Maya Deren recorded film and audio in Haiti between 1947 and 1949. She had been studying dance with Kathryn Dunham, and her intention was to make a “cross-cultural fugue,” a film montage combining Haitian dance with non-Haitian elements. In the preface of her book Divine Horsemen (1951), Deren conceded defeat as an artist and abandoned her artistic “manipulations,” as well as the film project, on account of the “irrefutable reality” of Vodoun. Two years later, she wrote: “If the songs and drumming achieve the compelling power which I believe to be represented in this album, it is because the microphone, lashed to the centerpost of the ceremonial peristyle, has captured a record of labor – of the most serious and vital effort which a Haitian makes – for he is addressing himself not to men but to divinity. They are singing for the gods. It is a privilege to have overheard and to have recorded it.”