mexico in 1947 (before Horsemen) and in France in 1957 (after Horsemen). Also, Dunham does not cite/mention Deren in her work either, including her two memoirs. That said, this research ended up creating a new question: why Deren did cite Zora Neale Hurston’s book on Haiti, Tell My Horse, which was published in 1938? Now, I haven’t read the Hurston book yet. It could be simply a relevance issue. Once I get around to reading it, maybe I’ll come back and revise this note!

[3] In contrast to those performed for tourists.

[4] Note that Voudoun is generally not a closed or secretive practice, especially what happens around the potomitan—excepting during periods of government suppression of course. Nowadays, you can catch practitioners (and occasionally Mambos and Houngans themselves) live streaming ceremonies. As I was researching this piece I watched a few and it was fascinating to see how much is recognizable based on writing and footage from seven decades ago. Of course plenty of things have changed, since Voudoun is a living, practical religion that doesn’t shy away from matching the times in which it is practiced.

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Further Reading:

About Deren/Dunham:

The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography, Vol. 1 by VèVè Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman “Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren on Ritual, Modernity, and the African Diaspora” by Ramsay Burt “Cosplay the Classics: Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)” (by me) “The Body’s Time: Film, Dance, and Ritual in Maya Deren’s Explorations” by Dorota Sajewska

By Deren/Dunham: