Meshes of the Afternoon

Meshes of the Afternoon is a 1943 American experimental silent short film directed by and starring wife-and-husband team, Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied.With each failed attempt, she re-enters her house and encounters numerous household objects, including a key, a bread knife, a flower, a telephone, and a phonograph.The film’s narrative is circular, repeating several motifs: a flower on a long driveway, a falling key, an unlocked door, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper–like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook, and an ocean.Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film portrays a world in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from illusion.[9] Further in his discussion of experimental cinema in postwar America, Jacobs says the film "attempted to show the way in which an apparently simple and casual occurrence develops subconsciously into a critical and emotional experience.[citation needed] Deren wanted her audiences to appreciate the art for its conscious value and spent much of her later career delivering lectures and writing essays on her film theory.Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon in his experimentation with narration.Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance.Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters and in the incorporation of the “psychogenic fugue,” the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual.[14] In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened an exhibition that dealt with Deren's influence on three experimental filmmakers, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich and Carolee Schneemann, as part of a year-long retrospective there on representation of women.Likewise, Milla Jovovich's video for "Gentleman Who Fell" reproduces other motifs such as the mirror-faced figure, the reappearing key, the knife, and the shifting staircase effect.Industrial metal pioneers Godflesh used a still from the film for the cover of their 1994 EP Merciless, as did alternative rock band Primal Scream for their 1986 single "Crystal Crescent".