Genre Mystery

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Item: Meshes of the Afternoon
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

There are films that sit comfortably in the mainstream of cinema history, and then there are films that seem to exist slightly outside of it, in a space of their own making. Meshes of the Afternoon belongs firmly in the second category. Shot in 1943 in Los Angeles on 16mm film, the fourteen-minute short was made by Maya Deren and her then-husband Alexander Hammid largely at their own home and with their own money. It had no studio backing, no distributor, and no conventional ambitions. What it did have was a clarity of vision unusual enough to mark a genuine turning point in American cinema. Scholars and critics have consistently cited it as one of the founding works of American avant-garde film, and it regularly appears on canonical lists of the most significant short films ever made. For something running less than a quarter of an hour and made on a shoestring, its cultural footprint is, to put it plainly, enormous.

Maya Deren is the more prominent of the two directors in terms of subsequent reputation. Born in Kyiv and raised partly in the United States, she went on to write and lecture extensively on film form, becoming a key theoretical voice in experimental cinema through the 1940s and 1950s. Hammid, a Czech-born cinematographer and filmmaker, brought considerable technical experience to the collaboration, and his skill with the camera is evident throughout. The two also star in the film itself, which lends the material a personal, almost confessional quality. The film follows a woman (Deren) who returns home, drifts into sleep, and finds herself caught in a loop of recurring images: a key, a flower, a knife, a cloaked figure whose face is a mirror. Time and space fold back on themselves. Whether what we see is dream, memory, or something happening in the waking world is never resolved. The film works primarily through accumulation and repetition rather than conventional storytelling, drawing on the logic of dreams rather than the logic of plot. For context, the same year saw polished but unremarkable Hollywood productions rolling off the studio system's production line. Meshes of the Afternoon was doing something categorically different, closer in spirit to the European surrealism of Luis Buñuel than to anything playing at a local Odeon. If you're curious how the period looks from a more conventional angle, I've also written about The Ox-Bow Incident, another 1943 film that takes a very different approach to unsettling its audience, and Louisiana Story, a later 1940s production that similarly blurs lines between documentary and poetic vision. For a sense of how the fantasy genre has been handled elsewhere, my reviews of Viy and The Snow Woman are worth a look, both being films that use dream-like imagery and folklore to unsettle rather than to entertain straightforwardly.

https://youtu.be/JoETYvwI7I0?si=cHqp6ptfYCFUohr3 Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is undeniably important, a groundbreaking piece of avant-garde cinema and a pioneer of American experimental film. Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, it’s a dreamlike, surreal exploration of identity, subconscious fear, and repetition, told through symbolic imagery: a key that appears out of nowhere, a cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a knife in a loaf of bread. The cinematography is striking for its time (fluid camera movements, creative editing, double exposures) all done with a fraction of the resources available today. You can see its DNA in decades of arthouse and student films that followed. That said, as someone who’s never been drawn to pure arthouse abstraction, Meshes feels more like a historical artifact than a compelling experience. It’s hypnotic in rhythm, yes, but emotionally distant. There’s no narrative, no dialogue, no characters in the traditional sense, just mood, motif, and metaphor looping in on themselves. I get what it’s doing: plumbing the depths of the psyche, evoking anxiety and alienation through visual poetry. But without context or interpretation, it risks feeling like a series of enigmatic shots strung together. And honestly... Having worked in a college, I’ve seen dozens of student films that could be mistaken for this (dream sequences, symbolic objects, eerie music) but forget to bring meaning or originality. That makes it hard to watch Meshes now without thinking, “Yes, this was revolutionary… but everyone’s been copying it for 80 years.” As a modern viewing experience? Challenging, opaque, and not for everyone. A landmark, yes. But not one I’d revisit willingly.

I think that tension between historical importance and actual watchability is one that comes up more than critics like to admit, and it's one I find myself sitting with after returning to this one. Acknowledging that something changed the course of a medium is not the same as enjoying it on a Tuesday evening, and there's no shame in saying so. For me, the most honest response to Meshes of the Afternoon is a respectful nod from a safe distance: yes, it matters, yes it opened doors, and yes, I'd rather let someone else walk through them.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 1943 | Watched: 2025-09-22

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Trailer

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Stream: Criterion Channel
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