Meshes of the Afternoon

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Maya Deren broke through the glass ceiling to create this significant surreal statement of women’s consciousness during the conformist forties and fifties. As the Museum of Modern Art has indicated, “A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the ‘trance film,’ in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus.” Alexander Hammid, her husband, provided the distinctive camerawork, and Teiji Ito composed the Asian musical score.

The swan is a sign that ruffles the reeds,

Searching for the lost key to the garden,

A real Mother Goose fat with seeds,

Grotesque only when plot twists harden.

 Innumerable algorithms cosign reality,

As if the child were a mirror to the soul

Or the State reinstate dance to democracy

And set artists free from some mercantile troll.

Multiple selves peel the oaken bark

Sheltering the living, two by two,

To abide aboard the women’s Ark

Where myth transforms the global zoo.

 

 It’s all identity politics now,

Bewildered by the wilderness descending,

As if fossilized flight endured somehow

To follow with wonder the lark ascending.

[Disposable Poem December 26–29, 2018]

Dr. Mike & Michelle McKinney

BONUS

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) – Music added (2015)

In her fourth complete film, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), Maya Deren uses movement and dance together with movement suggested by the ‘cinematic stage’ that is also mobile and volatile itself, in order to create a ritualistic procedure or a metamorphosis. As she writes in one of her program notes, “A ritual is an action that it seeks the realization of its purpose through the exercise of form, […] it’s an inversion towards life, the passage from sterile winter into fertile spring; mortality into immortality; the child-son into the man-father; or, as in this film, the widow into the bride”. [1] The two professional dancers, Franck Westbrook and Rita Christiani are complemented by a mass of people moving in circles around them and also two more main characters Maya Deren and Anais Nin.