Meshes of the Afternoon
Before I start I must say that this movie is a prominent influence in my work. Causing me to always look at mirrors and reflections to search the soul, I will always site it as a major factor in inspiring my love for films.
One of the worst places to excavate is your mind. The horrid dark parts that constantly perverse your memory and imagination. For those with an active one, every day is a battlefield and every night is a war zone. Dreams are haunting even long after you are awake. When trying to convey the fantastical such as your inner most images, hopes and fears that plague you in the night, then it is hard to translate it into a film without being so ridiculously surreal, you alienate your audience. Enter Meshes in the Afternoon, a movie that exactly conveys a personal experience of powerful dreaming that seeps into the blistering daylight and become truths.
In this experimental short film Maya Deren, a master filmmaker of the surreal and explores that fine dance of day dreaming. Only fifteen minutes, it is a breath taking visualisation of a young woman on a hot summer’s afternoon who falls asleep in her arm chair. Exploring the plane of hallucination, she encounters many sides of her mind but they are horrific and terrifying, acts in which lead up to her suicide. When a man wakes her up, she finds that she begins to re-enact the events of her dreams are coming true. But is she awake or is this continuous delusion?
Deren subverts the real into, funnily enough, this mesh of thoughts and representation. Utilising the limited technology her time period may have, she brings a fresh eye to the genre and subverts some incredible shots to make the viewer always feeling uneasy. Angles focusing on the stars, a knife, eyes and reflections all may seem ordinary but Deren uses it as a gaze into the haunting of the artistry. Using repetition and triggering memory (and how memory can too be perturbed), Deren demands your attention and you have to look past the grainy surface and go deeper into what she is saying.
The constant battle with inner demons is large. The illusions of frustration and isolation are large as Deren’s role struggles inside her mind and out. Constantly turning the camera on the “viewer” and Deren herself by using mirrors and reflections. A mysterious hooded figure plagues her, hinting at death and destruction, with a mirror for a face. It quite brilliant reflects fear and issues with someone’s inner most self. The idea of the self is large here as Deren’s character has dinner with different versions of herself, catches her reflection within the objects around her and continuously falls into her mind. Each second is another layer of the conscious and the subconscious, and as a viewer, you must unwrapped the symbolism.
The movie is frightening and scary because it plays with the idea that not every wide eyed moment is a true one, drawing you into the sensation of reawakening in a dream. It is a different level of cinema viewing, where you are submerged in the subjective reality of the characters mind. Similarly to recent movies such as Inception, you are never sure what it entirely means or what is real or not. That creates such an unnerving experience that it is a movie that will never leave your mind.
In fact, it might plague you, even in your dreams.
TTFN
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