Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a short experimental film directed by husband and wife team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid (born Alexander Hackenschmid, 1907-2004). The film was the product of Deren's and Hammid's desire to create a personal film that dealt with devastating psychological and personal problems. Most films of this genre had been French avant-garde films of the 1920s. The narrative is circular, and the context of the film's repeating images changes throughout. The psychological symbolism and recurrent images include: a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper-type cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off-the-hook and the ocean. Deren's use of symbolism in her films relates to her father's preoccupation with psychology and her desire to appeal to her father's interests.

Deren and Hammid wrote, directed and starred in the film. Filmmaker Stan Brakhage makes the case in his book Film at Wit's End that Meshes of the Afternoon was largely Hammid's creation although Deren stars and is largely credited with it. Because Deren received more credit for the film than her husband their marriage began to suffer.

The original print had no score. However, a musical score influenced by classical Japanese music was added by Deren's third husband, Teiji Ito, in 1953. The film was deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

In the early 1970s, J. Hoberman claimed Meshes of the Afternoon made a commentary on film noir. The film is structually related to Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, and the dreamlike (or nightmarish) atmosphere was influential on many subsequent films, notably David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997). Wendy Haslem of the University of Melbourne's Cinema Studies department wrote about the parallels:

Maya Deren was a key figure in the development of the New American Cinema. Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon in his experimentation with narration. Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance. Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters and in the incorporation of the “psychogenic fugue,” the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual. ^*

In 1993, Milla Jovovich made two different videos of her song, "Gentleman Who Fell." Lisa Bonet directed the first in color and starring Harry Dean Stanton. Jovovich was not satisfied with the result and made a second video, in black-and-white, that is an obvious pastiche of Meshes of the Afternoon.

1943 films | Short films | United States National Film Registry

Meshes of the Afternoon | Meshes of the Afternoon