First pass

You walk up a hill. Your hand picks up a key. The key is on the sidewalk for no reason. You enter a house. A phonograph is playing. A knife is on the stairs. A flower is on the bed. You sit in an armchair by the window. You fall asleep.

That’s it. That’s the whole film.

Except you haven’t started yet.

Second pass

You walk up the hill again. Your hand reaches for the key again, but now there is a hooded figure ahead of you, walking away, and its face is a mirror. You cannot see who it is. You can only see yourself reflected in what should be a face.

You enter the house again. The phonograph is playing again. The knife is on the stairs again. The flower is on the bed again. You sit in the armchair again. You look out the window and see yourself walking up the hill.

There are two of you now.

This is the point at which any reasonable description of Meshes of the Afternoon begins to sound like a clinical intake for a dream study. It was made in 1943 by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, in their own house, in Los Angeles, with a 16mm camera and about $250. It runs fourteen minutes. It has no dialogue. For its first two decades it had no soundtrack at all. And it is, by most accounts, the single most important American experimental film ever made.

Third pass

You walk up the hill again. The key falls from your hand. The knife is no longer on the stairs. It’s in your hand. The flower is no longer on the bed. It’s on the pillow where a head would be.

There are three of you now. The three of you sit around a table. One of you picks up the key from the table. It becomes a knife.

You understand the grammar of this film by now. Objects replace other objects. A key becomes a knife. A flower replaces a face. A mirror replaces a face. Everything that should be stable — the furniture, the stairs, the path up the hill — stays fixed while the things that move through them change their meaning every time the loop restarts.

Maya Deren was twenty-six when she made this. She was born Eleanora Derenkowska in Kyiv, emigrated to New York as a child, studied journalism, worked with Katherine Dunham’s dance company, married Alexander Hammid (a Czech cinematographer), and decided, apparently on a Tuesday, to invent American avant-garde cinema.

That’s an exaggeration. There were experimental films before Meshes. But none of them did what Deren did, which was to take the logic of the dream — not its content, not its surreal imagery, but its logic, the way a dream makes you feel that impossible transitions are perfectly natural — and build an entire film language out of it.

Fourth pass

You walk up the hill. The hooded figure is gone. The key is in your mouth. You reach the door and the door is already open. Everything that was sequential is now simultaneous.

In the armchair, there are three of you watching one of you approach the bed. One of you raises a knife. The face on the pillow is your sleeping face. The knife descends.

And instead of blood: the ocean.

Instead of a wound: a wave.

The French surrealists used dream imagery. Buñuel sliced an eye. Cocteau walked through mirrors. But they illustrated dreams. They placed impossible images side by side for shock, for poetry, for confrontation. Deren didn’t illustrate dreams. She replicated the experience of dreaming. The difference is everything.

In a dream, you don’t notice the cut. You’re in a house and then you’re on a beach and you don’t remember moving. In a dream, objects carry emotional weight that has nothing to do with their function. A key isn’t a key. A key is dread, or desire, or escape, or something you can’t name but you know you need. Deren understood this. She built match cuts that work the way dream-transitions work: spatially impossible, emotionally seamless. You step off a beach onto pavement onto soil onto carpet, and each step follows from the last because the feeling follows, even though the geography is nonsense.

Nobody had done this in American cinema. Not in 1943. Arguably, not before or since with such purity.

Fifth pass

You walk up the hill. But you’ve been here before, and now you know what’s at the top. The key. The house. The knife. Yourself, asleep.

The man comes home. He is real. He picks up the flower. He carries you to the bed. The mirror breaks. Everything that was looping resolves into a single line. He walks up the stairs and finds you in the armchair with your throat cut and seaweed in your lap and mirror shards on the floor, and the ocean is visible through the broken window.

Or is it? The film doesn’t tell you what actually happened. It tells you what the dreaming mind produced, and then it tells you the result, and leaves a gap between them that fourteen minutes is not enough time to cross.

What the loop produces

Here’s the peculiar thing about Meshes of the Afternoon. It’s fourteen minutes long. It cost almost nothing. It was made by two people in a house with a borrowed camera. And it invented a cinematic vocabulary that directors have been borrowing from for eighty years without always knowing where it came from.

David Lynch’s work is inconceivable without Deren. The match cuts in Mulholland Drive — where a woman opens a blue box and the film falls into a different reality — are Deren’s grammar. The way Lost Highway simply becomes a different movie about a different person and asks you to accept the transition as you would in a dream: that’s Meshes.

But Deren is not Lynch’s precursor. She’s not a stepping stone. The film isn’t historically important the way a first telegraph is important — interesting as an origin, obsolete as an experience. Meshes of the Afternoon still works. The loops still tighten. The knife still becomes the key. The face in the mirror still refuses to be anyone but you. Eighty years of cinema have not produced a purer fourteen minutes of what it feels like to dream.

Sixth pass (final)

You walk up the hill. You already know what’s there. You’ve always known. The key, the knife, the flower, the hooded figure, the mirror face, the three selves around the table, the sleeping body, the ocean where the wound should be.

You can describe every element of this film in a single paragraph. You cannot describe what it does to you. The description and the experience are not the same object.

That’s the gap Meshes of the Afternoon lives in. It has never left.

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Meshes of the Afternoon Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid | United States | 1943 | 14 minutes