Meshes of the Afternoon

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Meshes of the Afternoon
Maya Deren watches herself
Directed by	Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid
Produced by	Maya Deren
Written by	Maya Deren
Starring	Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid
Music by	Teiji Ito (added in 1953)
Cinematography	Alexander Hammid
Editing by	Maya Deren
Distributed by	Mystic Fire Video (DVD)
Release date(s)	1943
Running time	18 min.
Language	no dialogue
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Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a short experimental film directed by husband and wife 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.

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

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 was added by Deren's third husband, Teiji Ito, in 1953. The film was deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

[edit] 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]

In 1993, Milla Jovovich made two different videos of her song, "Gentleman Who Fell." The second, filmed in black-and-white, is an obvious pastiche of Meshes of the Afternoon.