Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

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Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) – M. Deren & A. Hamid

P. Adams Sitney calls Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid’s 1943 film “a dream unfolding within shifting perspectives” and starts his survey of the American Avant-Garde with this film.  He does compare it explicitly to Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1928) and briefly to Man Ray’s Étoile de Mer (also 1928) suggesting their possible influence, but declares that Meshes of the Afternoon resembles more clearly a dream – part of a genre he dubs “the trance film.”  Meshes does offer a clear boundary between early scenes awake and then subsequent scenes asleep (Deren’s eyes close), whereas the other explicitly surrealist films use jarring juxtapositions to create dream logic laden with metaphor but without the resonance of autobiographical psycho-drama.  Although Deren denied any Freudian content, there are many startling images which feel symbolic:  a black clothed figure with a mirror for a face, a key extracted from Deren’s mouth, an omnipresent knife, as well as Deren herself doubled, tripled, and then murdered in her sleep.  These dream images seem drawn from our earlier brief slice of Deren’s actual reality but they take on greater and more ominous significance in the dream, sometimes seen in subjective first person perspective and sometimes in the more objective third.  Hamid’s camerawork makes the mundane spaces of their house into something with less clear laws of physics than our ordinary world.  A beautiful work that contains enough of a narrative flow to keep the average viewer (new to experimental films) enticed and entranced.