Cinematography, choreography and cultural influence

Maya Deren opens the preface to her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti with an admission of defeat. Armed with Guggenheim funding, she had gone to Haiti in 1947 with the express purpose of making a creative film ‘in which Haitian dance, as purely a dance form, would be combined (in montage principle) with various non-Haitian elements’.1 As described in her grant application, the film would juxtapose images of Haitian Voudoun with Balinese dance and children’s games filmed in New York City, drawing together examples of sacred and secular rituals to demonstrate their common principles.2 Over the course of her time in Haiti, however, Deren came to believe that dance practices cannot be rendered independent of their attendant belief systems, and so she abandoned the creative film project and opted instead for her written account of Haitian Voudoun, Divine Horsemen. Deren’s initial supposition that dances

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