Meshes of the Afternoon

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a short experimental film directed by wife and husband team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film's narrative is circular, and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper–like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean.

In 1990, Meshes of the Afternoon was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", going into the registry in the second year of voting.

Background and production

The film was the product of Deren's and Hammid's desire to create an avant garde personal film that dealt with devastating psychological problems, like the French avant-garde films of the 1920s such as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930). Deren's use of symbolism in her films relates to her father's preoccupation with psychology and her desire to appeal to her father's interests.^{[citation needed]}

Deren and Hammid wrote, directed and performed in the film. Although Deren is usually credited as its principal artistic creator, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who knew the couple, has claimed in his book Film at Wit's End that Meshes was in fact largely Hammid's creation, and that their marriage began to suffer when Deren received more credit.

The original print had no score. However, a musical score influenced by classical Japanese music by Deren's third husband, Teiji Ito, was added under Deren's supervision in 1959.

Analysis

In the early 1970s, J. Hoberman claimed that Meshes of the Afternoon was a commentary on film noir.^{[citation needed]}

"This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience." —Maya Deren on Meshes of the Afternoon, from DVD release Maya Deren: Experimental Films 1943–58.

Lewis Jacobs' discussion

Writing about Meshes of the Afternoon, Lewis Jacobs credits Maya Deren with being the first film maker since the end of the war to "inject a fresh note into experimental film production". (Jacobs 279) Further in his discussion of experimental cinema in postwar America, Jacobs says the film "attempted to show the way in which an apparently simple and casual occurrence develops subconsciously into a critical and emotional experience. A girl comes home one afternoon and falls asleep. In a dream she sees herself returning home, tortured by loneliness and frustration and impulsively committing suicide. The story has a double climax, in which it appears that the imagined, the dream, has become real.”(Jacobs 279)

Deren uses specific cinematic devices in this film to convey deeper meaning. In a particular scene, Deren is walking up a normal set of stairs, and each time she pushes against the wall, it triggers the camera to move in that direction, almost as if the camera is part of her body. As she pulls herself up the last stair, the top of the stairs leads her to a window in her bedroom, which completely breaks the expectations of the viewer. In doing so, Deren completely destroys normal sense of time and space. There is no longer a sense of what the space is that she is in, nor for how long she was there. Deren constantly asks the viewer to pay attention and remember certain things by repeating the same actions over and over again, with only very subtle changes. In Meshes of the Afternoon, repeated images are of the knife in the bread, the phone off the hook, the key, and the record player as Deren goes about performing the same actions. Deren uses familiar images to trigger memory.

A recognizable trait of Deren’s work is her use of the subjective and objective camera. For instance, shots in Meshes of the Afternoon cut from Deren looking at an object, to Deren’s point of view, looking at herself perform the same actions that she has been making throughout the film. This conveys the meaning of Deren's dual personality or ambivalent feelings towards the possibility of suicide.

It is Lewis Jacobs' view that, "the film is not completely successful, it skips from objectivity to subjectivity without transitions or preparation and is oftentimes confusing." (Jacobs279) An example of Jacobs' comment would be when Deren cuts to her point of view, which normally is an objective shot, but in this POV shot she is watching herself, which is subjective. The viewer cannot expect Deren’s POV shot to contain herself.

Joseph Brinton's discussion

In Joseph Brinton’s essay called, "Subjective Camera or Subjective Audience," he states that,

the symbolic picturization of man’s subconscious in Maya Deren’s experimental films suggest that the subjective camera can explore subtleties hitherto unimaginable as film content. As the new technique can clearly express almost any facet of everyday human experience, its development should presage a new type of psychological film in which the camera will reveal the human mind, not superficially, but honestly in terms of image and sound.(Brinton365 )

Jacobs’ critique that "the film is not completely successful, it skips from objectivity to subjectivity without transitions or preparation and is oftentimes confusing," represents one point of view. However others take the film's approach to be a direct representation on the character's thought patterns in a time of crisis: "Such a film should indeed endow the cinema with a wholly new dimension of subjective experience, permitting the audience to see a human being both as others see him and as he sees himself."(Brinton365)

Influence

The dreamlike (or nightmarish) atmosphere of Meshes has influenced many subsequent films, notably David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997); Wendy Haslem of the University of Melbourne's Cinema Studies department wrote about the parallels:

Maya Deren was a key figure in the development of the New American Cinema. Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon in his experimentation with narration. Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance. Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters and in the incorporation of the “psychogenic fugue,” the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual. [1]

Jim Emerson, the editor of rogerebert.com, has also noted the influence of Meshes within David Lynch's film, INLAND EMPIRE. [2]

One of the two music videos for Milla Jovovich's 1993 song "Gentleman Who Fell" is an obvious pastiche of Meshes of the Afternoon.

The music video Your Ghost by Kristin Hersh contains several details from this video short, including the key in the mouth, the winding staircase and the phone off the hook.

In the booklet of Selfless by Godflesh, the Grim Reaper-like figure is in one of the inserts.

External links

• Meshes of the Afternoon at IMDB
• copy of Meshes of the Afternoon at Google video
• Meshes of the Afternoon at Allmovie