157. Meshes Of The Afternoon (1943)

Directed By Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid

Synopsis

... uhhh. Girl does stuff and then sees herself do stuff. Death has a mirror for a face. She may or may not have been dead throughout the whole film.

Review

As you can see by the synopsis Yankee Doodle Dandy this ain't. It's the kind of film that you feel should be aplauded by snaping your fingers at the end, oh and cigarettes and beret wearing are optional but might improve your enjoyment of the piece.

Yes, it is pretentious, but isn't all avant-garde/experimentalism pretentious? And is this necessarily a bad thing? Frankly with all these down to earthy, war time films I was gasping for some pretentiousness. It seemed for a while that after Buñuel the world of experimental cinema was dead, but Deren and Hammid put it squarely back on the map.

So it isn't that innovative, Spaniards were doing it in France 20 years earlier. This film does, however, have an aesthetic which is both very particularly of the 40's and also very particularly American. This is what marks it as a different and interesting film. It is still obsessed with the subconscious as well as death and mutilation like any good surrealist film, but it does it differently and it shows.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

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.

Women they all be biotches! (Except my wife, she's luverly)

Part I:



Part II:



And... The Milla Jovovich video for The Gentleman Who Fell: