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).

 

Andrzej Wajda | Sibirska Ledi Magbe (Siberian Lady Macbeth) / 1962

a trapped woman

by Douglas Messerli

 Andrzej Wajda (based on the novella by Nikolai Leskov), director Sibirska Ledi Magbe (Siberian Lady Macbeth) / 1962

 

The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s 1962 film, Siberian Lady Macbeth, even from his point of view, was unsuccessful:

 

“… the only lasting results of my labours are: the wonderful photography by Aca Sekulovic, the character of Sergei played by Ljuba Tadic with enormous commitment and talent, and the set decorations…. The film made me realise how difficult it is to adjust to a new and foreign reality. I understood that a little freedom abroad was not enough: I needed more freedom at home, in Poland.”

 

     Yet, this film, 56 years later, has very much stood the test of time. Yes, its sets by Sekulovic are crucial; the isolated village in which Katerina Izmilowa lives, with its whirls of blowing dust and the walled fortress of her home in which she lives with a missing and unloving husband and his terrifyingly crude father, symbolizes her plight of being a handsome woman locked away from any emotional fulfillment.

     Yet, this film, 56 years later, has very much stood the test of time. Yes, its sets by Sekulovic are crucial; the isolated village in which Katerina Izmilowa lives, with its whirls of blowing dust and the walled fortress of her home in which she lives with a missing and unloving husband and his terrifyingly crude father, symbolizes her plight of being a handsome woman locked away from any emotional fulfillment.

     Is it any wonder that the moment she sets eyes on the iterant pig-tender Sergei—who himself has a brazen way with the women, worming his way into the Izmalowa fortress through his attentions to the cook and servant (Kapitalina Erić)—should immediately be seen by Katerina as mysteriously attractive?  Besides, she is desperate to have a baby to whom she might be able to devote her love and life, something, evidently her husband cannot provide.

     And you have give it to this “Lady Macbeth,” although she is proud of her family’s wealth she has no scruples when it comes her position in this small village’s social world. What she seems most to want is simply a way out.

     Yet, one must ask, what is a woman of the latter 19th century to do to attain that? Surely, if she were simply to run away, as Sergei finally desires to, she would have a difficult time of it. She 

might hate the world in which she is imprisoned, but if she might control it, surely life would be different. And she has now discovered that she pregnant, at the very moment almost when her step-father discovers her sexual peccadilloes, severely beating Sergei and threatening to send her off in social disgrace.

     The old man, who early in this film displays a fascination with killing the rats that inhabit his house, is himself killed by rat poison cooked into mushrooms, reminding me a bit of the recent film Phantom Thread; beware of a spurned woman cooking up mushrooms, I thought to myself. In killing him, however, she can spend days in bed with her new lover, and, after nursing him to health she has ensnared him in her machinations. Sergei, in fact, plays a role that is usually assigned only to women: a figure so devoted to his lover that he cannot free himself from the enchantment. The swine can go hungry, since he has become a kind of dependent beast himself.

       

     While Sergei, the peasant, clearly feels guilt, Katherina seems to feel no remorse; she has freed herself from one of worst one of her major tormentors. And when her husband returns home, forcing Sergei to temporarily flee her bed, she has little difficulty in planning the demise of Zinovij Izmailow (Miodrag Lazarević), who having heard rumors has returned home earlier than expected—although it appears that he might have intended to go away forever.

     But even his death cannot end the legions of those who descend upon this killer to claim their rights. Katerina’s aunt soon arrives with her mean-spirited little son to claim that a great part of the estate belongs to him. As with the young son it Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, one wouldn’t really mind if the little brat, who tortures the local animals, might be sent to heaven or worse. Of course, so many deaths in single family, or, at least, attempted ones, arouses suspicions.

     Eventually, the police arrive, arresting Katerina and Sergei, punishing them by banning them to Siberia, to which, with numerous other such criminals, they are forced to take a long and arduous march. Instead of the forest coming to them, they must march to the forest.

     Despite Sergei’s relative innocence in the murders, we see him, once again, as a sexist monster, attempting to seduce another beautiful woman during the voyage. Strangely, by this time, we side more with the murderous Katerina than with her former lover. She, at least, is still loyal to him, ready to give up her own life for his.

     Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella, upon which this film was based, in its pre-feminist hero, might have been in league with Ibsen’s Nora of Ibsen’s A Dell’s House, written 14 years later. We sympathize with this intelligent and passionate woman, trapped in a society from which she had few alternatives to escape, although we might not wish to be left alone with her for very long for fear of our survival. Like so many strong women of film, literature, and opera, she is a seductress and monster both, just as likely, if she fell in love, to serve your head upon a plate.

     I should add that Wajda’s film also offers up a score by Dušan Radić that wonderfully incorporates many elements of Dimitri Shostakovich’s operatic treatment of this same work.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2019).

 

 

Charles Chaplin | Modern Times / 1936

black sheep

by Douglas Messerlil

 

Charles Chaplin (screenwriter and director) Modern Times / 1936

 

So much has been written about Charles Chaplin’s great 1936 film, Modern Times, that I should perhaps just express my admiration for this movie, which I revisited again the other day on the occasion of his birthday and close my mouth to let the record stand. Anyone who knows me well, however, will understand that such a response would be impossible, seeming to me like an abandonment of my somewhat autobiographical representation of the cultural events of my lifetime. So, please forgive me if I repeat long repeated observations about Chaplin’s comic masterpiece. I might, however, have one insight that can help further appreciate the little tramp’s encounter with modern life.

 

    Let me begin where Chaplin’s film does: immediately after his inter-title statement— somewhat ironically, it appears to me, declaring this film to represent a “story of individual enterprise, crusading in the pursuit of happiness”— before the director represents the factory workers on their way to work, through a rather obvious metaphor, as a group of sheep, in the center of which is a single “black” one. The tramp is, obviously, the “black sheep,” as the Belgium directors Luc and Jean Pierre Dardenne pointed out in their commentary screened after the TCM showing. Yet, the first few scenes of Chaplin’s movie portray the tramp as a hard worker, mechanically tightening the bolts—which move quickly along a conveyor belt—in a mad attempt to keep up with the demands of the factory owner, not dissimilar to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis. Bravely, the tramp moves up and down the line, deflected, as usual, by his fellow workers and nature (in the forms of a bee, an itch) along with the intrusions of the foreman. Even during a few seconds of break, in which the tramp, completely caught up in his mechanistic task, literally spins off into space, he is rebuked by the factory owner, whose image is suddenly projected across a bathroom wall, to return to work. In Modern Times big brother has clearly made an early appearance, long before George Orwell’s 1949 book. There is no room for personal behavior. The tramp as “factory worker” must suffer not only the abuse of his endlessly repetitive tasks, but the testing of a new feeding machine for factory employees, where he is literally spoon fed—while entrapped with the machine’s embrace—soup, diced cuts of meat (and, by accident, actual bolts), and, most ridiculously, cobs of corn on a never-ending rotisserie of insistent grinding across his mouth! Soon after, the “factory worker” must suffer the gigantic roulettes of the clogs and links of the machine which conveys the meaningless tools up to him.

      Is it any wonder that this well-intentioned, but tortured worker has, what Chaplin’s inter-titles describe as a “nervous breakdown,” a ridiculously funny series of balletic events in which he faces off with his fellow workers, using the machine that has tortured him, in turn, to torture them as well alternating, well in advance of Harpo Marx’s antics, with chasing after any woman with buttons upon her dress in an attempt to “screw” them into place. In a sense, the innocent tramp has suddenly become, through the repetitiousness of his conveyor-belt acts, a kind of sexual maniac. Since his fellow employers have allowed themselves to become mere functionaries in the factory machine, the tramp, oil can in hand, deservedly treats them just as he might mechanical elements of the whole. His arrest represents a breakdown of the whole inhuman enterprise, which during his imprisonment, is completely closed down due to the Depression and worker strikes.

    These early scenes are among the most famous of the film and seem to indicate that Chaplin’s work is primarily a statement of the inhumanity of new industrial usage as humans are transformed from individual artisans into mere mechanical robots—much like the workers in the new Ford automobile plants. But Chaplin, one must always remember, is at heart a romantic, and despite his early statements about worker abuse—issues Chaplin had explored and written about in the year just before the making of this film, as he travelled about Europe and met with legendary figures such as Mahatma Gandhi—he presents the rest of his film very much in the context of the cultural romanticism of his earlier works.

      The Tramp may be an outsider, but he is, Chaplin reminds us, time and again, a citizen of the community who might, given a chance, be committed to the most bourgeois aspects of society. Although incarcerated in prison, the Tramp, as we know, is a complete innocent, even though he consumes a large salt-shaker full of cocaine, he ultimately saves the prison guards and officers from a group of escaping fellow-prisoners. His award for his acts, a lovely decorated prison cell, along with a radio and regular visitors, represents perhaps the most normative world in which he has ever existed. In a time of complete unemployment and brutal attacks on poverty-stricken individuals—portrayed so vividly through the experiences of the homeless gamin, Paulette Godard—the Tramp is protected, given special privileges he might never find on the outside. Despite his constant outsider designation, Charlie is happiest on the insides of society. He would be a perfectly moral and upright member of society, as I previously argued, if he was only allowed.

      In the deepest sense, this is the problem, always, with Chaplin’s works. The hero, finally, is less a rebel than a conservative figure who is simply projected—often quite literally through accidental movements through space—into outsider positions. The moment he is given pardon and freed from jail, an accidental drop of a red flag from a rig, the Tramp’s attempt to return it, and a group of radical strikers—which, without even comprehending, he leads into action—results in another arrestment, this time for his being a radical!

     Freed again, and after a disastrously short-lived job as a ship-builder’s assistant, the Tramp is literally felled by the young gamin, who has stolen a loaf of bread. As always, the Romantic Chaplin figure attempts to protect her by claiming he is the thief, but societal forces, brutally un-Romantic, foil him, as they re-arrest the nearly starved girl. It is finally at this point that the Tramp seems to realize that his problem lies in his good intentions, as he determines to taste nearly every dish a nearby café offers, without paying. It is important, it seems to me, that so much of this film is centered simply upon the possibility of being unable to eat, as the Dardennes brothers clearly described it. If the Tramp is often impervious to the unpredictable events with which society throws at him, he is, almost always, hungry, desperate to fulfill a hunger that is not only of the stomach but involves his needs of love and societal fulfillment!    

 

     Hoping to be re-arrested for his unpaid gluttony, he is again foiled by the reappearance in the police van of the beautiful Gamin. Again, quite by accident, they van is overturned, with the couple escaping. He insists that she go on without him, that she run from the imprisonment which he has sought. But again, another first in the Tramp’s life, everything changes, as she motions him to escape with her. Suddenly, the loner, the black sheep, is no longer alone.

      The rest of the film, for the first time in Chaplin’s work, tells the tale of two outsider individuals, not merely one. Together, they even dream together about a bourgeoisie life: imagining themselves intertwined in what later might be described as The American Dream, in a small suburban house. If the Tramp’s vision is highly paradisiacal—a tree of knowledge at his doorstep, a cow hobbling alongside the house to provide fresh milk—it is also an absurdly preposterous world, realized in reality by a shantytown house, where floor boards break under broken-down chairs and tables, and where the roof is held up by a utensil that might have been used to help clean it. Whatever this couple might aspire to is represented through the Tramp’s and the Gamin’s night—in the apotheosis of any consumer’s delight—where they locked in a large metropolitan Department Store where the Tramp works briefly as a night watchman. There, once more, they can eat, play—another of Chaplin’s major tropes—in the toy department, and sleep wondrously in the bedroom display, if only temporarily. A group of unemployed workers, one having been a torturous partner of the Tramp’s factory working days, attempt to rob the store, admitting, finally, that they are not thieves but simply hungry men!

      Again arrested, Charlie is released once more to find that the Gamin has obtained a job as a dancer in a local café. She helps him get a job as a waiter and singer. We know in advance how it will end. The tramp is an absolutely resolute waiter but given his needed entries in and out of the kitchen and the dancing activities of the joint, he can never deliver up anything that he has promised, including a much-requested duck.

     So, once more, he fails. Except—here a kind of miracle happens. Completely unable to remember the lyrics to the song he is supposed to sing, the Tramp is helped out by his faithful friend, the Gamin, as she writes them out upon his cuffs. The comic figure is once more foiled as in his marvelously manic dance preceding his song. The cuffs go flying off his coat. But here, suddenly, a miracle happens: encouraged by his “lover” (Chaplin secretly married Godard the very same year) as he sings out, for the first time allowing his audience to hear his voice*—French composer Léo Daniderff’s comic song, Je cherche après Titine—performed, however, in complete gibberish, nonsensical words from Italian and French that, nonetheless, convey its sexual themes. Here Chaplin is absolutely brilliant, both in his mime-like performance, his absurd singing, and his absolutely brilliant dance-like movements! For the first time in this film, as the Dardennes stated, he is in control; he has found his true home: the theater—the world of the film that has previously defined the Tramp’s existence.

     As fate would have it, however, the police catch up with the vagabond Gamin, and the Tramp, finally committed to a new world, must suddenly attempt to protect her, sending the two on another run from societal order—away from the police who represent that order. In another on-the-road sequence, the two sit side by side, in dismay, the Gamin finally admitting—despite her previously energized resistance of all authority—complete despair. What’s the use of going on, she proclaims? But the “black sheep,” a member of the herd nonetheless, speaks out from the cultural refrains of the period: “Buck up, put on a smile,” as the two go trudging down the highway—the Tramp, for the first time engaged with another—into the sunset, a conformist unable to find a society to which he can conform!

       It is quite obviously the end of the Tramp, a man who has found conformity outside of the very society in which he seeking to be part of, an outsider who has, nevertheless, found an inner contentment with those who have kept him so isolated. Sadly, it is a bit like a heavily bullied man finding peace with those who have perversely attacked him again and again, somewhat like a beaten wife coming home to her husband’s drunken fists. I now think Chaplin meant the first words of his film seriously, even if I can never comprehend how his trek down the California highway represents anything near to “the pursuit of happiness.”

    Chaplin’s later paternity suits with actress Joan Barry, and the final attacks by US authorities for his supposed Communist involvement, forced him to leave the US, suggesting what his perceptive 1936 film had already predicted. Smile as you might, there was still a white line dividing that highway, which symbolized the strict divides of American society.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (April 2013).

 

*Modern Times, one of the last of silent films, was not completely silent. Originally, Chaplin had planned it as a “talkie,” but felt that the myth of his Tramp figure would disappear with the realization of a voice. Accordingly, throughout most of the film, only the “machines”—the food-eating machine, the large-screen images of the factory’s owner, radios, etc.—“speak.” The final performance, in gibberish” is Chaplin’s first on-screen voice premiere.