1944 Directed by Maya Deren
Witch’s Cradle is an unfinished Maya Deren film made in the Guggenheim Gallery during a surrealist “Art of this Century” exhibit. It was assembled long after her death by staffers within the preservation department at Anthology Film Archives.
CW: narratives, objectivity vs. subjectivity, the occult, witchcraft, trans content, queer content, feminism, very brief references to cannibalism and child murder and maybe animal abuse?, erasure reference, magic
I can't speak for people who don't like experimental cinema, so I apologize if my hypotheticals don't match your perspective. I assume, though, that one stumbling block often faced by people who don't like avant garde works is that there is no discernible narrative. The preference is for what is seen solely on the screen to present some story to connect with, to make some sense of the images. Sometimes, an image is powerful enough on its own to convey some meaning, some energy that none can deny it. Still photography and…
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A Binding Spell
A Stopped Heart
A Seal Of Wisdom
Ariadne In Her Labyrinth
A Mirror For Scrying
Maya Deren plants the flag of occultism firmly in the unforgiving cinematic ground of 1944. The sensationalized imagery of a woman chanting with a pentagram etched on her forehead must have surely been provocative in a way that would register with a young Kenneth Anger. That's neat and all, but this is packed full of some strangely disturbing imagery beyond the immediate.
More than the blaring neon-lit witchcraft iconography, the motifs of strings and lines are what really leave the burned images in the mental retinas. Even if the effects are a little amateur, the shots of a string creeping along a sleeve or around a neck hit psychologically, strangling tendrils emanating from a cluttered old attic at the behest…
It may not always seem this way, but I am constantly aware of the menace of self-parody. So when I want to give an assembly of footage from an unfinished Maya Deren film five stars, I wrestle with it, try to find some part of it that maybe doesn't deserve such a high rating. And then I realise it isn't there, and give it five stars anyway.
Besides, what does it matter if a perfect object matches the plan its creator originally had for it? All of Kafka's novels are unfinished - does that make them less worthy of their place in the literary canon? This attitude, which I think is instinctive to consumers of art, was validated by artists…
Uhh yeah, I think I've seen enough from Maya Deren to declare her an absolute goddess. Some of the purest, straight-out-of-dreams imagery I've ever come across. Almost mythical in their singularity, dripping with geometrical patterns, fragmented planes and hypnagogic forms that swirl into one another. Ecstatic disorientation.
Fibonacci Spiderwebs in Man Ray's Wine Cellar. Black Mass surrender to darkness///lightness//otherness/. Study of movement, a natural witch. All dancers are witches and witches are forever.
Technical experimentation goes one big step forward; substance goes one step back. Unfortunately, this almost Satanic work was never finished. All of the sequences, I think, were leading to an imminent self-destruction of the protagonist. Hence, perhaps the conclusion planned could have been much more shocking than the whole imagery depicted by its own. Impressive nonetheless and a must for fans of Maya Deren.
86/100
2nd Maya Deren (after Meshes of the Afternoon)
A series of roughly connected rushes spliced together in some order, we'll never know how Witch's Cradle was supposed to look. All we can do is watch the various takes of the same scene, each with slight variations of how the actresses moves her face or body, and try and work out where things were going. It's movie-detective play in the purest form of the term, made even more tantalising by the strange occult symbols that appear throughout the eleven minutes, especially the Pentagram on the young woman's head. In between these rushes is a piece of semi-finished trickery, that of a piece of string winding its way across a man's body,…
Obviously not mind-blowing like Meshes of the Afternoon, but still visually to die for. It's crazy that an incomplete work from 1944 can be leagues better than most short films made today. Maya was a pioneer.
Now let the spooky szn commence! 🧙♀️
by far the most experimental one ive seen so far, my least favorite of hers but still pretty good. Although i hear its unfinished so maybe im being unfair.
The end is the beginning is the end
This is more my speed. It's funny me mentioning Meshes of the Afternoon in a review this morning, and now here I am without intention watching another short from its director. What's perhaps even more surprising is that despite the near universal acclaim Meshes has, this unfinished, lesser-known short I think I like more. Around these spooky times, among the wide variety of supernatural events and concepts that will cross my mind in a given day, one that has fascinated me for as far back as I can remember is the existence of witches. More specifically, the Salem witch trials. It's an equal parts interesting and horrifying moment in American history, and…
