SOURCE: A review of Witch's Cradle, in Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 55. No. 653, June, 1988, p. 187.

In the following review, O'Pray asserts that editing was so important to Maya Deren's work that a film of hers that is put together by someone else, in this case Witch's Cradle, is "automatically less interesting."

As Maya Deren remarked, Witch's Cradle "was inspired by the architectural structure and paintings and objects" of the Surrealist Exhibition at the "Art of This Century" gallery in New York in 1942. The film was never completed and seems to have been made between the Hammid-influenced Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land in 1943. (Very little documentation exists on the film; it is not mentioned by P. Adams Sitney in his book Visionary Film.) Its main focus is Marcel Duchamp's string 'installation', which evoked for Deren the idea that surrealist work was the alchemy of the twentieth century, an...