Meshes of the Afternoon is a silent experimental film from 1943 directed by Maya Deren that explores themes of dreams, reality, and the subconscious. It features a female protagonist and uses repetition, rhythm, and ambiguous visual elements to portray her interior experiences. The film can be interpreted through various lenses such as feminism, surrealism, or film noir. Deren aimed to reproduce how the subconscious mind interprets and elaborates on everyday incidents into meaningful emotional experiences.

1. Meshes of the Afternoon
Context, influences, visual elements and style,
meaning and interpretation.

2. Context
• Deren mixed cinema and choreography and played with
the spatial-time possibilities that this mean offers.
• Meshes of the afternoon is a film that offers many
interpretation possibilities depending on which literacy or
cinematographic theory that is focused on.
• Feminism is one of the many factors that is focused on
because the main character is a girl and a man only
appears sometimes nearer to the end.

3. Influences
• Some people think that the mirror face is influenced by Yeasayer’s video for “ambling alp”
when a mirror-faced figure appears in John Coney’s 1974 Sun Ra vehicle.
• Main themes of the film are:
1. Dream vs reality vs dual reality
2. Closeness of death
3. Intimacy
4. Receptiveness of everyday life
5. Deformation of reality
6. Repression of past personalities
• The main themes may be seen as influences because Maya Deren would of experienced
repetition of everyday life and maybe others on the list like closeness of death.

4. Visual elements and Style
• Meshes of the Afternoon is shot as a silent film, there is no
dialogue, communication between characters or diegetic sound. A
record player plays silently. Whilst the disc revolves and the needle
is engaged in the groove, there is no indication of the sound that it
makes. When Deren takes one of her many short journeys along
the path or up stairs, the sound of her steps is overlaid by.
• Rhythm is a defining element of all of Deren’s films, it arises from
the play of repetition and variation which is integral to her
experiments in narrative. The rhythmic drumbeat and the
repeated movement highlight her movement throughput the film.
Ito’s soundtrack enables Deren’s temporal and spatial
experimentation.

5. Meaning and Interpretation
• In the early 1970s, J. Hoberman claimed that Meshes of
the Afternoon was "less related to European surrealism"
and more related to "Hollywood wartime film noir".
• Deren explained that Meshes "is concerned with the
interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an
event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather,
it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an
individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an
apparently simple and casual incident into a critical
emotional experience."