Meshes of the Afternoon by John David Rhodes (BFI Film Classics, 2011). (British Film Institute / Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). 128 pages. ISBN: 978-1844573776 (paperback). Price: £9.99
About the reviewer: Elinor Cleghorn is a writer and curator. She is currently completing her PhD at the London Consortium, and recently curated the BFI Southbank season ‘Maya Deren: 50 Years On’, a dedicated programme of events and screenings celebrating Deren’s legacy and influence.
'The mind begins with the matter at hand,' wrote Maya Deren of Meshes of the Afternoon, her first film, made in 1943 with her then husband, Czech filmmaker and photographer Alexander Hammid. This fourteen-minute spiral dream of domestic disturb and murderous doubling is the film with which Deren is most commonly associated, and endures as probably the most widely screened in the canon of avant-garde cinema. As John David Rhodes points out in ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’, the recent addition to the BFI Film Classics series, this film, made on a whim in a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills for just $274.90, “is one of the most dense, condensed, difficult and pleasurable artefacts of aesthetic modernism”. The film is indeed restless, beautifully disquieting and continually influential: ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ is a timely inclusion in a series of books that honors landmarks of world cinema, with authors such as Salman Rushdie, Mark Kermode and Laura Mulvey arguing for the classic status of films as seminal and diverse as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night Mail and Citizen Kane. October 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of Deren’s death, so this is an apposite year for the publication of a book celebrating, as Rhodes states through a quote from film historian David E. James, a film constituting ‘the most crucial pivot in the history of avant-garde film’.
Rhodes’ mind begins with the matter at hand, and the matter is writ large across the very first frame of ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’. The opening credits let the viewer know they are about to watch ‘A Film by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943’. Deren learnt the mechanics of filmmaking from Hammid, and his tutelage enabled her to bring an initial vision for a subjective film of a girl moving alone about her apartment to cinematic life. Deren plays the film’s unnamed protagonist, and it also features Hammid: additionally an enigmatic reaper figure, referred to by Rhodes as ‘mirror face’, haunts the intimate spaces of the protagonist’s home, foreboding some silent violence. Rhodes illuminates the issue of the film’s co-authorship, attending to Hammid’s essential role in its technical realization whilst giving breath to the potency of Deren’s politics and poetics in its conception. Rhodes emphasizes Deren’s promotion of ‘Meshes’ as a collaborative creation, and in doing so evokes the film as borne of an intense relationship between two exiled individuals (Deren was a Ukrainian émigré and Hammid located to the US from the former Republic of Czechoslovakia) Whilst Rhodes resists an easy and oft given definition of ‘Meshes’ as predominantly Deren’s, or indeed Hammid’s, film, the subject of his study is most persuasively Maya Deren. In exploring the breadth of Deren’s pre-filmmaking immersions in modernist poetry, socialist politics and with a progressive dance troupe, Rhodes composes a comprehensive reading of ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ as comprised of myriad influences and experiences, realized through the ‘wedding’ of the artistic expression of two distinct individuals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S03Aw5HULU
This fluently written book takes a journey from Deren’s prodigious early scholastic endeavors, to the making of ‘Meshes’, taking in her passionate involvement with Socialist radical politics through her role as national secretary of the Young People’s Socialist League, and her commitment to modernist literature and poetry which found form in her MA received at Smith College in 1939. Whilst it might seem excessive to devote such page count to biography in the pocket-handbook format of a BFI Classic, in the case of ‘Meshes’, this devotion is not only appropriate but eminently enhances the contextual analysis of the film itself given in an intricate yet engaging descriptive reading. Illustrated with stunning archival stills and weft with references to previous interpretations and to perceptions of the film as Surrealist or symbolically Freudian (both descriptions Deren resisted with forte), Rhodes’ analysis is thorough and discursive, allowing a multitude of voices and divergent points of view to emerge. ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ composes a vital insight into Deren’s inaugural film that undoubtedly will offer a theoretically sound and generative basis for further investigation into Deren’s filmmaking. In his closing chapter, Rhodes puts forward the accurate summation that ‘Meshes’ is not only ‘a metonymic signifier’ of Deren’s life’s work, but also acts as metonym for the project of American Avant-garde cinema and, most crucially, for women’s filmmaking. At the time of her death in 1961, at the age of just 44, Deren had completed a further five films, traveled to Haiti to film and participate in Voudoun ritual activity, published a wealth of theoretical writings and advocated for the production, distribution and exhibition of ‘film as art’. Rhodes, in attending so generously to often neglected elements of Deren’s life, with attentive archival research, pulls focus to the complex motivations of an artist for whom filmmaking became the integrated expression of the personal, poetic and political.
Elinor Cleghorn