Meshes of the Afternoon
LUX, Anthology Film Archives, The Film-makers' Cooperative
Sunshine... a cloaked male figure... a dropped flower picked up by a woman... a key... a staircase... a bread knife... mirrors and reflections. Halting and repeating movements, isolating and altering images, Maya Deren reinterprets and elaborates an apparently simple, casual incident into a critical emotional experience. Deren wrote of her own works that they might be called metaphysical, poetic, choreographic, experimental. And in this her first film (which she also scripted, edited and acted in) she creates an interior world of resonance and rhythms, a dream time where beauty and nightmare mesh and fragment in images which emanate from the subconscious.
‘Meshes’ is, one might say, almost expressionist; it externalizes an inner world to the point where it is confounded with the external one.
– Maya Deren
There is, for me, not only a visual richness in Maya Deren's work, but also a richness of meaning and symbol which as a film-maker, and most particularly as a woman, I find relevant and challenging.
– Judith Higginbottom
'Meshes’ mixes the real and nightmare worlds of a woman so that film becomes a medium which does not portray events literally but which expresses emotions, in this case anguish and loneliness.
– Jo Camino, City Limits
Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.
This film is not available to book through Cinenova. It is now represented by LUX (UK), Anthology Film Archives (USA) and The Film-makers' Cooperative (USA)
