As she progressed further and further into her brief career of avant-garde filmmaking, Maya Deren became less and less interested in conveying a narrative through symbolism, which she began her career with, and more and more interested in the beauty and grace of dance. "Ensemble for Somnambulists" is her seventh effort, and there's no question about it that it's not nearly as repetitive or as unnecessarily lengthy as her previous effort "Meditation on Violence", though the depth of what's here isn't much and nothing really occurs in these six minutes of footage. Apparently, "Ensemble for Somnambulists" is kind of like a primitive experiment using photographic negative that later resulted in Deren's "The Very Eye of Night" from several years later. It's really more like artistic scribbles for that film and thus can't be fairly judged because of this.
The unfinished short consists of some ghostly-looking dancers performing ballet while floating around in a black void, doing various dance moves and sometimes coming quite close to the camera. The way this differs from "The Very Eye of Night", which took the concept further, is mainly that it does not appear professionally photographed but is more a collection of shots thrown together to create a rather artistically well shot, if not overly interesting, work. In the end, only one really for Maya Deren fanatics or those into dance, since even as an avant-garde short it comes across as rather pointless.
