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Filming the <i>Lwa</i> in Haiti

2008; University of Puerto Rico; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/crb.0.0024

1940-9095

Laurent Dubois,

African Studies and Ethnography

In the late 1940s, armed with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the film maker and dancer Maya De en spent several years studyi g and filming Vodou ceremonies in Haiti. Having previously performed in Catherine Dunham's dance company, she travelled there with the inten tion of studying Haitian dance, but quickly found that she couldn't do so without studying the religion as a whole. The nine hours of footage of ceremonies that she took focus intensely on the motion and dance. And they also attempted to capture on film what Deren described in her book Divine Horsemen as the center toward which all the roads of Vodoun converge: possession by the lwa (Deren 1953:247). The term often spelled loa in earlier ethnographic texts, is usually translated as either spirits or god, and sometimes used interchangeably with the term saints by those who practice Vodou. But it is, on some level, impossible to translate. So, too, the appearance of the lwa among the living, through what Karen McCarthy Brown (2001) has called possession-performances, is extremely difficult to translate into film (p. 57, 112). Deren, and some filmmakers who have followed her towards Vodou, have had to confront a difficult question: how do you film a lwa? How do you capture their presence in Vodou and in Haitian society? The lwa themselves sometimes have something to say about this. In a ceremony I attended in a basement in the Paris banlieue of Bobigny in the late 1990s, a TV cameraman who had been invited to film parts of the ceremony found that he had neglected to get permission from perhaps the most important of those present: Ogou Badagri. Having arrived, present in the body of one of the houngan who was overseeing the ceremony, Ogou charged the camera and sent the cameraman reel ing, assuring that the rest of the ceremony would take place unrecorded on film. During her time in Haiti, Maya Deren had more luck, and she memorably filmed the terror of one chwal, or horse, being mounted by a lwa, using the slow-motion she favored in much her filming. And when