Meshes of the Afternoon
1943 · 14m · USA
Directed by Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid
Genres: experimental, surrealism
A woman returns home and falls asleep, entering a recurring dreamlike state where she encounters a hooded figure with a mirror for a face, multiplying versions of herself, and symbolic domestic objects cycling through increasingly distorted repetitions until a violent conclusion blurs the boundary between dream and reality.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A mirror-faced figure, three Mayas in one room, $250 in 1943 — Deren made experimental film an American thing here. The blueprint everyone since has been redrawing.
Deren and Hammid's $250 cycle invented American avant-garde cinema as a domestic, dream-logic art form, and its influence is everywhere from Lynch to Beyonce's Lemonade. A founding text.
Deren shoots her own multiplied selves and the mirror-faced hooded figure on a $250 home-shoot budget — the looping structure works because the in-camera tricks are so simple they read as dream logic rather than effects. 14 minutes of pure form.
Reviews
Deren is one of the great screen presences, turning the air of idealistic purpose into a dance of seduction.
Deren took the dreamlike, intellectual surrealism of Un Chien Andalou and made it intimate.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 1947, Grand Prix International (16mm)