Film: Meshes of the Afternoon
Director: Maya Deren
Country: Ukraine / USA
Released: 1943
Runtime: 14 minutes
Genre: Surrealism
Studio: Independent
Influenced: Hitchcock, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch
Looking at the history of avant-garde film, women have played a prominent role in its evolution, notably with the work of Marie Epstein and Germaine Dulac in 1920s France, as well as Lis Rhodes in Britain, Joyce Wieland in Canada and Valie Export in Austria. Maya Deren has been given the title of "mother of the US avant-garde", largely on the basis of two pioneering works she released in the 1940s, Meshes of the Afternoon and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946).
Conceived by Deren in partnership with her Czech-born husband Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon is a silent black & white "trance film" that features Deren and Hammid as actors. As much as it's possible to describe the plot, it's a dreamlike sequence witnessed from the perspective of a young woman, interspersed with memories and strange visions. Deren described it as follows: "The protagonist does not suffer some subjective delusion of which the world outside remains independent ... she is, in actuality, destroyed by an imaginative action."
Critics have linked it with the work of Jean Cocteau (specifically his 1932 film Le Sang d’un Poète), Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel (specifically Un Chien Andalou) and the writings of Sigmund Freud. Deren has denied association with any of them, insisting her work was not intended to be symbolic, but to be understood in and of itself. Her films certainly moved the centre of gravity of avant-garde filmmaking away from Europe to USA, helping to shape the New American Cinema movement of the 1950s and 60s.
The birthplace for this movement was the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1946, when Deren's films were screened along with classic avant-garde films of the 1920s (Buñuel, Man Ray, Cocteau). A lasting legacy of Deren's work is that 16mm film continued to be the dominant exhibition standard for experimental filmmakers well into the 1970s. She also opened up new visual horizons in cinema, specifically in the context of dream sequences (similar fantasy sequences can be found in Hitchcock's Spellbound and the work of David Lynch) and spatial dislocations, influencing French filmmakers like Alain Resnais.
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