Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid | Meshes in the Afternoon / 1943

a sharp knife, a dead phone, and record playing in an empty house: the scene of the crime

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid (directors) Meshes in the Afternoon / 1943

 

We should not look for a single long coherent narrative in Maya Deren’s purposely fragmented and repetitive (one might almost describe it as looped) cinematic work of 1943, Meshes of the Afternoon. Rather it contains a series of possibilities—dream possibilities—for the central figure, presumably the director herself, to live out in the future, including a deep friendship with a female friend, a possible lesbian relationship, and death by suicide among other choices she might make, including returning to what is clearly a fraught relationship with her male companion, Alexander Hammid, whose name appears on this work as a co-director.

 

    Hammid later claimed that most of this silent movie was, in fact, his doing; and friends suggest he suffered over the attention Deren received for the film. One might certainly see this as yet another example of male hubris and sense of entitlement. For if it is his work, it is most clearly presented from her point-of-view, and surely doesn’t project a positive sense of their future together or, for that matter, even a positive view of male sexuality. This is a movie that suggests a major sea-change in Deren’s consciousness, which doesn’t seem to include any male except to send him on his way as she associates his attempt to have sex with her with death.

      The film begins with a female hand presenting a flower to our heroine, a kind of talisman that will allow her, perhaps even give her permission to enter the dream world she is about to experience. The hand holding it comes, quite literally, out of the sky, from the top of the screen, laying the flower on the road our hero is about to trod. She casually picks up the blossom and moves forward, although we see her only in shadow, a symbol of the dream state and, of course, a kind of shadow-figure, a doppelganger or mirror image of her own self which will be played out in several different ways throughout the film.

       But it also clear that she is not sure she wants to fully enter the dream about her own self, knocking at the door first to find it locked, as if the house she was about to enter was not quite hers to freely pass into. And when she goes to unlock the door, she drops the key, which not only falls on the door stoop, but leaps down the stairs, forcing her to almost give up entry as she attempts to retrieve it. Yet, she does finally capture it, turn it into the lock, and enter her own home only to

find it filled with clues, almost as in a crime scene.

       A newspaper has been spread out across the floor. A knife hanging in a loaf of bread, falls from the bread to the dining room table. A phone sits on the staircase, the handset off the hook. She climbs the stairs to see a curtain blowing from apparently an open window, a record player still playing a record placed upon the turntable. She turns it off and pulls away the needle. It is almost that, in her absence, someone has visited her house, or perhaps she has gone out very quickly, in the middle of a series of actions.

       She sits down in an empty chair, looking out across the yard, flower still in hand. Slowly, she begins to caress herself, her vagina, stomach, breasts, and legs, in that order. We see her eyes growing heavy as she falls into sleep.

       From the window we see a woman going down the path, dressed in a black dress and mantilla, her face, when she briefly turns, a complete blank, a bit like a switched-off television screen. She too holds flowers, if it is, in fact, a female.

       Once more, as in the first scenes, we see the shadow of our heroine. She seems to be following the woman in black, running after her, but as in dreams, never being able to catch up and reach her. The distance, in fact, seems to increase the more she runs.

       Reaching the staircase to her home again, she ceases the chase and climbs the stairs to once again enter the house. For the first time we see her, face on, Deren herself. As she enters she sees the same mess of newspapers on the floor. But this time the knife is embedded in the carpet of the stairway to the bedroom. She walks around it as she climbs stairs to the second floor, the stairwell this time seeming at least twice as long as in the earlier scene. She momentarily wraps the curtain of the bedroom round her body before moving forward to find the headset of the phone alone on the bed. Under the covers she discovers another knife. She quickly hangs up the headset on its cradle, and steps back to the window, falling out, down the entry staircase backwards, pulling herself back into the room to discover the woman (her previous self) still sitting in the chair, the record player again playing a song. In reverse order the last time, she pulls the needle off the record and turns it off. For a second she seems fascinated by the woman in the chair before the quick walk of the woman in the black robe catches her eye below, as she turns to watch her on the move. She watches herself, or another version of herself, running after the woman in the black mantilla.

      Meanwhile the self below, pulls out the key from her mouth and again enters the house. But suddenly we realize, it was not Deren who entered, but the nun-like figure, who walks firmly up the stairs, with Deren following after, keeping close watch. Deren climbs the stairs, this time as if suffering from a spell of vertigo, rolling off the walls beside the staircase, sometimes being forced to crawl on her knees in the manner of Curtis Harrington in his long climb of a staircase in his film Picnic (1949, clearly influenced by this movie).

 

     When she finally reaches the top, she observes the nun placing a flower, similar to the first one of the film, on the bed. And we realize that the flower may be a potent agent of sleep, possibly even death. When the woman in black turns toward us, once more we see the terrifying mirror-like face.

     Just as suddenly the flower lady disappears into think air, Deren realizing that she has only made half-way up the stairs. The knife now lays on a small end table next to the sleeping woman still ensconced in her chair. Below, the nun-like woman walks briskly off, Deren’s figure seen running after her all over again.

   Again the woman pulls the key out of her mouth and walks up the outside stairs to the front door of the house. But she enters this time with the knife in hand instead of the key. Two other versions of her are sitting at the dining room table awaiting her entry. She walks over to them, puts the knife down on the table as it quick transforms back into the key. Is it to be a challenge or a revealing conversation, the opening of a true communication between her other selves. The two others, still sleepy, pick up the key and display in in their open hands before it suddenly appears back on the table. But when third version of Deren picks up the key, turning her hand over to reveal it, it become the knife, the other two shocked by what they witness.

     All this time, as well, the woman in chair remains asleep, this time the new Deren appearing in what appear to be goggles or a device that pretends to be eyes, while knife he hand, she begins to stalk a nearby beach that leads just as quick back to the living room where she appears to put the knife into the sleeping woman’s mouth.

 

   Just as suddenly, her husband appears standing over the sleeping version of her, as she had a moment before. He holds out his empty hand. She presents him with the flower which puts into his mouth as he reaches both hands out to pull her up and out of her slumbers.

    He begins to walk to the staircase, noticing, once more, the phone at the bottom step, the headset off the cradle. He returns the phone headset back to its proper place and begins to climb the staircase, flower in hand. She follows, stopping briefly to look into the dining room where the bread sits on the center of the table, the knife beside it. Order seems to have been restored. This time she has no difficulty mounting the staircase, following in the steps of her husband.

    She lays down in the bed, he sitting beside her, stroking her body and leans toward to kiss her. But she now has a knife again beside her head, taking it up and challenging the form over her. We see broken pieces of glass falling into the sand by the ocean where she had briefly walked in the earlier scene.

     Once more Hammid walks up the front stairs to the house, picking up a flower before he enters the house. He discovers the newspapers spread out on the floor, and the shards of glass spread about everywhere, his wife again in the comfortable chair, her neck slit open by the shards of glass, dead.

     The associations, as several commentators have made clear, are nearly endless: the flower standing for a potent hallucinatory drug, death, mourning, femineity, love; the phone off the hook is a lack of communication, a broken connection, a desire for silence without interruption; the knife is both a tool of a good housewife to cut the staple food of bread, but obviously also a phallic weapon of death; the face itself is the mirror, an image of one’s own being but also impenetrable, like a pool of water where Narcissus sees only himself; the man is both loving and predatory; the woman asleep and suicidal, desirous of permanent peace in sleep; the duplicate visions of the self are both sexually alluring, an emblem of feminine communal power, and a threat to the singular existence of being; the key both opens the door, the mind to answer the questions of life as well as possibly locking them away and locking oneself up.

     Almost every thing and action in this 15-minute film has multiple meanings and many possible consequences. The title itself suggests an intricate interweaving of a net or web, an abstracted pattern that is almost impossible to explain or interpret. How the viewer interrupts these interwoven images depends upon his or her own ability to follow the logic of a very personal surreality, a dream of another. The only way the film can come to mean is if the viewer commits to the dream process as well, entering into the logic of dreams and attempting to evoke a series of possible emotional responses, knowing as well that there is no one answer to the questions the film poses. The clues are simply that, nothing more or less. They do not solve the deep riddles of the mind.

     I might just posit that the year of this film, when Maya and Hammid had just moved into the bungalow on King’s Road (John Cage lived on the same Los Angeles road in famed Schindler House) that we see in this film, was not a particularly happy time for her. As this surreal nightmare hints, she was obviously going through a great deal of contradictory emotional trauma, doubting her sexuality and, in particular, her relationship with Hammid or perhaps even with men. By the following year she had moved with Hammid back to New York City and was closely involved in a circle of bohemian friends including Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, John Cage, and Anaïs Nin, clearly a lifeline to some of the isolation she must have felt in Los Angeles. She would divorce Hammid in 1947.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).