"The Very Eye of Night" was Maya Deren's last complete film and it is also one of her weakest films as director due to lots of repetitiveness and an overlong run-time. Deren had first started out with symbolic avant-garde shorts of symbolic narrative, but over the course of the forties changed gradually to dance studies, something which made her work much more lackluster compared to how she started out. Being made quite late in her career, this short is one of these and is more meant as an art film than a symbolic narrative tale. Like the other reviewer, I would say that Teiji Ito's music was excellent (possibly better than his score for "Meshes of the Afternoon") and kept the fifteen minute short from losing steam.
While I will admit that in the past I've called her "Meditation on Violence" boring, part of me wants to say that was better. Believe it or not, Deren did make a shorter version of this film earlier in 1951, in the form of a little known six minute movie entitled "Ensemble for Somnambulists". Apparently left off by her, this earlier project features the exact same idea of filming dancers in negative and superimposing them onto a backdrop, differing only in more chaotic, unedited camerawork. The idea still appealing to her, she probably decided by this point it was time to make a better film and get it released. The results, unfortunately, 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 sharper, brighter, and look gorgeous in the ghostly look of the dancers. As with "Meditation on Violence", the director didn't really seem to know when enough was enough, but this movie still manages to be artistic and visually appealing within its short (yet overlong) run-time.
