The Witch's Cradle (1943)

The Witch's Cradle, sometimes billed as Witches' Cradle, is an unfinished, silent, experimental short film written and directed by Maya Deren, featuring Marcel Duchamp, and filmed in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery.

The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman (Pajorita Marta) and an elderly gentleman (Duchamp).

The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura.

The Witch's Cradle was written and directed by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. The film was developed at a comparison between surrealists' defiance of time and space and that of medieval magicians and witches. Daren developed the film over a period of one month, lasting from August to September 1943. However, long after principal photography for the film commenced, she abandoned the project, leaving the film incomplete. Some of the film's outtakes were found and stored at the Anthology Film Archives, while several sequences that were shot appear to be lost. Surviving shots from the film are mostly semi-edited sequences, including one particular sequence that Deren had engineered during post-production to be played backwards.

In her essay taken from her dissertation for her doctorate at The University of Southern California, “So I Would Move Among These Things: Maya Deren and “The Witch’s Cradle,” Fox Henry Frazier revives the important legacy and cultural importance of Ukrainian-born, avant-garde poet and filmmaker Maya Deren, who died too young of a brain hemorrhage in 1961. Frazier’s analysis of Deren’s filmic semiotics reminds present day readers not only of Deren’s groundbreaking work as a filmmaker in the nineteen forties and fifties, but her poetic genius as well for creating memorable surrealistic imagery in both her poetry and films. By documenting Deren’s particular brilliance for converting a torturous, misogynistic ritual called “The Witch’s Cradle” at the hand of the writer and “adventurer” William Seabrook, Frazier explains just how Deren ingeniously converted her torturous experience with Seabrook into her own visionary feminist film starring Marcel Duchamp under the same title, thus not only exposing Seabrook’s ritual for his thinly disguised enactment of one of his perverse sexual fantasies in the guise of witch-training for broom-riding, but co-opting it as her own with a far superior philosophical conceit for betraying the complexity of the feminine psyche via the symbolic use of string. “Deren’s interest in the power of objects may feed into bigger questions triggered by the Rhinebeck episode,” Frazier writes, “questions, for example, about bodily/embodied autonomy for female and femme people, and subject-versus-object power within that context…We might ask,” she goes on to suggest, “whether there is an implication here that, if these objects have subjectivity and agency, then perhaps even a woman who has been reduced to an object, in a violent way, might then more easily be able to envision herself possessing subjectivity and agency—even if that, too, must be achieved by supernatural or occult means, i.e., witchiness.” –Chard DeNiord