[Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943]

Directed by: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid





Nothing says elegance more than black and white, other than "Meshes of the Afternoon,' Maya Deren's creative niche of Hollywood's illegitimate child. Within the first few minutes of the film, no full person is seen, only their actions in conjunction with their movements. A slice of bread on the table, a vinyl player that a hand manipulates, then a couch which the person out of camera frame sits in, their single eye closing and opening to the light of the day. A myopic vision of a female figure is then walking, her shadow upon the wall, someone giving chase in an effort to catch up to this figure as she walks away.  The chase is abandoned and 4 minutes into the film, the main character Maya Deren herself is finally seen as the pursuer who has given up the chase of the shrouded woman who walks away. She meanders up a stairwell outside past the same knife that was place near the bread slice, walking through a curtain of silk blowing in the wind up to a room where she finds the phone off of the hook. It is clear, when she returns to the window and stair well that she prefers to be in the ecstasy of the wind as she displays her desire, the yearn to be apart of the follicles invisible to the human eye. Then there is a sort of distress in her feature, in her body language, an endeavor to free herself from the inverted romance she has imposed on herself, confused of the labyrinth it has become.

Suddenly, she is back in the room, sitting on the couch, then back up against the walls, reaching down to again manipulate the vinyl player, watching herself asleep on the couch. The figure of the shrouded woman again appears and she gives chase, only to lose her again and wonder up the same stairs once she fails to catch up to her. But this time, as she enters the stairs, the shrouded figure makes her way up them and Maya follows, not with haste, but with a simple desire to know. The face of the shrouded figure is a mirror, disappears and Deren, abhorrently left abandoned by her curious nature to discover, again repeats the chase of the shrouded figure.

This is reminiscent of purgatory- Deren's need to know and the object always to elude her knowledge. The discovery is the key, the experience is the key, the empiricalism that paves our way from ignorance to a lesser ignorance. Deren exposes her greatest fear, unleashes it without restraint in "Meshes of the Afternoon," a symbolism for an eternal, confounded hallmark that perhaps haunted Virginia Wolf, Samuel Beckett in his "Waiting for Godot." What is paralyzing of this film is Deren's exposure of this paralysis itself, the dictation that despite what we do, what we learn, this human condition will always remain ignorant to itself and its own dreams.