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Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon
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Regarded as one of the founders of the postwar American independent cinema, the legendary Maya Deren was a poet, photographer, ethnographer, filmmaker and impresario. Her efforts to promote an independent cinema have inspired filmmakers for over fifty years. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) ranks among the most widely viewed of all avant-garde films. The eleven essays gathered here examine Maya Deren's writings, films, and legacy from a variety of intriguing perspectives. Some address her relative neglect during the rise of feminist film theory; all argue for her enduring significance. The essays cast light on her aesthetics and ethics, her exploration of film form and of other cultures, her role as (woman) artist and as film theorist.
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The raven-haired Maya Deren--experimental filmmaker, proto-feminist, proto-everything, really--is the subject of this not especially illuminating documentary, which seizes on the idea of Deren's self-absorption like a lifeboat. For one thing, that quality hardly makes Deren unique among great artists; for another, the film misses that what's truly singular about her is that her work seems to come out of a dedicated worldliness, an upbringing of tremendous curiosity (and privilege), and a ferocious educational discipline--Swiss prep schools, degrees from NYU and Smith, and tours with a professional dance company, all before the age of 25. Though most of the footage is fascinating and could serve as an acceptable introduction to Deren's oeuvre, director Martina Kudlácek glosses over much of the import of her subject's independence, including the provocative fact that "Meshes of the Afternoon" was shot in and around Deren's own Hollywood apartment during the height of the studio period. This wasn't just a water-obsessed solipsist, but a politicized woman who took many interracial lovers; her trips to Haiti (to film voodoo rituals on a Guggenheim fellowship) weren't simply aesthetic pursuits of beautiful bodies in motion, but a means of breaking with American culture and its stifling roles for women. Kudlácek does include moving testimony from several of the artists and cineastes who were inspired by the warp that Deren seemed to create wherever she went. But the full Deren story--so much more than her art--is largely shortchanged.
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For her very first short film — Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) — Deren won a major award at the 1947 Cannes Film Festival. In the film, Deren watches herself chase a third, enigmatically hooded figure up a tree-lined path. The hooded figure does a three-quarter-turn toward the camera, and reveals, as its face, a flat mirror. As the title of this documentary — In the Mirror of Maya Deren — suggests, Deren's art was inner-directed, and the mirror is its proper symbol. But Deren's mirrors were not those of the narcissist; they were those of the religious explorer. In her next short, At Land (1945), the image of Deren merges with that of the ocean; the truth she sought there was the mirror of that in the depths of her own soul.
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In the early 1940s, Deren used some of the inheritance from her father to purchase a used 16 mm Bolex camera. She used this camera to make her first and most well-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), in collaboration with Hammid. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Ito in 1957.
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With IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN, documentary filmmaker Martina Kudlácek has fashioned not only fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking and influential artist, but a pitch-perfect introduction to her strikingly beautiful and poetic body of work. Crowned "Fellini and Bergman wrapped in one gloriously possessed body" by the L.A. Weekly, Maya Deren is arguably the most important and innovative avant-garde filmmaker in the history of American cinema. Using locations from the Hollywood hills to Haiti, Deren made such mesmerizing films as AT LAND, RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME and her masterpiece MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
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Deren inspired and stunned many people in her short life of forty-four years. Her first film, “Meshes of the Afternoon,” was made with Hammid, a hand-wind Bolex camera and funds from her own pocket in a period of two weeks in 1943. Fluidly combining mysterious surrealist elements with decidedly female psychological overtones to evoke an image of consciousness, its influence ranks with that of Bunuel’s “Un Chien Andalou.” Her subsequent films continued to explore space, time, the nature of form, the psyche, the possibilities of cinematic manipulation and the magic of dance.
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Meshes of the Afternoon