In 1947, Maya Deren became the first female artist to receive a research grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, for her research project Film-in-Progress. The set of case studies she chose for this project was unconventional in academia. Although her field research meant going to the lengths of transporting her camera equipment to Haiti and examining the voodoo rituals there, she did not plan to produce an ethnological study of voodoo, but an artistic collection of material, which she aimed to work with through an experimental montage approach. Together with further footage from a range of cultural contexts, she wanted to research patterns of rituals through audio-visual composition.
The inspiration for Film-in-Progress came to her when she was observing children’s games. She was fascinated by children’s ability to live out ideas through imagination and games which were just as potent as existing rules, institutions, and behaviors. Film-in-Progress was to place, for example, children’s games of hopscotch in the New York streets alongside the Vevers19 of voodoo rituals, pointing out the connecting patterns in dances and games in quite different cultures. Deren’s idea of a ‘cross-cultural’ approach was based partly on her long-standing interest in dance and in religious trances.20 It also stemmed from her development of experimental film forms which are able to bring together heterogeneous elements through montage, combining them in such a way as to point out connections which are only revealed through this form.
However, as Deren explains in her Thematic Statement21 on Film-in-Progress, she saw the risk that the rituals could be trivialized by the comparison with children’s games. For the sake of the “cultural integrity”22 of the rituals, she sought advice and input from experienced anthropologists. She conducted in-depth discussions about her project with Gregory Batson and Margaret Mead.23 Deren saw similarities between her montage concept and Batson’s thoughts about his own exhibition practice, because both of them started from a variety of specific ‘individual pieces’ from different cultures (objects in Batson’s case; film recordings for Deren) and sought a way of ordering the material which would transcend the individual identities of particular cultures. Batson compared his form of exhibition organization with a symphony, while Deren characterized her approach as counterpoint, meaning that it did not organize a theme in view of a harmonious whole, but instead tried to “reveal[…] a homogeneity in a variety”.24 She also described her film project in musical terms as a “fugal structure”[F is for Fugue].25
Although Deren does not explicitly talk of different temporalities, her reflections on the structure of film are concerned with precisely this aspect. Unlike Batson’s staging of the exhibition in terms of “temporal progression […] interested in introducing a climatic variety”,26 her idea consists of drawing attention to elements of constancy. Regarding the temporal experience of ritual actions, which she aimed to communicate precisely by pointing out patterns, repetitions and similarities in the heterogeneity and discrepancy of the material, she writes: “[…] the film would constitute rather a cross-sectional cut into a process which should be understood as being continuous both before and after.”27
Looking at her project today, Film-in-Progress appears, beyond the film itself – in its unfinishedness and in its potential for transformation – to be a continuous process, or a process which has been kept open. When Deren arrived in Haiti and began her field research, she soon realized that she would have to work differently than she had planned. “Four years and three Haitian trips later”, she reflects on her “defeat as an artist”28 in the foreword of the book which was to be published instead of the film. The failure of the project lay, for her, in the fact that she did not want to impose her ideas (including her ideas about artistic form) on the complexity of the existing reality, but recognized that she must instead try to record “as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity”.29 It is a description of an open process in which she recognizes her own “inability to master the material in the image of [her] own intention”,30 which becomes the precondition for practicing the ability to be unprejudiced and to understand herself (as a researcher) as being in a process of transformation. It seems to be this ‘unlearning’ that creates the conditions in which she is able to comprehend the experience of ritual actions: rather than capturing visual patterns in the dances using a camera, what became important was the initiation into the physical experience of the trance and the collecting of impressions, without already having a plan for how they should be processed or presented. That does not mean that Deren had given up the film material: the book represents a phase in her research, and she comments in parenthesis in the introduction that her next step will be to set about developing a new concept for the use of montage in the film.31
My fascination with Maya Deren’s biography, with her processes, with her search for artistic integrity and research, which was mainly concerned with finding the right form of presentation for her results, seemed to me at first to be a sign of my need to articulate the precise concept of artistic research underlying my project. I understood my engagement with Deren as a meta-reflection on the research process, on artistic and ethnographic approaches, and – connected with this – the specific implications of artistic research and the use of film.
But the longer I spent thinking about Deren’s difficulties with her Film-in-Progress, the more parallels I noticed between her project and my own, and the more connected I felt with her. From the heterogeneity of the case studies and material and the associated issues of (in)comparability, to the question of montage as a research approach, and the role of artistic sensibility. Deren argues that this artistic approach is expressed in field research as a “disinterested receptivity” and “human affinity”32 enabling a different kind of perception and access to the phenomenon being observed than that of the scientific methods dominant at the time, which she criticizes for their “reverence for ‘detachment’” and “dualism between spirit and matter, or the brain and the body (…)”.33 Deren asks whether such methods allow any access at all to a reality that is constituted by the experience of voodoo rituals, which does not function with such a value system. In her description of her experiences in Haiti she is mainly concerned with demonstrating her legitimacy as an ethnographic researcher through her position as an artist,34 but her argumentation can also be applied to the unfinished film project: unlike an ethnographic documentary film, the Film-in-Progress aims through its experimental form to extend our faculties of perception, foster greater respect and sensitivity for what initially seems to be meaningless or nonconceptual, and thus to increase our attention to detail and nuances.
Although I could use Deren’s relevance to my methodological approach to justify my feeling of connection with her, I knew that my obsession with her preceded all possible attempts at explanation from my side, and went beyond them. As I traced asynchronous experiences in my case studies – in interactions with children, in the management of physical stress, and in care for people with dementia – she often became a source of encouragement, admonishing me to listen to my intuitions. Her experience with different states of consciousness and her expanded sensitivity made her my secret guide when I was unsettled by the diffuse and ungraspable aspects of the different temporal perceptions I was working with.
Inventing the figure of Chiara [I is for Imaginary Friend] meant that my inner dialogue with Maya Deren liberated itself [R is for Ritual] and became recognizable as a narrative strand of equal weight to the case studies. Chiara is researching Maya Deren’s unfinished film project on Haitian voodoo dances; I took responsibility for my intuitive sense that what she did with Deren’s ‘magic thinking’ would somehow contribute to my investigations of asynchronicity.
Chiara, and with her the detour via a ‘foreign culture’ in the sense of Deren’s work with Haitian voodoo, set in motion my engagement with my own cultural socialization with regard to temporal perceptions.
The philosopher and sinologist François Jullien suggested the strategy of the detour as a method of discourse analysis: his notion of a digression into Chinese thought has nothing to do with a longing for the exotic, but with the attempt “to allow our thinking to change location, in order to take account of other forms of intelligibility, so that through an effect of reversal we can question the preconditions of European reason.”35 It is about creating a distance by comparing the differing cultures of thought in Europe and in China: in order to question the preliminary decisions behind the thinking shaped by western notions of achievement, progress, rationality, he shifts the concept of time,36 for example, by exploring from the outside (from a Chinese perspective) what only becomes visible as “not being thought” when seen in contrast.
The Chiara-Deren constellation initially formed an outside in relation to my construction of the case studies, by creating an incoherence in both content and method: direct observation was impossible, since these figures were fictional (Chiara) and historical (Deren), and could only be evoked in a mediated form, through descriptions or documents. Furthermore, Deren’s project on voodoo ceremonies has no clear connection with the temporal experiences in the case studies, with starting school, digital self-optimization tools or dementia care in today’s Switzerland. But only through this incoherence, by breaking out of and breaking with the case studies, was it possible for me to question the logic structuring my own thinking and approaches, the logic which led to this selection of case studies. For the case studies, I deliberately chose areas in which rational and rationalized temporal regimes are prevalent. Temporal perception should be investigated precisely in the places where abstract and cognitive notions of time do not apply – not yet, or not any longer – as in children’s temporal perceptions [E is for Emoticons, for Evaluation], as in the physical experience of stress in a start-up company [P is for Period, for Pheromones], or in the disorientation [N is for Normality Principle] and language loss of dementia [X is for X]. As a researcher, I myself am socialized in this rational(ized), linear and universalist framework of efficiency oriented time concepts, and can only approach those other states of temporal perception from the outside.
Developing the narrative strand with Chiara and Deren sharpened my sense of the potential of artistic research to mobilize different sources of understanding and contribute to conceptual shifts when dealing with time. I set up a narrative experiment on myself: between the figure of the narrator, Chiara, Maya Deren and myself, physical perceptions of time could unfold, as well as memory processes and the power of the imagination, which are usually neglected within rationalized logics, but which play an important role in how we deal with temporal perceptions. Approaches such as narratology, and methods of writing and speaking such as free writing allowed me to explore more closely the role of affect and the resources of sensomotoric memory, for example. Such approaches, which W.G. Sebald described as “psychogrammic experiments,” (“psychogrammische Versuche”)37 allowed me to find access to invisible, elusive, internalized moments of different temporal perceptions. Psychic perceptions of time as we experience them in dreams, for example [T is for Tabletop, for Tricks, for Trust], sometimes lack a linear chronology or any firm boundaries between me, you, and her/him. Exploring dissociative experiences narratively through the character of Chiara and the connections with Maya Deren meant that I could study and represent the living self in its hybrid polyphony [H is for Historical Present].
