Review of Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Justin B — 18 Jun 2007

The most petrifying feminist psychodrama about the ambiguity of social gender I've ever seen. Deren follows in Germaine Dulac's footsteps (The French Dulac was basically the first woman filmmaker) to construct a moody, experimental trance work purely about the reciprocity of her sexual identity as an autonomous woman; hence, how we all chase or pursue gender roles constantly, and how the same such roles constantly stalk us.

Since the cloaked figure's gender is unknown, the spectator gets the sense that Deren's film mirrors (NO pun intended, for those of you who've seen Deren's film) ideas of queer theory and the like (not surprising this was right before the burgeoning of French Kristevaean feminism).

The cinematographic allusions knitted into the film also harken to German Expressionism and works such as "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," case-in-point being a scene in which Deren herself stands in a hallway and re-enacts the famous 1919 Ceasare sleepwalking scene.

The film is autobiographical in the meager sense that Deren herself stars as the protagonist in her own film (her husband [I don't know which one of the three] filmed MANY of the scenes), but not shamelessly narcissistic like a Stanley Brakhage piece.

Check out the sequel, "At Land" as well; very horrorshow film. For interpretative purposes, know that many art film theorists generally have tried to pigeonhole Deren's work as directly surrealist or intimately related to what Bunuel was doing in the late 1920s with Dali, but Deren's film is more in the category of what the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov originally called "The Fantastic," which is a work of art that initially exhibits reality as most usually view it, but undermines that reality at certain points (the "fantastic" points- there is no synonym for the idea) to create a hesitation in the viewer to believe they are in the waking, conscious world rather than a strange dream.

For example, the surrealist film, "Un Chien Andalou" is filled with scenes in which the viewer would not hesitate for a single second to say the film displays the unconscious happenings of a dream, while "Meshes" is slightly more realist and anchored to the viewer's general perception of reality.

There was no question in my mind while watching Bunuel's film that I was viewing an onscreen dream when the priest enters yoked to an enormous grand piano containing a tipped over cow; the mere idea of such scenes obliterates any hesitation the viewer would have to believe that what they're viewing is surreal.

Todorov would say Bunuel's surrealist film is a product of "the marvelous," a film that makes the viewer disbelieve the film is exhibiting reality, tipping the hesitation perched on the fulcrum balancing reality and phantasm in the direction of phantasm.

Todorov would call Deren's film "uncanny," meaning the hesitation is destroyed by a stronger grip on filmic reality. At the point you're convinced a film is one or the other (real or surreal, conscious or unconscious), the fantastic no longer exists because it's a film that constantly sustains your hesitation to believe it's one or the other.

I fully acknowledge that all films are probably fantastic in some way or the other and actually endorse that philosophy. I'm simply saying that generally, Dali's films contain less fantastic "matter" than Deren's work because Deren's is more often in the gray area between fantasy and reality; inhabiting the fantastic space more thoroughly.

In other words, avoid saying "Meshes" is surrealist in precisely the same vein as "L'Age D'Or" or material of the early surrealists.