Meshes of the Afternoon

DIR: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, USA 1943, 14 min, Black and White/Silent. WITH: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Cert PG.

Ulster Hall Group
Tuesday 13th July, 8pm
£3, or £10 for a WeeFT pass

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the trance film, in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.”