Meshes of the Afternoon #2

Meshes of the Afternoon is a radical avant-garde film. From the plot, we can know that the film’s narrative is circular. Deren encodes many daily items (eg. Flower, key, knife, mirror, etc), and sends such a message to us, the audience, then we decode it. Before we go in-depth into the decoding, I believe that it is important to understand the background of the movie. In the 1940s, a dominant pattern in classic Hollywood cinema is that women onscreen embody be-looked-at-ness, and are framed as objects of male desire. However, men do not serve as erotic objects. Although Maya Deren was Ukrainian, she lived in America since 1922. She was also a choreographer. The extreme close-up of the woman’s eyes symbolizes the female gaze. We’ve been watching the film from a woman’s perspective until the end the man appears on the screen. The woman is leading the movie, and we are gazing at the mirror-faced man. At the end of the film, the perspective changes from the woman to the man, because the woman is dead. We could only gaze at the screen with the man. I think the shots of Deren’s body and lips are a classic pattern in Hollywood that women are erotic objects, male’s desire. The flower on the bed changes into a knife, and Deren picks up the knife to resist the man. Nevertheless, nothing happened except the mirror breaking into pieces. The man symbolizes the patriarchal society and Hollywood’s dominant pattern in which women are objects for gazing.