A wonderfull documentary by a pioneer of avant-garde cinema, about Vaudoo religion and rituals.

" 'When the anthropologist arrivesn the gods depart.' So declares, I am told, a Haitian proverb. Maya Deren, on the other hand, was an artist: therein, the secret of her ability to recognize 'facts of mind' when presented through the 'fictions' of a mythology. Her avant-garde films, composed before her first trip to Haiti, had already testified to her understanding of the pictorial script of dream, vision, and hallucination. She went first to Haiti as an artist, thinking to make a film in which Haitian dance should be a leading theme. But the manifestations of rapture that there first fascinated and then seized her transported her beyond the bounds of any art she had ever known. She was open, willingly and respectfully, to the message of the speechless deep, which is, indeed, the wellspring of the mystères. " - Joseph Campbell