“Meshes of the Afternoon”
This experimental Surrealist short movie is considered one of the most recognizable movies of this movement. “Meshes of the Afternoon” was produced, performed and directed by the husband and wife, Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren in 1943.
In 1990 it was voted to be preserved in the United States National film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “ culturally, historically and aesthetically significant”.
Background
This short movie was based on the Surrealist movements, which is described by the Metropolitan Museum as “a movement that experimented with a new mode of expression, automatism, which sough to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious”.
The surrealist movement started in Paris in 1924 with the publication os the “Manifesto od Surrealism” by Andre Breton who was poet, critic and trained psychiatrist, which then become an international intellectual and political movement.
The manifesto and the movement is all based on Freud’s theories of psychology and dreams. Surrealism later on gains more popularity in United Stated when European surrealist artists left Europe during the World War II and moved to the states.
Maya Deren, was one of the earliest female directors who were genuinely influenced by surrealism, and changed her original name “Eleanora” to Maya (Illusion in Sanskrit) to start off her career in film making. “The Meshes of the Afternoon” was her desire to make an avant-garde movie, which deals with her psychological problems. Though the movie’s earlier editions were completely silent, by in 1959 music was added to the movie that was obviously influenced by the classical Japanese music.
The Plot
The film starts with a scene of a woman (Maya herself) seeing someone in the street while she is heading home. The unknown person leaves a flower on the ground which she picks up and while she fails to catch the shadow of that person, she stops by her home and gets in. She observes the object around her home carefully to see everything in its usual places and she goes to her room and takes an afternoon nap on a chair. She starts to dream about a mysterious hooded person or figure that she sees in the street on her way home that covers her/his face with a mirror and holding the same flower.
She tries to follow the shadow and she misses it again, then she gets home to see that it is not as she saw before, organized. Then this dream repeats it self few times till Maya sees 3 duplication of her self sitting in her house while she’s asleep. There are few objects in this film that have iconic symbolization and Maya tries to have the viewer’s attention to them by having them repeatedly in the scenes; The key, the knife, the phone, the record player and the flower.
Each of these objects have a hidden symbolic meaning to Maya apparently. Most critics think since this film was created after the World War II and during the Feminism movement in the United Stated, Maya is referring to the frustration that she feels as a female living in that time period. In order to write analysis about “Meshes of the Afternoon”, I had to watch the film few times, search and read critics and articles and have brief background information about the movie and Deren too.
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Analysis
The first thing caught my eye in the beginning of the movie was Maya wearing pants, which was new and trend in that time because of the feminism. This clearly shows her desire of equality in her career and life. The white flower resembles purity and innocence, which usually resembles woman in society. The flower was given to her by a man by the end of the film, it might also refers to the frustration and the pressure she feels forced by women in men’s society. Then there is the key, which basically open and close things.
When Maya tries to enter her house, she takes out the key from her purse, which is a sign of femininity, and it fells out of her hand; in a meaning that there is a force that stops her from opening the door to enter her safe place, home. This force can be refers to the pressure of the time she was living in. When she enters home she feels safe and goes around checking out her place carelessly. She sees the knife and the bread on the kitchen table, which refers to the role of being a household and daily food provider on the table. Then she takes a carefree nap while waiting for her man to gets hope.
The dream that she has presents the subconscious mind of her chasing a hooded figure that takes her flower away from the path that she used to take to get home. Though she misses catching the figure, but she sees it again when the figure is placing the flower in her bed.
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That might refer to the sexual life, meaning women’s duty were to please their man sexually. Also it might refer to the trust that a man give a female to get what he wants from her in bed. This is also is shown by her feeling rescued by the dream she was having when her man woke her up and take her to bed. In her dream, one of her duplication left her a flower in bed, which turned to be a knife later on.
Maya used the knife to break the mirror-faced figure that she saw instead of the man and a reflection of her. This presents the frustration that she feels and trying to break through her duties and roles that were opposed to her by the society in that time period. The multiple duplications of Maya in the dream present Maya’s different layers of personality or ideologies that she was experiencing in her life.
By the end of the film the man come home to find her dead in the same chair that she was having her afternoon dream on, and the mirrors were thrown in sea; this might refer to the frustration and exhaustion women feel that might break them down and that women’s desires and needs were ignore and neglected in that time to the point that they were forgotten.
Since surrealism was based on theories of dreams and psychology, nothing is assured completely. Surrealist’s objective was to search for the “ more real than real world behind the real” but it makes us wonder what is reality? And how reality differs from one’s perspective to another. This is What Maya’s experimental film is about, what was real in her mind might not be real in others.
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2012