All language subtitles for ENG SUB In the mirror of Maya Deren

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!

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 of books...

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.

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 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.

Most Jews 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 many Jews 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.

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
of love and of beauty.

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 of becomingness.

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

in the stage of becoming.

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 of becoming.

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.

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.

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...

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 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...

she just 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 of her 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.

As a kid,
first I got a slide projector.

Then I got a 9 1/2-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.

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 indescribable.

He was such a sweet and gentle soul.

She was so busy and so involved
in the very essence of living...

that many things passed her by,
dangerous and otherwise.

And I think that Sasha had...

a more... a more precise way
of looking at things.

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

a great source
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 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 could just outrun death...

if I could just 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.

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.

Stones and pebbles.

Pebbles.

Stones.

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.

A portable 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.

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.

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.

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

is really one of the best
that I have seen.

For some reason,
I myself being 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...

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.

[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?

Maya, do you feel that
people in the audience...

Iooking 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 of love are different
than the logics of non-love.

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

by a transcendent
and larger force...

and you don't
take to it easily.

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 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.

[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 of boxing,
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 had just
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 one jump,
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 of her rages.

"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.

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...

to exhibit the exuberance of her 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.

[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 of being 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.

[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.

We'd have these little sort of like
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 anyhing...

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 rhyhms and learned them.

Then when they came back
to New York...

they had the idea that they would get
some of his 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.

Larry Jordon and I were invited to go
to Geoffrey Holder's wedding...

when he was in the
Flower Drum Song by John 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...

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 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 of her 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 are just 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 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
of ballet 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 remember John 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 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.

[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 l3th 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
2:00 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 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.

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

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