An illustration of a curly-haired woman wearing round glasses and holding a knife, with text that reads, "Meshes of the Afternoon"

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Ostensibly an afternoon in a woman’s life, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), is an hallucinatory, avant-garde masterpiece. The plot, if the film can be said to have a plot, is that the woman (Maya Deren, writer, co-director, star) falls asleep a third of the way through the film and dreams. With a running time of about 14 minutes, one word of dialogue, and no real resolution, one might ask what all the fuss is about. Well, it’s difficult to think of many other films that are as poetic in imagery (maybe The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) or repetition (perhaps Persona, 1966) or as experimentally strange this early in cinematic history (the obvious forerunner being Un Chien Andalou, 1929). Moreover, the time it took to edit this film must easily have taken months—the amount of camera techniques employed is extraordinary. 

The way our minds have been molded to work is to grasp onto meaning and this film resists an easy path to meaning and understanding. A key. You don’t really know what is happening. A flower. It seems like an ordinary house, an ordinary day. A telephone. Even when the same scene happens again. (A record player.) When more than one woman appears (the woman). [A shrouded woman] a mirror [face] enters largely (and later) becomes small. A knife (a knife) and a key [key] battle and what is unlocked is imagination (noir). All the sacs of blood out of 5.

5 red Cs dripping in blood representing the rating 5 out of 5 sacs of blood

—Matthew Schmidt