Maya Deren shooted this “incomplete” film (as she call these unfinished experiments, taking the meaning from the musical language) in the Guggenheim Gallery during an Art of this Century exhibit, inside the environment made by Marcel Duchamp for the New York Surrealistic Section in 1942. It was assembled long after her death by staffers within the preservation department at Anthology Film Archives. The film joins together outtakes and cut images, including a very brief image of Duchamp himself and constitutes what little we presently know of this complex film which seems to have assimilated Duchamp’s string gesture to Deren’s interest in witchcraft.
“…If philosophy is concerned with understanding the meaning of reality, then poetry - and art in general - is a celebration, a singing of values and meanings… My films might be called experimental, referring to the use of the medium itself. In these films, the camera is not an observant, recording eye in the customary fashion. The full dynamics and expressive potentials of the total medium are ardently dedicated to creating the most accurate metaphor for the meaning. In setting out to communicate principles, rather than to relay particulars, and in creating a metaphor which is true to the idea rather than the history of experience of any one of several individuals, I am addressing myself not to any particular group but to a special area and definite faculty in every or any man - to that part of him which creates myths, invents divinities and ponders, for no particular purpose whatsoever, on the nature of things. ...I am content if, on those rare occasions whose truth can be stated only in poetry, you will perhaps recall an image, even only the aura of my films. And what more could I possibly ask, as an artist, than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume, sometimes, the forms of my images”.

Maya Deren from A Statement of Principles in Film Culture, Summer 1961 New York