Hacker Cinema
Meshes of the Afternoon
1943 · Film · short · 14 min
Directed by Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid
A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Highly recommend a short movie “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943). Watched it in a local cinema right after Mulholland Drive, that was quite an experience :)
This is true. We were shown Meshes of the Afternoon in our foundational filmmaking courses at AAU. Her use of choreography in combination of camera placement created a truly remarkable effect on the viewer. An example is her running up the stairs swaying back and forth with a slight tilt of the camera which made it seem as though the abode was moving like a ship on the open sea. Techniques like this she poetically used continue to inspire film makers today.
"she inspired a generation of film makers and artists that reality is not one that needs to be reproduced exactly as it is filmed or photographed"
I'm not sure what you mean by that, but there were plenty of films before the 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon which showed reality in fantastic, even dreamlike ways.
From the 1902 A Trip to the Moon to the 1920's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari to 1922's Nosferatu to 1927's Metropolis, and other German Expressionist films, to name just a few.
For me the new thing that Meshes of the Afternoon brought to the cinema was an explicit interest in dream symbolism.. though even that may not be that new, if you count Bunel's 1930 film L'Age d'Or and other films of the surrealist era.
Deren has often been described as being in the surrealist tradition, and I think that's accurate in as much as she was interested in artistic use of dreams and dream symbolism, and the borderline between dream and waking life.
For those who haven't seen it, here's Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon: [1]
Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a version of this film with the original Teiji Ito soundtrack, so the one I linked to has a soundtrack by another artist, which I don't find to be as good as the Ito version, but it's better than watching the film without any soundtrack at all.
Also regretable is that I haven't seen many films that seem to be influenced by Maya Deren. The closest are probably some of the films of David Lynch (such as Mulholland Dr), which also show a fascination with dreams and dream symbolism.
I would have loved to hear Lynch speak on Maya Deren, if he could somehow be persuaded to give a straight answer without veering off on a tangent like Transcendental Meditation.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSY0TA-ttMA