SOURCE: "Continuum or Break? Divine Horsemen and the Films of Maya Deren," in New Orleans Review, Vol. 17, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 86-97.

In the following essay, Smetak explores how Deren's Divine Horsemen fits in with the aesthetic set forth by her films.

In 1947 Maya Deren, a New York based film-maker, received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded for creative work in the field of motion pictures. The result of this, however, was not a film but a book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren's original intention had been to go to Haiti to film indigenous dance. She had, as she says in the preface to the book, "deliberately refrained from learning anything about the underlying meaning of the dance movements, so that such knowledge should not prejudice [her] evaluation of their purely visual impact." But she soon discovered that "the dance could not be considered independently of the...