Meshes of the Afternoon

MoMA is running a small retrospective of Maya Deren's films and video (w/an accompaniment of three other women filmmakers inspired by her to round it out). Deren died at age 44 from a brain hemorrhage, allegedly due to malnutrition and amphetamine abuse, so unfortunately there is not a large amount of material to view. An avant-garde filmmaker/pioneer active in the 1940's, she is most famous for her (& then husband, Alexander Hammid) first film Meshes of the Afternoon. It was filmed using a small Bolex camera at their Los Angeles home. With a circular narrative and dreamlike symbolic imagery, the film shows duel view points from both a female and male perspective and possibly explores multiple personalities. It questions the power of perception and examines the line between real and perceived reality. There is debate whether this film can be considered surrealist. Music was added later composed by her third, much younger husband, Teiji Ito.

"Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the "trance film," in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted "to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately."

Made by Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent avant-garde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and other major experimental filmmakers. Beautifully shot by Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cameraman in Europe (where he used the surname Hackenschmied) before he moved to New York, the film makes new and startling use of such standard cinematic devices as montage editing and matte shots. Through her extensive writings, lectures, and films, Deren became the preeminent voice of avant-garde cinema in the 1940s and the early 1950s."

-MoMA collection

There is an interesting documentary on her life called In the Mirror of Maya Deren. A complex, multifaceted female I highly recommend exploring her work.

(this film is silent)