Meshes of the Afternoon

Meshes of the Afternoon is a 1943 American experimental short film made by the married filmmakers Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied, with Deren directing, writing, producing and editing the fourteen minute work and Hackenschmied serving as cinematographer. Made on a budget of about 275 dollars and shot without spoken dialogue, it portrays a woman's subjective and dreamlike encounter with a mysterious mirror faced figure, developing what Deren described as the way a person's subconscious elaborates a simple event into something emotionally significant. The film won the Grand Prix International for avant-garde cinema at the 1947 Cannes Film Festival, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1990, and ranked sixteenth in the 2022 Sight and Sound greatest films poll, standing as a landmark of American experimental cinema and subjective camera technique.