Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

A chronicle of Maya Deren’s journies to Haiti and a filmic exploration of Haitian dance. The footage of the various ritual practices and customs seen in the film was shot between 1947 and 1951, and edited by Teiji and Cherel Ito after Deren’s death. The title is a reference to the belief that the goddess Loa “mounts” dancers like a rider on a horse; the bodies of the dancers perform nearly superhuman movements after this seizure. We will present a newly struck 16mm print of the film with an introduction by film scholar Ute Holl, accompanied by tracks from the vinyl album Maya Deren – Voices of Haiti.

Ute Holl is Professor for Media Studies at the University of Basel, focusing on media aesthetics and epistemology, media infrastructure, sound and electroacoustics as well as anthropological and colonial filmmaking. She has published widely on Maya Deren’s work, initially in Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Berlin, 2002), which was published in an English translation in 2017 by Amsterdam University Press.