Meshes of the Afternoon

With Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid created one of the most important and influential experimental films of the 20th century. Starting from the real, the film moves step by step in the direction of fantasy, dreams and surreality. Employing montages, imagination breaks through into reality, reassembling the elements of time and space into a new unreal chronology. Psychoanalysis confronts symbolism when numerous egos of the protagonists (played by Maya Deren herself) encounter each other in dreamlike situations. At the end, a knife flashes, a mirrors breaks and the waves of the Atlantic wash the broken fragments into the ocean.