Meshes of the Afternoon

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the crucial contributions to the cinema, especially experimental cinema, by Maya Deren who believed that the function of film, like that of other art forms, was to create an experience. Creation and experience are important notions to explain Maya Deren’s vision because she creates a new World, which is fed by “reality” in her films. In the aspect of creation and experience, she had a successful touch to sociological and psychological issues, such as feminism and identity conflicts. Meshes of the Afternoon has a critical reflection of patriarchy and splits of identities via a Lacanian perspective, that comes from the lack of desire. In this film, dreams reveal the gap amongst reality and identity, which isn’t emancipated, so there is a reciprocal contrast between the dream-world as a liberating place and reality as a constraining place.

Once I addressed dreams in Meshes of the Afternoon, I will emphasize the effects of symbolics that are results of alienation. In order to express alienation of the “other”, we see the separation of Deren’s identities of three fragmented women who symbolise stages of conscience and reflection of sociological exposure which is not innocent, contrarily it reinforces the status quo. When the status quo is justified, people hardly ever perceive re-production, re-shaping and re-dividing of identities. When humanity opens its eyes to recognize the system, which is internalized and embodied by a cycle of repetition, it closes its eyes immediately.

“I open, I close.”*

One of the means to characterize alienation is the mirror in Maya Deren’s films owing to its inherent dialectical character, which visualizes dichotomy. Deren depersonalises her characters by using the mirror by virtue of its nature.

The Haitian voodoo ritual (…) works like a mirror in which humans and gods see themselves reflected in one another. Gods become humans and humans are depersonalised as archetypes and images of the gods.

*By Peter Freund/Camp

Didem Yilmaz