Maya Deren 'Meshes of the Afternoon'

We had a lecture on moving image on one of them were 'Meshes of the Afternoon' by Maya Deren as it was a very influential piece of American Cinema in the 1940's that relates to dreams. I decide to look into it further as I felt it would relate to my project.

I found it very confusing and had to watch it a couple of times to sort of understand it. After a few watches and a little research I started to understand it.

My interpretation of the film is about a women that returns home and falls asleep and falls into a very vivid dream (it is down to your judgement that may or may not be reality). It shows her waking up multiple times, but does this actually happen or is this in her dream? There are a lot of repetitive shots of a flower, a knife and a key. Her dark inner desires play out throughout the film. The music throughout the film is very creepy, it builds suspense.

Description by MoMa:

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the "trance film," in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted "to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately."

There is a hooded figure that appears throughout, we always see their back. When they turn around they don't have a face, the hood was filled with a circle mirror which is a really surreal, which is unexpected. But it makes sense as you can't dream up new faces in a dream.

This film relates to my project as we have been told to look into cinematography and it is all about dreams. It has been useful to look at as it gives a new perspective on how to represent dreams but I am not keen on the style as it is so mismatch.