Witch's Cradle 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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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…
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.
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.
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
Maya Deren didn't create the art, she created the witness to that art by formal means. She didn't create Witch's Cradle, whose parentage is something of an alchemical spliced-DNA brouhaha anyway (including Marcel Duchamp's pressed single-frame trousers). No, for 12 minutes she created me. I thank her for it, plus all those from the Anthology Film Archive who were ovumatically involved. How did they know my suspicious complicity was guaranteed, even against my will? A magic theater indeed.
Considering this is unfinished it still manages to be impressive. The first time I made a list of my "primary interests" related to my explorations of an art making process, one of the items on the list was "the intersection of modernist architecture and witchcraft" and I can think of nothing else that so perfectly demonstrates this idea more perfectly than this film (though perhaps Ulmer's The Black Cat comes close). A real pleasure, while part of me would be curious as to what Deren herself would have turned this into, the fragmented nature of how it sits currently has its own specific gravitas.
it looks like they randomized the scenes and put it like that and i didnt understand shit but i agree with maya deren
Me with the time machine: I placed a bet on the '44 World Series. Here's a million dollars, please make a feature-length horror film
Maya Deren: OK
All these Maya Deren shorts on YouTube have very synthy scores and they kinda rule.
Tecendo as linhas do ocultismo, do interior velado do ser humano, tece-se e o que se resta é a morte, a morte pelo oculto, pelo indecifrável pesadelo sem fim da psique humana. Progressão sensorial de manifestações do que é obscuro, do que é macabro, o que acaba se voltando contra a própria bruxa, carregando o fardo do oculto em sua própria psique (aqueles cortes q mostram o rosto dela diversas vezes, aquele semblante de arrependimento, medo), o feitiço se volta contra o feiticeiro, e o pesadelo sensorial se torna cada vez mais profundo e enigmático.
It’s difficult to tell if Witch’s Craddle is exactly what Maya Deren intended it to be, or if she ever intended to release it at all, given that it was assembled many years after she’d passed away, but the editors did a good job of matching the rhythms presented in the movements of the piece. Deren fractures the concept of ritual and reforms its base elements such as the striking and simplistic design aspects and the necessarily repetitious and ethereal natures of the act. It doesn’t so much analyse or critique in this deconstruction as it does categorise each individual action involved in it and then cut between them to show how each is contributing to the atmosphere being created…
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