[Frameworks] Haiti/Ito cut

[FrameWorks Admin]

In fact, Teiji Ito knew Haiti well. He traveled to Haiti with Maya in 1955 and studied drumming there. He made the wire recordings for the film’s soundtrack. 
He returned there several times with his fourth wife Cherel. They edited the film together.
Teiji even died in Haiti: Cherel described to me how Teiji died in her arms there, after going out for a walk. She blamed it on a Vodoun curse.

The documentary may follow an old fashioned form with a voice-over, but all the text is from Maya’s book, and the structure of the film is faithful to the research in the book.
The Itos can be faulted for removing the sequences they chose from the original rushes, thereby damaging the integrity of Deren’s raw footage. But it does respect the culture and the religion.

The original footage now belongs to Teiji Ito’s daughter Tavia, but is held by Anthology Film Archives. Disputes between them has prevented the release of the footage to Tavia for restoration. It is for this reason that we were not able to include it on our recent Maya Deren Blu-Ray release along with other unfinished films by Deren (but it does include previously unreleased session recordings of Teiji and Maya with alternate takes of the music of Meshes of the Afternoon and The Very Eye of Night).

Pip Chodorov, Re:Voir



> On Aug 27, 2020, at 12:05 AM, david at lake ivan <david at lakeivan.org> wrote:
> 
> Just wanted to describe an interesting experience I had a few years ago, attending a screening of the Teiji Ito version of Deren's "Divine Horseman" which was screened in Brooklyn. The audience was filled primarily with white viewers, but also included one Haitian woman who said she was an experienced Vodou practitioner. After the screening there was a lengthy discussion, which consisted almost entirely of an agonized unleashing of white guilt about how Ito's very conventional 1960s approach to documentary had "distorted" and "falsified" the footage, destroying its authentic spirit. This despite the idea that Ito isn't white, and that as Deren's husband and collaborator, he might well understand something of her intentions and wishes. (I actually know absolutely nothing about how this version of the footage, in fact, came to be, so feel free to fill me in on this.)
>