《Meshes of the Afternoon》
Category:
American short experimental film, Deren uses multiple repetitions to show the love and betrayal between lovers and murder to end the film, illustrating Surrealism’s sense of sex and death.
Background and formal function:
Maya Deren was a leading figure in American independent cinema in the 1940s, and her creative and theoretical initiatives influenced many American experimental filmmakers. Her influence on experimental cinema has been jokingly referred to as “her avant-garde movement.”
The psychoanalytic feminism and aesthetic state of presentation in 《Mshes of afternoon》are the main artistic features of the film.
Process:
The characters that appear in the dreams are all Deren.
Mirror
On the other hand, the Mirror Man is the ego that Deren wants to eliminate. Because it is entirely mirrored, this ego is shaped by someone else (the husband), lacks independence, and is heterogeneous in Deren’s ego system, which she (or rather they, Deren’s other selves) want to eliminate. This is implied by the appearance of the husband’s face in the mirror at the film’s end – the husband’s desires reveal this ego.
Flower
Deren’s husband sends her flowers and places them in front of her bed, a romantic gesture that is a beautiful prison for her.
Key& Knife
The key represents reconciliation with the “self.” The recurrence of the dream is Deren’s constant attempt to reconcile with her ego. However, she fails in her attempts. She takes the key and opens the door but cannot reconcile with “it” (the Mirror Man). So in the next cycle, the key turns into a knife.
Formal elements:
《Mshes of afternoon》is arranged as a silent film in which the viewer can see the heroine’s delicate figure, but you cannot hear her voice, as the film abandons language and replaces it with the body language and facial expressions of women as the main narrative object
Maya Deren’s film, directed by herself, shows the sensitive heroine’s imagination, daydream-like repetition, shaky camerawork, dance-like movements, and a break with and re-establishment of conventional cinema, combining her interest in dance, primitive religion, the psychology of the subject’s imagination, and Surrealism. Maya Deren brings her interest in dance, primitive religion, the psychology of the subject’s imagination, and Surrealism to the film, giving us the philosophical meaning behind the physical phenomenon.