Meshes of the Afternoon - Maya Deren

Over the easter holidays I stumbled across a short film at the Tate Modern. I found this inspiring as it had major influences on the work of David Lynch's films.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a short experimental film directed by wife and husband team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film's narrative is circular, and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper-like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean.

In 1990, Meshes of the Afternoon was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", going into the registry in the second year of voting.

The film was the product of Deren's and Hammid's desire to create an avant garde personal film that dealt with devastating psychological problems, like the French avant-garde films of the 1920s such as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou.[citation needed] Deren's use of symbolism in her films relates to her father's preoccupation with psychology and her desire to appeal to her father's interests.[citation needed]

Deren and Hammid wrote, directed and performed in the film. Although Deren is usually credited as its principal artistic creator, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who knew the couple, has claimed in his book Film at Wit's End that Meshes was in fact largely Hammid's creation, and that their marriage began to suffer when Deren received more credit.

The original print had no score. However, a musical score influenced by classical Japanese music was added by Deren's third husband, Teiji Ito, in 1959.

The dreamlike (or nightmarish) atmosphere of Meshes has influenced many subsequent films, notably David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997); Wendy Haslem of the University of Melbourne's Cinema Studies department wrote about the parallels:

Maya Deren was a key figure in the development of the New American Cinema. Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon in his experimentation with narration. Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance. Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters and in the incorporation of the “psychogenic fugue,” the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual.

Roger Ebert has also noted the influence of Meshes within David Lynch's new feature-film release, INLAND EMPIRE.

In 1993, two different videos were made for Milla Jovovich's song "Gentleman Who Fell." The second, filmed in black-and-white, is an obvious pastiche of Meshes of the Afternoon.

The music video Your Ghost by Kristin Hersh contains several details from this video short, including the key in the mouth, the winding staircase and the phone off the hook.

Freedom of speech

A highly interesting situation has occurred recently. we had a guest speaker in uni (Seraphina Samet, a digital artist) who wanted to come in of her on request. i wont talk about her work as that is not of importance of what im concerned about, but i will say that most peoples opinions of her work seemed to be hitting consistent notes.
self indulgent, disengaging to the viewer, cliched techniques, and rather boring unless you personally know her as she was rather reluctant to talk about why she was stuck in this narrow alley of her own mentallity. these were the occurring themes amongst peoples blogs. ooops, did i just say those things? are the thought police coming for me?

i myslef did not actually update my blog about her, but since this reaction to others i feel inclined to. me and my course peers were not intentionally trying to demean her, but our course encourages us to write about guest speakers and anything of interest, and try to be critical as well as just talking about all the things we find interesting. as in this case, being critical can also be areas of interest. should we have just not bothered to write anything, or instead lie to ourself and say we thought she was great? are we not entitled to express our views?

so, the controversy that has occured is Seraphina's friends have read these posts and have left comments, or rather "qoutes", from really really clever people. you cant argue with quotes. she has also contacted our tutor and expressed her distress at these posts, and asked for them to be removed and have formal apologies from a selected few. i can totally understand that it must have been painful for her to read these views about her work, but wanting to take legal action against two students is a complete joke, if not verging on total stupidity. ok, let me get this straight, she is going to sue a few students for expressing their opinions on her work , but she gave us that right when she contacted our course to come and show us her work. i could be wrong, but what difference is there to a review from art critics and magazines ect.

ok, we are not accomplished employed critics but she gave us the opportunity to make our minds up about her the day she agreed to come in. also, if we are not employed accomplished critics, are our views less important and insignificant. and if they are, why make a deal about it? would this whole legal spiel have arisen if these views was written by a professional? i think not.. you would have to take it on the chin, try to take the criticism on board and move on! or just ignore them! the same should apply to our comments.

if she's this sensitive about her work , a suggestion to her is to maybe to not make her work so personal, maybe about something outside her own four walls. being an artist you work is always going to be criticized, and is something you should use to your advantage to gain views. i think Seraphina took this all very personally as her work is personal, due to it all being about her. in contrast, i went to see my tutors exhibition the other night (Micheal O'Conner). he was exploring an issue with his work that i believe he wanted to be open to criticism. it was a subject that people could relate to and peoples views would be of a huge range, but thats what made it interesting to observe.

if she wants to continue what she's doing, and take this incident to make her stronger, fair play to her. i really do wish her the best, and hope she can take some positives out of this incident and better her work. i truly hope this does not make her bitter. we did not mean any harm, but felt no wrong in expressing what we thought. or am i wrong in thinking that????