Meshes of the Afternoon #1

Meshes of the Afternoon | Maya Deren | 1943

The movie Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is only fourteen minutes long, but the woman’s recurring dream makes the short fourteen minutes complicated, strange and challenging for the audience to understand. In this essay, I argue that Deren uses many feminist strategies to help her express the connotation of feminism.

Firstly, the storyline. I believe that this short film is a dream within a dream. I think this complex brief film could be separated into five parts or five dreams.

Dream 1:

The woman picks up the flowers on the ground in the afternoon and returns to the door of her house. The woman drops the key when she pulls it out of the bag, the woman picks it up and opens the door. The knife on the table falls from the bread when she enters the house. She puts the flower on her abdomen and falls asleep on the sofa. In her dream, she sees herself running outside and chasing the mirror-faced mysterious man. She couldn’t catch up with him and turned around to go back to the house.

Dream 2:

The woman comes into the house just like she is in Dream 1, steps over the knife on the stairs, and walks lightly up the stairs. She is surprised to find that the knife is hidden in the quilt. She sees herself asleep on the sofa and gazes out the window at running self chasing the mirror-faced man (it seems like she is gazing at her Dream 1), then she spits out the key from her mouth.

Dream 3:

The woman walks into the house and sees the mirror-faced man with flowers going upstairs and resting them on the bed. She sees herself asleep on the sofa and gazes out the window at herself chasing the mirror-faced man. She spits out the key again from her mouth, but the difference this time is the key becomes a knife.

Dream 4:

The woman holds the knife and rushes into the house. Three selves from different times meet in the same space. Each of the three selves takes the key to the dining table, and the key becomes a knife again in the hand of the last self. The woman with the knife will kill her sleeping self on the sofa, but suddenly the woman with the knife turns into a man. The camera cuts to the man that he is touching the woman, also a close-up of the woman’s sexy lips. The flowers on the bed turn into a knife, and the woman uses the knife to stab the man’s face, which turns into a mirror and breaks.

Dream 5:

The man repeats the series of woman’s actions (walking into the house). He Picks up the flowers and pushes the door. The mirror breaks into pieces, and the woman is dead.