by Aric HarrisonIn 1943 Maya Deren, a Russian born dancer/choreographer bought a second hand camera and with it she became the mother of Avant-Garde filmmaking. With the help of her cinematographer husband, Alexander Hammid, she gave life to one of the most inspired avant-garde films of all time, and one of the first feminists themed films, Meshes of the Afternoon. In this sixteen-minute nightmare we become part of Deren’s dark and oppressive reality. We watch as time gradually breaks her apart, fragmenting her into multiple dreamlike existences. She is forced to confront herself, her subconscious, and the patriarchal system that she exists in. What we discover is that her personal freedom derives from the separation of herself in life, through death, from the man who has taken her individual liberty away. He has brought her into a home that feels distant to her. She cannot cope. Deren’s contempt for the restrictiveness of her relationship quickly leads her away from sanity. She must reflect herself in order to understand herself. Meshes of the Afternoon is an early example of feminist cinema. Deren opens up a new dialogue on sexuality; one where the driving force is a desire to identify. It’s a critical characterization of a woman burdened with exploring her subconscious and a poetic introspection of a woman struggling to find the real within the delusions of her own mind. She beautifully depicts the doubts and confusions that occur when you are confronted with a love-based dilemma. Deren’s multiple existences and the repetition of scenes gives the sense that the main character is torn between many different and complex emotions. Meshes of the Afternoon is different in nearly every way from the typical cinematic experience of 1943. Deren thoroughly rejected typical narrative style in order to make way for audiences to experience the psychological drama of a woman.
The film seeks its resolution in the psychological complexity that is woman herself. “For if women are heteronormatively socially programmed to devote their entire being to the care and love of a man, then Meshes of the Afternoon makes the argument that a woman must find complete physical, mental and spiritual release in order to find herself again. The woman here feels so constricted and defined by a relationship that she must seek a dramatic escape. In her home, in her body and in her romantic life, she is caged” (Gemmill, Female Becomingness Through Maya Deren’s Lens in ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’). She is driven to her eventual suicide and the release from a patriarchal system. This film established Deren’s career and showcased her poetic, dream- like quality of filmmaking. She had an extraordinary ability, through framing and editing, to displace a “normal” sense of time and place and to express the tension between interiority and exteriority. Lauren Rabinowitz (a professor of film theory at the University of Iowa) pointed out that, Deren led the radical formalist movement as an oppositional force with a new set of economic and aesthetic standards that rebelled against a patriarchal society in which women were denied a voice.
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ContributorsThe contributors for Cashiers of Cinema are a menagerie of creators devoted to Radical Aesthetics. Meetings are held at the dumpster behind Winkie's. Archives
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