Title: Meshes of the Afternoon
Rating: 2 Stars
I’m slowly going through the British Film Institute Sight and Sound top 250 films. Meshes of the Afternoon came in at sixteenth.
Comparing the BFI list to the AFI (American Film Institute) list of 100 films is pretty illuminating. First of all, by design, the AFI films are all American films. This requirement is slightly lax because films like Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge Over the River Kwai make the list even though they are predominately British films.
The BFI list has no such requirements. The films in the list are from all over the world. The number one film, Jeanne Dielman, is Belgian. In the top twenty-five or so are films from Japan, Hong Kong, USSR, France, Iran, and Sweden. The AFI list, somewhat infamously, has no women directors. In the top echelon of the BFI list are several, including, again at number one, Jeanne Dielman, directed by Chantal Akerman.
Also, the AFI has not been updated since 2008. At that point in time, the American film industry was (and, arguably, still is) in the thrall of the 1970s auteurs. So you end up with six Steven Spielberg films, three Martin Scorsese films, and three Francis Ford Coppola films. Included in the list are films like American Graffiti, The Deer Hunter, and M*A*S*H, which I’d argue would not be included if the list was updated today. The BFI electors are not quite so enthralled with these auteurs. Sure, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now pop up in the top twenty, but there’s definitely a wider variety of filmmakers.
Because the BFI is so much more inclusive, even in the top twenty, there were a number of films that I’d never heard of. Not to brag, but over the last four or five years, I’ve seen close to five hundred films, so I’m not a complete neophyte to films. The fact that so many films are considered the greatest ever are films that I’ve never even heard of is pretty astounding to me.
Several times, when I’ve sat down and watched one of these films, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I remember pretty much forcing myself to sit down and watch Jeanne Dielman, a three and a half hour film meditating on the mundane day to day existence of a Belgian widowed housewife. I ended up being completely drawn into the story (I wrote about it here). This was equally true when I reluctantly sat down to watch A Man with a Movie Camera, a 1929 USSR silent film about the day in the life of a city. It told a compelling story using special effects decades ahead of its time (written about here).
Some of the films listed have not done it for me. The number five film, In the Mood for Love, was just not all that interesting telling of a thwarted, repressed love story. Coming in at number seven was Beau Travail, an uninteresting French Foreign Legion take on the Melville novel, Billy Budd.
This brings us to number sixteen. It is called Meshes in the Afternoon. From the cryptic title, I assumed that it was going to be a foreign (I don’t know, it sounded vaguely Middle Eastern to me) film with a poorly translated title.
Imagine my shock when I discovered that it was an American film made in 1943. In case that didn’t leave me off balanced enough, it runs a grand total of fourteen minutes and is absolutely silent (a musical score was added in 1959).
How did that film manage to get ranked sixteenth? Well, that’s a great question that I have not been able to answer.
Let’s talk about the film. It’s an experimental film made by a married couple, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. Apparently there’s some controversy over who exactly did what, but the general consensus seems to be that it was primarily the brainchild of Deren. Deren was twenty-six when making this film (coincidentally the same age when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane).
What’s the film about? Well, that’s a good question. It’s fair to say that it’s open to interpretation. Maya Deren plays a character that sees someone as she’s walking down the street. She then enters her home and falls asleep. In her dream(?), she repeatedly chases a hooded figure that has a mirror for a face. A key, a knife, a flower, a telephone, and a record player make regular appearances in the film. For some reason, the Deren character repeatedly spits out the key. The Deren character seems to be going through the same overlapping cycle. At one point, three different Deren characters are sitting around a kitchen table staring at each other. A man (Hammid) appears in the house. The Deren character that was sleeping in a chair is now dead, apparently murdered, although possibly by suicide.
And that’s it.
Clearly, it’s an experimental film. I might be tempted to say avant-garde, although Deren apparently resented that characterization. From the wiki page, Deren and Hammid were inspired by the films of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel (Great! More home work). On the other hand, Deren denied that influence and hated surrealism, so who knows?
Given there is little in the way of plot, you find yourself focusing on other aspects of the film. There are interesting camera angles chosen. In the same wiki post, it’s mentioned that their use of shadow and angles could have been an inspiration to the noir films to come. I guess that perhaps I can see that.
One interesting connection made in the wiki page was to David Lynch. It specifically mentioned how Lynch was influenced by Meshes in making the film Lost Highway (written about here). Specifically, it called out the fact that Lost Highway also circles in on itself, is somewhat loose with its plot, and the same characters reoccur in the film. Having now watched Meshes and several Lynch films, it does make sense that Meshes was a source of inspiration to Lynch.
The fact that I’m struggling to come up with my own thoughts of the film and am having to rely upon wiki should tell you that I had trouble engaging with the film. Perhaps I’m too trapped in the traditional narrative cinema form. Perhaps experimental films like these are always going to be a struggle to me.
In my defense, there have been a couple of experimental films that I have enjoyed. The 1962 film La Jetée (#62 on the Sight and Sound list), is a film composed almost entirely of still photos. It was the inspiration for the much later Brad Pitt / Bruce Willis film 12 Monkeys. Running twenty-eight minutes, it oddly sucks you in.
Even more weirdly, in 1965, there’s a weird mash-up of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett in the 1965 film called, ummm, FILM. For twenty-two minutes, a camera relentlessly pursues Buster Keaton as Keaton futilely tries to escape the scrutiny. A very odd film, but again, weirdly compelling to watch.
All of that to say, I don’t get Meshes of the Afternoon. I certainly don’t get it coming in ranked at sixteen. Of all films ever created, there are only fifteen films that are more significant? That seems like a shaky proposition.
Anyway, it’s only fourteen minutes long. It’s available on youTube. It’s a pretty painless way to experience what some consider to be one of the greatest films ever made.
dorkenstein 