Meshes of the Afternoon: A Revolution in Filmmaking

By Odelia Wu

Born in Soviet Ukraine as Eleanora Derenkovsky, the pioneering experimental filmmaker adopted the name Maya after the Sanskrit word for “dream” or “illusion,” which would soon become central concepts in her enormously seminal body of work. However, Maya Deren’s 1943 debut Meshes of the Afternoon remains her unassailable magnum opus, and is widely considered the most important film in the history of the American avant-garde; a claim substantiated by Meshes’ preservation in the National Film Registry and its ranking as the BBC’s 40th greatest American film ever made. Created alongside her then-husband Alexander Hammid for a mere $275 in her Hollywood Hills bungalow, Deren and Hammid are the sole performers in Meshes. Clocking in at just 14 minutes, the silent black-and-white film consists of a woman coming home and slipping off into a midday reverie, which leads to a fragmented montage of uncanny dream sequences and repeated imagery, melding together dread and desire, violence and seduction into a rhythmic, trance-like narrative. The same motifs play over and over again: a hooded figure with a mirror as a face, her trek up the stairs, the knife on the table, the key in her mouth, the flower on the pavement. Multiple versions of Deren appear as the cyclic structure continues and the film ends with an eruption of brutality: Deren’s lifeless body, covered in shards of glass. 

Although Meshes of the Afternoon’s vast influence can be traced in media as far-reaching as Kate Bush’s ethereal music videos to the surrealist films of David Lynch, the insular nature of the American avant-garde meant that very few people were actually exposed to Deren’s work until much later on. Instead, the people coming into contact with her films were her contemporaries—those who already existed within the movement as writers, artists, critics, filmmakers, and intellectuals. By examining the wide scope of criticism and scholarship that surrounds the film, as well as personal accounts from Deren’s contemporaries, a clear picture begins to emerge of the cultural implications that prevented Meshes from gaining popularity amongst the masses, the complex gender dynamics that shrouded Deren’s role in the making of the film, and the legacy of Deren herself as a bold, uncompromising, and enigmatic trailblazer in cinematic history. 

The physical and cultural devastation of Europe after World War II resulted in the displacement of the avant-garde art movement, which found its new locus in New York as Americans and European émigrés worked, lived, and fraternized in a small, inward-looking community. Maya Deren, who moved back to Greenwich Village shortly after finishing Meshes and remained there for the rest of her life, quickly became ensnared in this intricate web of downtown artists and bohemians. She worked with Marcel Duchamp on an unfinished film filmed in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery. Composer John Cage, who was responsible for the first Happenings during his time at Black Mountain College, appeared in and collaborated on Deren’s film At Land. Hella Heyman, the German-born cinematographer who shot a number of Deren’s films and ended up marrying Alexander Hammid after the couple’s divorce, had also attended a semester at the fabled Black Mountain College before meeting Deren. After a chance meeting in Amagansett, Deren befriended Anaïs Nin, who would be featured in Ritual in Transfigured Time alongside Gore Vidal. 

Deren’s involvement and positioning in these circles meant that her primary audience was her friends, who were also her primary performers, her primary inspirations, and her primary critics. In diary entries from 1945 and 1946, Nin evocatively details the thrall Deren seemed to have over them: 

We were influenced, dominated by her, and did not know how to free ourselves. We are subject to her will, her strong personality, yet at the same time we do not trust or love her wholly. We recognize her talent. We talk of rebellion, of being forced, of tyranny, but we bow to her projects, make sacrifices (102).

Without any established framework to market, distribute, or screen her films, Deren became an expert in self-promotion. In February of 1946, she held a screening of three of her films (Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and A Study in Choreography for the Camera) at Provincetown Playhouse in the West Village. She promoted it heavily, creating brochures, tacking fliers around the Village, and personally inviting major critics. “The evening sold out in a matter of minutes, leaving hundreds on the street milling about in frustration,” says Mark Alice Durant in his recent biography of Deren, “Deren’s films were, for weeks, the talk of the Village, even those who were turned away had an opinion about what was seen that night” (2022). Nin recalls the event in an oft-quoted entry from March, 1946: 

The crowd was dense, and some policeman thought he should investigate. He asked: “Is this a demonstration?” Some-one answered: “It is not a demonstration, it is a revolution in film-making.” (137) 

However, Deren was not a universally beloved figure, even within her own circles. For all the excitement surrounding it, Meshes of the Afternoon received its own heap of criticism. In his 1946 review, painter and critic Manny Farber dismissed Deren’s work as “Freudian-toned, lesbianish, freezing, arty, eclectic, conventional, and safe,” going on to argue that, “This film, cluttered with corny, amateurishly arranged symbols and mainly concerned with sex, hops too confusingly from reality to dream” (292). Farber is known for championing and coining the term “underground film” in 1957 and was one of the great iconoclasts of the period. However, his emphasis on sex and sexuality in his lambasting of Meshes is a particularly trenchant display of the gender dynamics extant in the art world. For the male artists in this period, the exploration of sexuality and the female form in particular was celebrated as visionary. But female artists who sought to explore their own innermost desires and sensuality were often met with chastisement. James Agee, another leading voice in the film criticism of the 1940s, found fault with Deren’s performance and pronounced her films “solemnly, arrogantly, distressingly pretentious and arty” (1946, 147). Yet he maintained that “they are to be seen, and that there is a good deal in them to be liked, enjoyed, and respected” (ibid). 

A common thread throughout the criticism of Meshes is Deren’s supposed lack of subtlety in conveying themes and symbols. Heavy-handed, cliched, and self-conscious are a few of the ways the film was described by well-respected critics like Farber and Agee. Another attack frequently levied at the film was that it was unoriginal and simply riding the coattails of the European avant-gardists, most notably Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1928) as well as Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1932). Interestingly, Deren firmly rejected any link to these works, and to Surrealism as a whole, in spite of the undeniable visual and narrative similarities. Against her best efforts, Meshes would continue to be discussed in relation to Un Chien Andalou and the surrealists, and to this day remains inextricably bound to them. 

Something her (overwhelmingly male) detractors neglected to acknowledge was how Meshes was not merely taking the formula of its predecessors and regurgitating it, but instead using it as a framework to expose and disrupt the pervasiveness of the male gaze and female subjectivity in cinema. As Theresa L. Geller asserts in her 2006 paper, “Rather than read Meshes of the Afternoon as a feminist intervention and reappraisal of the patriarchal discourses at work in early European modernist film, it has been written into film history, most notably by P. Adams Sitney, as the unproblematized legacy of that tradition” (149). Through the use of the dreamscape to represent female interiority, Deren is able to fuse the perspectives of author, spectator, and protagonist to probe the development of her personal and artistic identity within a male-dominated society. Hence, Geller argues, Meshes and the remainder of her canon can be interpreted as autobiographical films.

Another major point of contention in the critical reception of Meshes was the issue of authorship. At the time of its release, the film was presented as the byproduct of the husband-and-wife duo, although Deren’s name circulated much more due to her vigorous promotion efforts and screenings of Meshes alongside her other independently-directed films. Hammid himself credits Deren as the film’s sole creator. However, in subsequent decades Deren’s role in the making of the film was obfuscated. When P. Adams Sitney dedicates the opening chapter of Visionary Film—one of the foremost texts on American avant-garde cinema—to Meshes of the Afternoon, he awards authorship of the film chiefly to Hammid: 

Commentators on this film have tended to neglect the collaboration of Alexander Hammid, to consider him a technical assistant rather than an author. We should remember that he photographed the whole film. Maya Deren simply pushed a button on the camera for the two scenes in which he appeared. (1974, 9–10) 

In going so far as to call the film “Hammid’s portrait of his young wife,” Sitney reframes Meshes to conform “to the dominant artistic paradigm of the male auteur with his female muse” (Geller 150). He contrasts their partnership with Buñuel and Dali’s, highlighting that the latter pair were both accomplished artists at the time of their collaboration, while Deren had flirted with numerous mediums (poetry, dance, photography) but had not succeeded in building a career in any. Her husband, on the other hand, was already an experienced cameraman, editor, and director, supposedly providing him with the technical expertise to realize the film. Geller contends that by “assigning the film’s guiding consciousness to Hammid,” Sitney is able to gloss over the feminist critique embedded in the fabric of the film; thus “...enacting discursively the very thing the film itself critiques—the de-subjectification of woman—Sitney turns Deren into Hammid’s, and his own, object of contemplation rather than seeing her as an artist and subject in her own right” (151–152). Conversely, earlier critics such as Farber and Agee placed an emphasis on “Deren’s specifically gendered influence in order to attack it” (152). In 1946, Deren became the first person to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative filmmaking, and the following year Meshes won her the Grand Prix Internationale in 16mm experimental film at Cannes. She went on to establish the Creative Film Foundation in support of independent filmmakers. However, she had sunk into obscurity and poverty by the time she died from a brain hemorrhage at age forty-four (on Friday the 13th, nonetheless), a portrait of martyrdom that only further contributed to her legend. 

Today, Deren is viewed almost unequivocally as the conceptual force behind Meshes. She is a figure that looms ineffably large in not just the independent, underground, and avant-garde visual cultures (inspiring filmmakers like Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, and Barbara Hammer), but also in the essence of Hollywood auteurism, demonstrated through perhaps Deren’s most significant spiritual successor, David Lynch. Recent decades have seen her mythic status cemented in prolific scholarship and media concerning her life and work. In 2011, fifty years after Deren’s death, John David Rhodes’ Meshes of the Afternoon was published as part of the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series. Named for the landmark film, the book places Meshes at the center of a changing cultural landscape and argues for its reading as not just a pioneering feminist text or experimental film, but a paradigm of political art. In the prologue, Rhodes cogently posits that although Hammid may have had an equal hand in the film’s production, “the legend of Meshes belongs to the legend of Maya” (13). In the pattern of Geller and other scholars, Rhodes affirms that Meshes is a deeply personal film and inseparably tethered (in both its conception and evolution) to Deren’s “dangerously seductive” life and legacy (ibid). 

A childhood divided between Kiev, New York, and Geneva; a Socialist activist in Syracuse; touring the Jim-Crow South with Kathleen Dunham’s black dance troupe; a fixture in the Village beau monde; a Voodoo priestess in Haiti; an effusive proponent of film as an art form throughout her career. It is not hard to understand why Deren’s cult of personality has, at times, overshadowed her work, as is the case with many great female artists. But as more attention has been paid to not just her filmic oeuvre but her radical work as a theorist, which was largely ridiculed and overlooked during her lifetime, it becomes clear that “Maya Deren did not contribute to an existing film movement but galvanically launched a new one” (Nichols, 2001, 5). Meshes of the Afternoon indisputably laid the groundwork for this legacy to form, as well as the legacies of countless other filmmakers, and eighty years on, its indelible influence on pop culture continues to be seen.

Works Cited 

Agee, James. “Films.” Review of Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land. The Nation, March 2, 1946, 269–270. 

Deren, Maya and Alexander Hammid, dirs. Meshes of the Afternoon. 1963. Farber, Manny. “Maya Deren’s Films.” In Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito (Library of America, 2016), 292–93. 

Geller, Theresa L. “The personal cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and its critical reception in the history of the avant-garde." Biography, vol. 29, no. 1, winter 2006, pp. 140+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A146346918/LitRC?u=anon~9fa933eb&sid=googleScholar&xid=c1e921b5. Accessed 16 Aug. 2024.

Nichols, Bill. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. 

Nin, Anaïs. “March, 1946.” In The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1944-1947, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1971), 134-138, 94-106. 

Rhodes, John David. Meshes of the Afternoon. London: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2011. 

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film; the American Avant-Garde. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.