A flower clutched in a stranger’s hand heralds the descent into a fractured psyche, where mirrors multiply and knives glint with unspoken menace.

 

In the annals of cinema history, few short films cast as long and enigmatic a shadow as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Co-directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, this 14-minute experimental masterpiece plunges viewers into a hypnotic whirlpool of dream logic, symbolic imagery, and psychological unease. Far from mere abstraction, it weaves a tapestry of surreal horror that anticipates the subconscious terrors of later filmmakers, all captured with stark economy on a shoestring budget in a modest Los Angeles bungalow. As a touchstone for avant-garde cinema, it invites endless interpretation, rewarding repeated viewings with layers of meaning rooted in personal turmoil, gender dynamics, and the fluidity of time itself.

 

  • The film’s revolutionary looping narrative structure, which collapses linear time into an obsessive cycle of pursuit and failure, mirroring the inescapable grip of the unconscious mind.
  • A arsenal of potent symbols – the flower, key, knife, and shattering mirror – that encode themes of desire, access, violence, and fragmented identity in haunting visual poetry.
  • Its profound influence on surreal horror genres, from David Lynch’s dreamscapes to modern indie nightmares, cementing its status as a blueprint for cinematic reverie and dread.

 

The Infinite Staircase: Mastering Cyclical Time

From its opening shots, Meshes of the Afternoon establishes a rhythm that defies conventional storytelling. A figure cloaked in black ascends sunlit steps and places a single white flower on a kerb, its petals stark against the concrete. Moments later, the flower appears in the hand of the film’s protagonist, played by Deren herself, tumbling down those same steps alongside a rolling key. This is no accident; the film loops relentlessly, each iteration layering subtle variations on the action. The protagonist climbs the stairs repeatedly, enters the house, encounters uncanny tableaus – a knife on the table, a record player spinning in eerie silence, a hooded figure gazing through the window – and confronts her own doubles in a multiplying array of mirrors.

What elevates this repetition from gimmick to genius is its emulation of dream states, where events recur with the inexorable pull of obsession. Viewers feel trapped alongside the protagonist, the camera’s slow pans and rhythmic cuts mimicking the disorientation of half-remembered nightmares. Deren drew from her studies in psychology and dance, infusing the sequences with choreographed precision; her body moves through space like a ritual dancer, each gesture laden with portent. The stairs become a Sisyphean metaphor, suggesting futile attempts to escape one’s inner demons, a concept that resonates deeply in the post-war psyche grappling with trauma and fragmentation.

This temporal folding prefigures techniques in later horror, where time bends to amplify dread. Consider the endless corridors in Dario Argento’s Inferno or the repetitive hauntings in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo; both owe a debt to Deren’s innovation. Yet Meshes achieves its effect without elaborate sets or effects, relying on montage and implication. The slow-motion flower drop, captured in meticulous detail, evokes both fragility and inevitability, a wilting bloom that foreshadows self-annihilation.

Keys to the Unconscious: Decoding the Symbols

At the heart of the film’s enigma lies its iconography, each object a cipher for the psyche’s hidden chambers. The key, innocuous yet omnipresent, symbolises access denied – to the house, to understanding, to the self. It rolls away repeatedly, eluding grasp, much like Freudian symbols of repressed desires slipping through fingers. Paired with the flower, emblem of fleeting beauty and femininity, it hints at erotic longing intertwined with peril. Deren, influenced by surrealists like André Breton, populates her frames with these totems, allowing them to accrue meaning through iteration.

The knife emerges as the most visceral motif, glinting on the dining table amid loaves of bread, then wielded in trance-like states. It slices through bread, through space, and ultimately towards the protagonist’s own throat in a climactic montage of self-slashing. This act of symbolic suicide underscores themes of auto-destructive impulses, where the self turns blade against itself. Critics have read gendered violence here, the knife as phallic threat in a domestic sphere dominated by passive femininity, though Deren rejected reductive psychoanalysis, insisting on personal myth-making.

Mirrors multiply the horror, fragmenting the protagonist into infinite reflections, each staring back with accusatory calm. The shattering mirror at the film’s ambiguous close – does she die, or awaken? – shatters identity itself, echoing Lacan’s mirror stage where the ego forms through misrecognition. These elements coalesce in tableaus of uncanny domesticity: the telephone off the hook, suggesting failed communication; the record’s blank groove, silent screams. Together, they form a lexicon of surreal dread, influencing from Luis Buñuel’s razor-sliced eye in Un Chien Andalou to the domestic horrors of Repulsion.

Sound design, sparse and diegetic, amplifies the symbols’ potency. Footsteps echo hollowly, doors creak with menace, and the protagonist’s own gasps punctuate the silence. No score intrudes; the horror arises organically from rhythm and image, a austerity that heightens immersion.

The Hooded Phantom: Shadows of the Other

Lurking at the periphery is the hooded figure, an androgynous spectre with mirror-face, gliding through rooms and windows like a harbinger. Neither fully human nor ghostly, it embodies the uncanny – familiar yet alien, observer turned intruder. Deren’s choreography positions it as doppelgänger, externalised id pursuing the ego through the house’s labyrinthine spaces. Its mirror visage reflects the viewer’s gaze, implicating us in the voyeurism.

In one sequence, the figure sits at the table, hands folded in eerie patience, surrounded by the protagonist’s inert forms – overdoses of self confronting the intruder. This confrontation builds to frenzy: multiple Derens wield knives, flowers, keys in a balletic melee. The hood evokes death’s anonymity, monastic robes twisted into menace, tapping into universal archetypes of the Grim Reaper reimagined through personal lens.

Hammid’s steady camera work grounds the surreal in tangible dread; shadows stretch unnaturally, light filters through blinds to carve faces from gloom. The figure’s pursuit across rooftops adds vertiginous terror, defying gravity in slow-motion leaps. This otherness probes identity’s fluidity, asking if the monster lurks within or without.

From Living Room to Legacy: Birth of a Masterwork

Shot over six weeks in 1943 at Deren’s Hollywood home, Meshes emerged from wartime constraints and artistic ambition. Deren, a Ukrainian émigré, funded it herself after meeting Hammid, a Czech cinematographer. They used a 16mm Bolex, natural light, and friends as crew, turning domestic space into psychodrama. Challenges abounded: splicing loops by hand, syncing sound post-production, all on a $275 budget.

Premiere at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1947 launched Deren’s career, though initial reception mixed abstraction with incomprehension. Over time, it gained canonical status, screened at museums worldwide. Marketing was grassroots; Deren toured universities, lecturing on its ‘vertical’ film theory – time as subjective flow over linear plot.

In retro collecting circles, original 16mm prints fetch premiums, their scratches badges of authenticity. VHS bootlegs from the 80s preserved it for home viewing, introducing it to horror fans via midnight tapes. Digital restorations now gleam pristine, yet fans cherish the grainy aura evoking 1940s projection rooms.

Ripples Through the Decades: Echoes in Horror

Meshes seeded surreal horror’s evolution. Lynch credits it for Eraserhead‘s industrial dreams; Ari Aster echoes its loops in Hereditary‘s grief cycles. Experimentalists like Stan Brakhage built on its montage, while mainstream fare – think Inception‘s folding cities – nods to its architecture of mind.

In gaming, titles like Control or Silent Hill ape its shifting geometries. Toy collectors draw parallels to surreal playsets, like those warped Barbie dreamhouses modded by enthusiasts. Its gender subversion prefigures slasher final girls, empowered yet ensnared.

Recent revivals include 4K restorations at MoMA, inspiring TikTok recreations where users loop personal nightmares. Its legacy endures as antidote to CGI spectacle, proving intimate horror’s timeless power.

Director/Creator in the Spotlight

Maya Deren, born Eleanora Derenkowsky on 29 April 1917 in Kyiv, Ukraine, embodied the restless spirit of 20th-century modernism. Her Jewish family fled pogroms to New York in 1922, where she immersed in Greenwich Village bohemia, studying at League of New Women Voters and NYU. A dancer with Katherine Dunham’s troupe, she absorbed anthropology under Gregory Bateson, shaping her view of ritual in film. Marriage to Hammid in 1944 propelled Meshes, but divorce followed amid affairs, including with Anais Nin.

Deren’s career pivoted on self-distribution; she crisscrossed America by Greyhound, screening films at colleges for $5 a pop, funding via Guggenheim Fellowship – first for a woman filmmaker. Her 1960 book An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film codified theories of psychodrama. Haitian voodoo enthralled her post-1946 travels, yielding Divine Horsemen (1977), ethnographic masterpiece assembled posthumously. She died 13 October 1961 at 44 from brain aneurysm, likely exacerbated by amphetamines.

Filmography highlights: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, co-dir. Hammid) – looping dream horror; At Land (1944) – surreal journey across tables and beaches; A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) – dance-film hybrid; Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) – social rituals morphing to tragedy; Meditation on Violence (1948) – slow-motion martial arts poetry; The Very Eye of Night (1959) – astronomical ballet; plus unfinished works like The Witch’s Cradle (1943). Influences spanned Cocteau, Eisenstein, and Haitian lore; her legacy endures via Maya Deren Theatre at Anthology Film Archives.

Actor/Character in the Spotlight

The protagonist of Meshes, embodied by Deren herself, remains an iconic cipher – everyman of the subconscious, trapped in cycles of pursuit. This nameless woman, clad in flowing white, navigates the house as explorer and victim, her multiples suggesting dissociative identity. Her arc peaks in ritual suicide, knife to throat amid blooming flowers, symbolising rebirth or annihilation. Critics dub her the ‘mesh maiden,’ enmeshed in fate’s web.

Deren’s performance draws from modern dance; fluid, angular movements convey trance states, eyes wide with hypnotic terror. No dialogue heightens expressivity – gasps, stumbles, ritual poses speak volumes. As auteur-performer, she blurs actress/director lines, anticipating Isabella Rossellini in Lynch’s works.

Cultural trajectory: spawned parodies in Saturday Night Live sketches, homages in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady. In collecting, fan art proliferates on Etsy, hooded figures reimagined as pins. Appearances extend via restorations: Cannes 2019 tribute, BFI Southbank series. No awards in lifetime, but 1986 National Film Registry induction affirms status. Comprehensive roles: lead in Meshes (1943); self in At Land (1944); dancer in Choreography (1945); mourner in Ritual (1946); observer in Violence (1948); cameo in Duchamp doc Portrait (1950s). Her character endures as feminism’s fractured mirror, challenging passive femininity.

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Bibliography

Rabinovitz, S. (1991) Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in 21st-Century Avant-Garde American Film. University of Illinois Press.

Morin, E. (2013) Maya Deren: Dance in the Vortex. Blurb.

Tyler, P. (1995) Underground Film: A Critical History. Da Capo Press.

Deren, M. (1960) An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. Alicat Bookshop Press.

Hoberman, J. (2003) The Magic Hour: Film at MOMA. The Museum of Modern Art.

MacDonald, S. (1992) Avalanche of Images: The Films of Maya Deren. Afterimage, 20(1), pp. 12-15.

Vogel, A. (1974) Film as a Subversive Art. Random House.

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