User reviews 53 Review. Top review. Our Unfortunate era. Its just so unfortunate to not have 'Maya Daren' with us today. Her exemplary direction with perfect length of her movies makes her a legend in short film category. Meshes of the Afternoon has everything that no one has ever seen before, in terms of abstraction, philosophy, movie making..
Her movies cannot be categorized into any available genres, cos' no on e really makes movie of her sort. A girl entangled into a recursive event which by the directorial pattern looks like a figment of her own imagination. It seems like she is waiting for her lover or something like that and then she finds her replicas all around her haunting her and finally killing her. It also seems that Maya's other short film 'At Land' is a sequel to 'Meshes of the Afternoon' for she keeps alive the same passion and abstraction and romance in 'At Land'.
All in all, its one of the best attempts I have seen. If you believe in movies you cannot miss it. Details Edit. Release date United States. United States. Redes de la tarde. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 14 minutes. Black and White. Mono Silent. Related news. Apr 26 FilmSchoolRejects. Apr 26 Filmmaker Magazine - Blog. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. By what name was Meshes of the Afternoon officially released in Canada in English?
See more gaps Learn more about contributing. Edit page. Unable to catch up, she enters the house, and the subjective camera movement switches to this version of her, whilst she catches a glimpse of the funereally dark, cloaked apparition walking up the stairs. The elusive mirror-faced character is compelling and symbolically evocative. Nun, Grim Reaper, or mourner? After leaving the flower on the bed, the character disappears and the image of the woman also disappears and re-materialises several times, back and forth on the staircase.
She then heads towards her own sleeping body whilst holding a knife, proceeding to try to stab herself before she awakens and sees a man holding a flower in front of her. The phantom steps of the hooded dream character are traced and re-traced by the man and the woman in what appears to be reality but turns out to be a dream within a dream.
The man carries the flower upstairs, leaving it on the bed, a gesture that echoes the dream act but is seen in a different context- of intimacy rather than a religious or funereal act.
The flower, a symbol of femininity, is therefore connected with death and sexuality, respectively. After a shot of the reflection of the man in the mirror next to the bed, we watch her lying down through the male gaze.
The camera switches to the predatory look on his face, and, as he is about to touch her, she grabs the knife and tries to stab his face. At this point, the knife breaks a mirror instead, and the face of the man disintegrates into shards another connection between the man and the dream figure , revealing an image -perhaps a memory- of waves and the beach.
The man comes inside the house again to find the dead body of the woman on the couch- she committed suicide by cutting herself with a mirror. The uncanny dimension of the film lies in the transformation of the familiar environment into something mystifying, the dream-reality ambiguity, the repetition compulsion, the doubling tripling and quadrupling , the distortions in spatial and temporal awareness, as well as the repetitive use of familiar images such as household objects that seemingly gain unknown symbolic connotations, whilst functioning as mnemonic devices.
The juxtaposition of objects also contributes to the sense of dread and paranoia- the off-the-hook phone, the silent record player, the flower left behind by the enigmatic figure, the knife, the falling key. We can associate the off-the-hook phone with loss of communication, the knife -phallic form, therefore masculinity, besides the surface level connection with danger and death, the flower, as mentioned, having a contrasting effect-femininity, but also, death in this context; the key represents confinement, repression, and feeling entrapped, but also the possibility to escape.
The mirror stands for introspection, and the death by mirror cut might allegorically refer to the disintegration of the identity construct, linked to liberation. When a version of the woman picks up the knife, she is re-claiming her agency, wielding phallic power. It is worth mentioning that the director strongly opposed and discouraged psychoanalytic interpretations of her film and of the symbolic significance of the objects the film revolves around, instead encouraging the viewer to only interpret them in the context of the film narrative as a whole to avoid going beyond conscious intent in art.
Before turning to cinematography, Maya Deren expressed herself through poetry, but she found it too limiting to convey the images in her mind through words. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.
The multiplying of the character is connected to dissociation, alienation, emotional fragmentation, and potentially reintegration towards the end. The multiple incarnations of the woman evoke an internal schizoid narrative breathing life into alternative versions of herself- challenging her self-construct. Some of her personas are passively observing her more powerful, key-holding, knife-wielding persona. The suicide is symbolic, despite the fact that, in the final scene, it appears as if the layers of the dream world are peeled off and we have access to the real world.
I believe the death symbolism is derived from Jungian psychology- i. What unfolds on screen is the process through which a person gains awareness of and confronts unconscious material driving their life in order to unite and re-channel the opposing energies of the ego and the unconscious into a third state of being, of wholeness. According to Jung, the process involves a challenging, unnerving unleashing of fantasies, dreams, and instincts.
The sense of dread and panic evoked by the film matches this idea. The process is also associated with the notion of ego death in Eastern philosophies. She later participated in Vodou ceremonies and documented the rituals.
Together with her love of dance and later, her experience with recreational drugs her immersion in and fascination with rituals were also a result of seeking to drift away from self-centredness, to go beyond self-construct and personality, and merge with something greater. This is again related to the Buddhist concept of ego death — a transcendent, life-turning mental state with self-revelatory consequences.
We know that Deren has a preoccupation with the transformation of the self and reaching higher spiritual states of awareness.
The intent of such depersonalisation is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension and frees him from the specialisations and confines of personality. He becomes part of a dynamic whole which, like all such creative relationships, in turn, endow its parts with a measure of its larger meaning.
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