{"id":19085,"date":"2019-04-05T01:06:09","date_gmt":"2019-04-05T00:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=19085"},"modified":"2019-04-05T01:06:09","modified_gmt":"2019-04-05T00:06:09","slug":"the-witchs-cradle-by-maya-deren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2019\/04\/05\/the-witchs-cradle-by-maya-deren\/","title":{"rendered":"The Witch’s Cradle by Maya Deren"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It’s taken a while for Maya Deren’s less familiar films to drift into YouTube’s Sargasso Sea so I hadn’t seen this one until now. The Witch’s Cradle<\/em><\/a> (1943) isn’t really a film like Deren’s other short works, more a collection of fragments for something that was left unfinished. But the Surrealist tenor of the piece means that the diverse shot sequence and unusual imagery can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Pajorita Matta is the woman wandering like a Cocteau heroine through the darkened rooms of one of Peggy Guggenheim’s galleries where we catch glimpses of sculptures and a Max Ernst painting, Blind Swimmers<\/em> (1934). Prior to this there are brief shots of Marcel Duchamp with this fingers tangled in a cat’s cradle, and later on we see that\u00a0Pajorita Matta has a pentacle drawn on her forehead, a precursor of Deren’s subsequent occult explorations in Haiti. Disjointed as it is, I prefer this to the solo films that Deren produced after her collaboration with Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon<\/em> (1943), most of which were filmed dance performances. The Witch’s Cradle<\/em> offers another taste of enmeshed mystery.<\/p>\n

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Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Alexander Hammid<\/a>
\n\u2022 Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s taken a while for Maya Deren’s less familiar films to drift into YouTube’s Sargasso Sea so I hadn’t seen this one until now. The Witch’s Cradle (1943) isn’t really a film like Deren’s other short works, more a collection of fragments for something that was left unfinished. But the Surrealist tenor of the piece … Continue reading “The Witch’s Cradle by Maya Deren”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,7,16,44,41,18],"tags":[6214,1200,112,192,9998,2976,4083],"class_list":["post-19085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-film","category-occult","category-painting","category-sculpture","category-surrealism","tag-alexander-hammid","tag-marcel-duchamp","tag-max-ernst","tag-maya-deren","tag-pajorita-matta","tag-peggy-guggenheim","tag-sargasso-sea"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-4XP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}