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Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

★½ — Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Shot in and around Deren and Hammid's own home in Los Angeles on a budget of roughly $275, Meshes of the Afternoon is a fourteen-minute silent film (a sound score was added by Teiji Ito in 1959) that became the founding text of American avant-garde cinema. Maya Deren was a Ukrainian-born poet and theorist who had recently emigrated to the United States; her collaborator and then-husband Alexander Hammid was a Czech documentary filmmaker of some standing in Europe. The two made the film entirely independently, with no studio involvement whatsoever. Its influence on the American experimental tradition, from Kenneth Anger through Stan Brakhage, would prove considerable, and Deren spent much of the following decade writing, lecturing, and producing solo works that cemented her reputation as the movement's central figure.

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.

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

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch (US)

Stream: Criterion Channel
Physical: Amazon UK

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