Meshes of the Afternoon

Meshes of the Afternoon is a short experimental film in which a woman returns to her home and drifts into sleep, entering a dreamlike state where everyday objects and familiar spaces take on an unsettling quality. A knife, a key, a flower and a telephone recur in shifting contexts, and a cloaked figure whose face is a mirror moves through the same scenes more than once. The woman appears to encounter herself, and the line between what is happening and what she is imagining stays unclear as the imagery repeats and time and space refuse to line up. Maya Deren plays the woman and Alexander Hammid, her husband at the time, plays a man who enters the house; the two also directed the film together, and Deren wrote it.

Made in the United States and running about fourteen minutes, the film was released in 1943. It was the first directorial credit for Deren, who went on to become a central figure in American avant-garde cinema, and Hammid was a photographer and filmmaker. The film has since been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.8 from roughly 17,000 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 7.6 from about 455 votes: strong, consistent audience appreciation for a short experimental work from the 1940s, with far more votes on IMDb than on TMDB.