Meshes of the Afternoon: Surrealist Filmmaking by Maya Deren

Introduction and Background

Meshes of the Afternoon was introduced to audiences in 1943 as a short film directed by the husband-and-wife team Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film has been widely considered one of the most compelling works in the surrealist tradition and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Approximately thirteen and a half minutes long, it contains a variety of striking visual effects that challenge conventional narrative filmmaking.

Maya Deren's Artistic Vision

Deren articulated her intentions clearly in a 1944 statement:

"My purpose is to make an experimental motion picture (the physical scope of which is subject to material conditions) in which I will attempt to develop a cinematic art form, originating in the creative potentialities of the movie camera itself, and freed from the influence of other artistic idioms, such as literature, theater, the plastic and pictorial arts." — Maya Deren, 1944

This statement establishes the foundation for understanding the film: Deren sought to create a purely cinematic language, one that owed nothing to pre-existing art forms and instead emerged from the unique capabilities of the camera itself. This ambition places Meshes of the Afternoon squarely within the broader avant-garde film movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Scene-by-Scene Visual Analysis

The film begins with a woman picking up a flower from the sidewalk. Her face is not shown; instead, the camera emphasizes shadows that highlight her movements. Although the scenes initially suggest reality, the movements and actions carry a surreal quality and do not follow a normal routine. This impression is reinforced in the next scene, where a key is dropped and falls down a staircase — yet the manner in which it falls, and in which the woman retrieves it, does not quite seem real. These early moments establish the film's central strategy of blurring the boundary between the ordinary and the uncanny.

One of the subsequent scenes introduces a ghostly figure that appears to hover as it moves away from the camera. The figure's face is completely void of detail — a blank expanse of pure white, as if a piece of white cardboard had been cut out to fill the hood of its cloak. The woman from the earlier scenes chases after this figure and follows it into a dwelling, where she discovers a knife at the bottom of a staircase. Her face is finally revealed, and she is shown hovering up the stairs — an effect that appears to have been achieved through slow motion.

What follows is a disorienting combination of the woman floating and falling, rendered from multiple camera angles. It is deliberately difficult to determine exactly what she is doing; the camera emphasizes unnatural movement over narrative clarity. The film then enters a repeating pattern in which the same woman watches herself chase the ghostly figure. Three versions of the same woman sit down at a table and take turns picking up a key, only for it to reappear each time — until, finally, one woman picks up the key and it transforms into a knife.

The film ultimately suggests that the entire preceding sequence has been a dream. It concludes with a mirror being broken and thrown into the ocean, after which the woman's husband picks up the flower, opens the door, and finds his wife dead in a chair, surrounded by broken glass. This ending reframes everything the viewer has witnessed, consistent with Surrealist interests in the dream state and the unconscious.