Films that inspire me.

MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.

One of the most important and influential experimental films of the 20th century, Maya Deren's 18-minute feminist classic explores the interior images of a woman (played by Deren) whose daydreams restore mystery and danger to the ordinary objects of her everyday life. Deren veers away from plot to advance her view that a film should be like a poem: a deep tissue of images designed to examine a mood or startle us with the strangeness of the things around us. Using film as an artistic medium rather than as a vehicle for stars or story or action, Deren looks back toward the earlier European avant-garde of such filmmakers as Germaine Dulac, who believed that film most resembled the abstract yet emotional form of music. Deren's investigation of one woman's subconscious experience explicitly rejects the linear form of theater and literature in favor of the non-narrative models offered by painting, music, sculpture, or poetry. 

A woman sees someone on the street as she is walking back to her home. She goes to her room and sleeps on a chair. As soon as she is asleep, she experiences a dream in which she repeatedly tries to chase a mysterious hooded figure with a mirror for a face but is unable to catch it. With each failure, she re-enters her house and sees numerous household objects including a key, a knife, a flower, a telephone and a phonograph. The woman follows the hooded figure to her bedroom where she sees the figure hide the knife under a pillow. Throughout the story, she sees multiple instances of herself, all bits of her dream that she has already experienced. The woman tries to kill her sleeping body with a knife but is awakened by a man. The man leads her to the bedroom and she realises that everything she saw in the dream was actually happening. She notices that the man's posture is similar to that of the hooded figure when it hid the knife under the pillow. She attempts to injure him and fails. Towards the end, the man walks into the house and sees a broken mirror being dropped onto wet ground. He then sees the woman in the chair, who was previously sleeping, but is now dead.

The film's narrative is circular and repeats several motifs, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious grim reaper like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality. I looked into this films due to the non conventionality of it, especially for its time. I think the repetition element of it also intrigued me as the film creates a sense of ambiguity around itself.