Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, United States) by Maya Deren, Alexandr Hackenschmied

Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon Added to the Auteur Cinema Archive

The Auteur Cinema Archive proudly announces the inclusion of Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, United States), a landmark in experimental filmmaking directed by Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied. This surreal short film, deeply rooted in dream logic and symbolic repetition, is widely recognized as one of the earliest and most influential works of American avant-garde cinema.

Starring Deren herself, the film explores themes of identity, time, and psychological fragmentation through a haunting loop of recurring imagery—a cloaked figure with a mirror face, a falling key, a bread knife, and multiple versions of the self. With its cyclical structure, disorienting editing, and radical subjectivity, Meshes of the Afternoon blurs the line between dream and reality, inner life and external action.

Curator Kris De Meester on the film’s significance:
"Meshes of the Afternoon is cinema turned inward. Where most films look outward to tell stories, Deren used the camera as a mirror—fragmenting time and space to explore memory, desire, and death. It’s a poetic blueprint for personal cinema and a cornerstone of auteur filmmaking. This inclusion is not just necessary; it’s overdue."
Created on a shoestring budget and largely filmed in and around the filmmakers’ home, the film is a pioneering work of independent artistry. Its radical use of form and subjective perspective laid the groundwork for generations of experimental filmmakers—from the structuralists of the 1960s to contemporary feminist auteurs.

By welcoming Meshes of the Afternoon into the Archive, we acknowledge Maya Deren not only as an essential filmmaker but as a visionary who helped redefine what film could be: not merely narrative, but psychological; not illustrative, but experiential.