SOURCE: A review of Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti, in American Anthropologist, Vol. 84, No. 4, December, 1982, pp. 979-80.

In the following review, Ehrenreich discusses the film Divine Horsemen, based on Deren's book by the same name. He asserts that the film has a limited usefulness for a general audience, but provides a thrilling visual document of Haiti for the informed viewer.

Divine Horsemen preserves and makes available to a wider audience some of the intriguing and valuable firm footage shot by the American filmmaker/anthropologist Maya Deren between 1947 and 1951 in Haiti. Cherel and Teiji Ito have edited the film and sound track and have added narration. The narration is adapted from Deren's book, Divine Horsemen (1953), and provides an adequate description of the more important aspects of the Voudoun (voodoo) rituals shown (I have chosen to use Deren's spellings for technical terms). At some points in the film...