What are the Meshes of the Afternoon?

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren follows a young-woman caught in a dreamlike narrative that finds herself repeating the same actions over again. Within the film, Deren uses peculiar techniques in terms of her cinematography, lighting, and symbolism in order to create a nightmarish atmosphere that effectively illustrates the main subject’s internal feelings about the development of technology more than the character herself, inevitably leading to Deren’s own cinematic paradox.

Interestingly enough, Meshes of the Afternoon refrains from introducing the face of its main character until around four minutes and eleven seconds in. Initially, the audience creates a relation to the character through her fragmentation. There’s a strong emphasis on limbs, specifically feet and legs, and hands and arms. Close-ups highlight the movement of individual body-parts. Our main character remains faceless, our only understanding of her being based on basic actions and desires (picking up a dropped key to open a door). The character does not provide a sensation of trust, but rather reflects more machine-like qualities: a list of parts together that complete repetitive objectives. Thus, the main character introduced in the beginning can be seen less as a depiction of a human being, but rather a depiction of events. A mechanized-film attempting to illustrate the human psychosis, however without using the human face at first. This focus on the actions committed by the woman rather than who she is provides insight into the significance of the atmosphere of the setting. The environment is meant to be a reflection of the human qualities that help us to relate and identify to people — her character.

Deren uses lighting and cinematography to tap into the conscience of the main character. Its twisted dreamlike structure allows the world to feel free of the restrictions of reality — leaving room for Deren to use her setting as an expression of her character’s internal frustrations. High-contrast lighting is used, helping to emphasize the shadows that either illustrate a character, or obscure part of the setting. This sense of lurking shadows, not only within the background but also directly following the main character, hints at an issue of duality. The main character’s frustration and disorder over her duality is illustrated through unique camera movements and jump-cuts. The world apparently flips around as Maya Deren attempts to balance herself in a place that lacks physical order. The camera follows her movement, pouncing as she hits the wall in confusion or jump-cutting her into many different places of a staircase. The more the camera commits to her subjectivity, the less of a structure the audience is given to rely on. As the movie progresses, the audience’s grasp of space and time decreases further and further until we too are trapped in the main character’s internal, repetitive madness. A madness that is fed by a shadow whom she follows, only to slowly come to the realization that the mirror-faced shadow may simply be a reflection of herself. She has become her own guide into insanity. Meanwhile, the objects included represent the foundation to this psychosis, illustrating Deren’s use of symbolism.

Deren uses symbolism to catalyze and descend her character into madness, each object (phone, knife, key e.g.) representing various metaphorical devices to do with a sensation of penetration. The Key and the Knife are both objects that are associated with the act of physical penetration. While a key has the potential to open and close, that choice is eventually narrowed down to a knife — an object that penetrates to close (end) or cut (fragment). There’s a disconcerting sense of eternity that is associated with the knife’s ability to end something through penetration. This is further elaborated in the end when we see the main character is dead, apparently bleeding from various cuts — shattering both the worlds of dream and reality until they are completely intertwined. This concept of penetration may be present in the other objects too. The Phonograph, for example, repeatedly plays a tune that causes the main character to turn it off. This idea of a consistent sound penetrating through one’s ears acts as another form of turmoil — something that is attempting to breakthrough whatever mental defense the main character has set up for herself (something that every object seems to be involved in).

The film comes to a tragic conclusion with the revelation that the main character is dead. Essentially the film can be seen almost as psychological cinema. One in which the conditions of being human are tested against the various human-made stimuli of modern times, and how those human-made stimuli eventually lead to one’s own self-destruction, separating one from their self through technology’s penetrative quality.

Yet, interestingly enough Maya Deren attacks her own thesis in order to illustrate how technology by itself has the ability to depict the human conscience (through cinematography, lighting, and symbolism) even with its rigged, mechanized and pervasive structure. Thus a paradox is formed — Deren illustrates the damaging effect of the pervasive nature of technology on psychology while using technology to pervasively illustrate psychology.