A young woman and an older man wrap a length of string through their hands to create an intricately patterned design. Yet their version of the cat’s cradle, a traditional string game common to many cultures, seems possessed of magical properties. Soon the web they have fashioned comes to encompass, and to entrap, the film’s characters…
This unfinished short film was made when Maya Deren (1917-1961) was in her mid-twenties, during a burst of creativity that would establish her among the most influential figures in the history of experimental American cinema. Shot in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought the European movements of Surrealism and Dada to the United States, The Witch’s Cradle showcases Deren’s groundbreaking techniques and interest in fields ranging from Haitian Vodou to gestalt psychology. Using oblique camera angles, backwards footage, mirrored images, and the model of a beating human heart, she creates a dreamlike atmosphere of occult rituals and paranormal forms of control.
In its defiance of the conventional logics of time and space, the work draws connections between the Surrealist movement in art, esoteric forms of knowledge, and the new narrative possibilities of avant-garde filmmaking. That the male part is played by Marcel Duchamp only seems to confirm the film’s association of art and magic.
