ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Wyatt There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

He_who_lurks "The Very Eye of Night" was Deren's last complete film and is probably one of her weakest films as director. She started out with symbolic avant-garde shorts, but changed later to studies of the human body in motion. This is one of these and is more meant to be an art film than a symbolic narrative tale. Like the other reviewer, I too would like to say that Teiji Ito's music was great and kept the thing from becoming too dull.Yes, I know that in the past I've called her "Meditation on Violence" boring, but that was because the film was too long when I saw it silent. This film however, deserves a lower rating than that effort because there's a shorter version of this effort out there. In 1951, Deren made a much shorter, 6-minute film called "Ensemble for Somnambulists" which was apparently unfinished and features the exact same idea of filming dancers in negative and superimposing them onto a backdrop! Apparently, years later Deren looked at that film and thought, "now I'll make a longer version of that and get it released this time!" The results, however, are dull for anyone who isn't a Maya Deren or dance fanatic.That said, I still find this to be somewhat interesting. Unlike "Ensemble for Somnambulists" the images here are more sharp and look gorgeous. Maya Deren didn't really seem to know when enough was enough, but this movie still manages to be artistic and beautiful within its short (yet overlong) run-time.

jazzest Inverted images of dancers with fixed outlines move across a starry sky. From the contemporary point of view, The Very Eye of Night, Maya Deren's last finished short, looks like a special effects computer application's tutorial; an innocent use of the "latest" technology comes to look cheap eventually. Probably it is an exercise piece whose experiment would have been developed if she had not passed away three years later.

wildstrawbe The Very Eye of Night is according to some critics Maya Deren's weakest work something that enraged Maya. I do understand why someone would not like this film as much as her first films but I still think it's quite good. The use of a balet that dances with a starry sky in the background (a very surreal picture) wouldn't interest me that much if it wasn't for Teiji Ito's music which is what really makes this film for me.

madsagittarian Too many people short shrift the works of Maya Deren after her "trance" period, when she made films with her first husband Alexander Hammid. Because she changed her filming style entirely does not make her "wrong" for doing so. This, and MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE, are absorbing studies of movement and ritual. The premise of this delicate dream piece is simply a study of ballet movements shot from overhead, as a starry sky is superimposed over their actions. With sparse music by Deren's second husband Teiji Ito, this is a movie which defies filmic space. It is an entrancing piece which transcends the human body into a cosmic form of being. Thoughts to consider: was Teiji Ito the first "ambient" musician?