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’.1¹ 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.2² 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.

中文翻译：

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摄影、编舞和文化影响：重新思考玛雅·德伦的《夜之眼》

玛雅·德伦（Maya Deren）在她的书《神圣骑士：海地的活神》的序言中承认失败。在古根海姆的资助下，她于 1947 年前往海地，其明确目的是制作一部创意电影，“其中海地舞蹈作为一种纯粹的舞蹈形式，将（按照蒙太奇原则）与各种非海地元素相结合”。 1 ¹正如她在拨款申请中所描述的，这部电影将海地巫毒的图像与在纽约市拍摄的巴厘岛舞蹈和儿童游戏并列，结合神圣和世俗仪式的例子来展示它们的共同原则。^{2 2}然而，在海地的这段时间里，德伦开始相信舞蹈练习不能独立于其伴随的信仰体系，因此她放弃了创意电影项目，转而选择了她对海地武都的书面描述，神圣骑士。