As Maya Deren remarked, Witch's Cradle "was inspired by the architectural structure and paintings and objects" of the Surrealist Exhibition at the "Art of This Century" gallery in New York in 1942. The film was never completed and seems to have been made between the Hammid-influenced Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land in 1943. (Very little documentation exists on the film; it is not mentioned by P. Adams Sitney in his book Visionary Film.) Its main focus is Marcel Duchamp's string 'installation', which evoked for Deren the idea that surrealist work was the alchemy of the twentieth century, an idea with which Duchamp himself toyed. Deren did programme notes for the film at some unspecified date, and they were published in Film Culture, No. 39, in 1965.

One is even puzzled as to whether Deren ever showed the film, which is described as 'out-takes' by its distributors and in the American Anthology Film Archives. The existence of programme notes would suggest that she did, but it seems that whatever she showed, in an incomplete state, was different from the film that we have here. Given Deren's low output, it is worth quibbling about this, as her stress on editing makes anything not actually put together by Deren automatically less interesting.

Witch's Cradle gives the impression of someone discovering, with excitement, a new medium, as Deren obviously was at that time. The images of the installation, of Duchamp's wheel, fleetingly of Duchamp himself near the beginning, are elliptical. In her notes, Deren speaks of surrealist artists being like "feudal magicians and witches" who were "motivated by a desire to deal with real forces underlying events". Interestingly, she saw At Land as a twentieth-century conception of space and time, and Witch's Cradle as being 'feudal'. Given her later antagonism to certain forms of surrealism, it perhaps also points to some of the problems she found with that aesthetic.

Although in Deren's view the film exemplified the 'defiance' of normal time and space, the major formal theme of all her films, Witch's Cradle does not have the fluidity and formal coherence she was to achieve later. Her restless search for the image juste with which to express the "cabalistic symbols" of surreal magic has none of the magic that would itself be characteristic of Deren's editing. One can only guess at her reasons for not completing the film, but it is a measure of her integrity and self-criticism that she remained dissatisfied with it.