Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Wonderful character development!

Sorry, this movie sucks

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

A wonderful short film that I stumbled upon via a little gif on Tumblr (the key turning into a knife). This a dark, artful piece about a woman who is / gets caught in a time-loop. The outcome is that she is finally found dead (suicide, probably) by a man, most likely to be her lover. One could interpret her going round and round in circles in more than one way, I suppose. My main idea is that, while she is dead, her soul / ghost is trying to figure out where it / she is. Or what it / she is, namely dead. Just my two cents, though. It also reminds me of the later giallo genre, at certain moments, especially when Maya Deren's face is reflected in the blade of the knife.Even without a perfectly reasonable explanation, one can still enjoy all the wonderful and mysterious, but at many times quite eerie, imagery of some Hollywood apartment block (inside and outside) knives, stairs, (broken) mirrors, black robes, keys, and such. The soundtrack, the original one by Teiji Ito, is just as wonderful, with some soothing acoustic guitars here and there, but also with a lot of haunting voices and percussion.For now, a big 9 out of 10. Note to self: watch more work by Maya Deren (and what a beauty she is, by the way)!

Meshes of the AfternoonThere are spoilers in this review/analysis. I'm not sure that's a fair statement given the nature of the movie, but I do give away the ending.This is an experimental movie by Maya Deren and her then-husband Alexander Hammid. It was made in 1943 and has no recognizable plot or symbols. Much of the action is repeated with some changes. Generally, a woman goes into a home, looks around the rooms, and seems to commit suicide. It's hard to tell, though. We see her repeatedly enter the home, but there are differences each time. She appears to chase a figure that is cloaked in black and has a mirror for a face, but she fails to catch the figure and goes into the home instead. The woman repeats certain actions with a key, but the actions are varied. There are views of a knife, first in a loaf of bread, then on a bed. A long-stemmed flower (which seems to be fake) is placed into various scenes, once by a manikin arm, once by the figure cloaked in black, once by a man. We see the woman fall asleep in a chair, but sometimes her eyes open and she sees the figure in black, sometimes her eyes close. She may or may not attack the man; she may or may not kill herself. All in all, we may guess that she's dreaming the repetitive scenes but there's no clear demarcation between what's real and what's a dream, and there's no clear explanation of what any of it means.What does the movie mean? We don't know. I think it's clear that Deren and Hammid vested the movie with themselves, that the film is an autobiographical self-portrait, but I think they've purposefully used symbols that are not clear. This is an interesting approach to art, because I think it reflects that we can never fully know another person, and perhaps we can never fully know ourselves. So by purposely refusing to use recognizable symbols, the artists here have hidden themselves from us, leaving us room to explore the work with our own fund of experience.My take on the figure in the black cloak is that it represents death. With a mirror for a face, when you look into the face of death, you see your death. The man who puts the flower onto the bed is less obvious. He goes upstairs as we've seen death do, so the repetition may tie them together: the man represents death, but not necessarily physical death. The man awakens the woman, and she has the knife in the bed with her, placed there by death.Other scenes deal with a key. There's a key necessary to gain access to the home, but the key is in other scenes as well. There is a series where the woman is seen sitting at a table; two other versions of her come in, so we see three versions of the woman at the table. Each version picks up the key, shows it in her palm, then the key reappears on the table for another version of the woman to pick up and display. However, the third time the scene is played, the version picking up the key has a palm painted black, and the key becomes the knife. Is the key the knife or is the knife the key? I can't tell. Ultimately, we come to the scene where the man comes home and instead of heading upstairs to where the wife is sleeping he finds her in a chair with blood shown on her throat, which appears to have been cut. Is the man death? Her death? Is her relationship with the man literal death or figurative death?The man is portrayed by Hammid, and the woman is played by Deren. Is the movie a reflection of their marriage? Of all marriages between men and women (at least in 1943)? Does the woman give up her life for the man? That will be my interpretation. That the home represents the place where the woman dies, figuratively speaking. That the man represents the death of that woman as an individual. The key to the home represents the knife with which she ends her life -- the key to the home is the instrument of her death as an individual. There's an old saying that through marriage a man and a woman become one, and that one is the man.This is an interpretation which is personal, and I think "Meshes of the Afternoon" not only invites personal interpretation but requires it. The viewer must bring his or her own fund of experience to the viewing and must use that experience to fund the ambiguities purposefully put into the film. "Meshes of the Afternoon" ensnares us into providing our own meaning if we are to find any meaning at all. Others will surely disagree with my interpretation because they bring a different fund to the film. I'm not sure Deren and Hammid would have a problem with that. And neither do I.

The only reason I saw this film was because it appears in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I personally can't see why. Basically The Woman (Maya Deren, also directing) a woman picks up a flower, picks up a falling key, unlocks her door, and inside there is a knife in a loaf of bread, and the phone is off the hook. She soon naps, and supposedly dreams of a hooded figure with the face of a mirror going down the driveway, the knife on the stair, then on the bed with her. The figure puts the flower on the bed, then disappears, and this is all repeated again. She goes downstairs to nap in the chair, waking to see The Man (Alexander Hammid, also directing) upstairs with the flower, putting it on the bed, and after a mirror breaks, he enters the house again. One of the final shots sees the woman sitting at the table with two replicas of herself. This may not be as gory or disturbing, this dreamy film is certainly just as original as Un Chien Andalou or Eraserhead. It may be just under twenty minutes, but the camera angles are certainly effective, the study of psychological and physical reality is quite interesting, and even though I was confused throughout, that I guess is the point, it is an experimental film. Good!

Postwar American experimental cinema was primarily founded on the creative endeavors of Maya Deren. Her psychodramatic narratives highly influenced works of the era and continue to influence contemporary filmmakers.Deren and her husband, Alexander Hammid, collaborated in making MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943, written by Deren), the preeminent experimental film of the day (and arguably today). With a "nonrealistic spatial and temporal continuity"* and an innovatively skewed narrative, Deren and Hammid produced a film radically different from the traditional Hollywood narrative, forcing viewers to defamilarize themselves with perceptions of what movies "should be" and delve into the vast unexplored terrain of unconventional cinematic expression.Unlike most surrealist or avant-garde films that present many unconnected images and non-linear strings of events, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON wields a solid narrative despite repetitions, temporal lapses, and ambiguity. While the images and events in the film are indeed subjective, the film unfolds whilst producing cumulative meanings.Topically, the film might appear pretentious and self-indulgent; however, when looked at closely, it presents rich commentaries on the duplicity of persona, self-reflexivity and the constraints of femininity as a nameless woman (Deren) travels through various subjective interludes. These interludes build off each other and are understood in their entirety when juxtaposed with what was seen previously (like a narrative). For example, two props are continually displayed, a knife and a key. Upon deeper (psycho)analysis, one might see the knife-like phallus as a symbol of power, and the key – an object that is "stuck" into a hole to "open" something – a symbol of discovery. The woman's manipulations of these two objects can be seen as her frustrations with her reality as a wartime woman where the privileges of power and discovery were limited by the default of gender. The eventual death of the woman at the end of the film is her penalty for experimenting with forbidden masculine privileges, a scenario reminiscent of the systematic exclusion of women from the work place after men returned from the war. Deren's almost prophetic understanding of this situation is brought to light in MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.Deren's experimental narrative approach to film-making is arguably one of the most commonly explored facets of cinematic experimental possibility. When it is realized that these types of films were virtually non-existent in the United States prior to the 1940s, the magnitude of influence Deren imposed upon American avant-garde film-making is understood in its entirety. *Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin. Film History: an Introduction. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.