Bióbarinn

In the bar I played the Seedy Friedrich card, the perfect ice breaker. In with a group of lively locals, we sipped our highballs of Tanqueray and tonic and spoke of islands, music, and the ambivalence of Pisces. Your surfed the dark edge of your redhead personality, playing to perfection the role of rock ‘n roll girlfriend. Then someone came in to announce that in the screening room upstairs two short films—Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou—would soon be starting. I knew them well and thought you’d like them; we decided to go and see them.

We stepped upstairs into the little cinema and stepped into Maya Deren’s dream; fifteen minutes later, Buñuel’s call to murder came across as a decidedly dated scream.

Meshes of the Afternoon  illustrates Maya Deren’s transition from verbal to visual expression. This film, a dream event which spirals inward from reality and back out again when a death wish apparently becomes manifest, has some peculiarly filmic qualities. These include the fluid hand-held camera-work, particularly on the stair sequences, and numerous carefully planned and edited transitions. Nonetheless, the film is dependent upon a traditional poetic narrative structure, resting on a series of events which recur with variations, and on the repetitive treatment of visually potent objects, such as a knife, flower, and key. Images and events work together to evoke a dark, subconscious mood.

We can easily ‘tell the story’ of Meshes of the Afternoon, inserting the significant objects as symbols to enhance the actions. A woman holding a flower and key, enters her absent lover’s home, and finds items there in disarray (a carving knife is propped on the stairs, for instance). She takes a nap, glimpsing as she dozes a black-robed, mirror-faced figure retreating, whom she pursues without success.

This sequence is repeated three times until the three dream selves conspire to stab the sleeping real self. The attacker turns into her lover, who begins to seduce her with the flower nearby. The flower becomes a knife, with which the woman attempts to stab the man. She breaks a mirror instead; its pieces fall into the ocean, and the man arrives home to the woman dead and draped in seaweed.

These comparisons do not prove that Deren was trying to visually duplicate Eliot’s poetry, but rather that as a young artist striving toward original expression, she naturally retrieved some familiar images from her memory. On the contrary, Deren’s film shows her admiration for Eliot’s use of powerful, personal symbolism in poetry, as she had described several years earlier in her thesis. It is fair to assume she was influenced deeply by his evocative use of objects and actions, and paid obvious homage to Eliot in her first film.

Deren spent a lot of energy over the next few years re-interpreting the first film, not as Symbolist, but as Imagist. She drew inspiration once again from her graduate studies in poetry, this time from Ezra Pound as primary expositor of the Imagist credos.

As a student of poetry, Deren knew the difference between images and symbols, and discussed these in her thesis: ‘For the Symbolist, the image is an element only in a synthesis built up out of a succession of images; for the Imagist, the image is the synthesis itself of the thought and emotion; the direct communication of the synthesized experience. For the Symbolist, the image is a point of departure for mysterious distances, whereas the Imagist departure is limited to the vision behind the word or image.’

Through writings and speeches that sound at times angry and defensive, Deren repeatedly disavowed any use of symbol in her first film and insisted that the viewer understand that the key, the flower, and the knife were used as themselves and not as symbolic referents. Similarly, the Imagists had insisted on the treatment of ‘hawk as hawk,’ and the first Imagist credo, as Deren quoted in her thesis, demanded a ‘direct treatment of the thing.’