Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Name: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Uploaded: 2026-09-01
Duration: 14 min
Description: A woman comes home, falls asleep, and dreams herself walking the same hallway again and again — a flower on the path, a key that becomes a knife, a hooded figure with a mirror for a face. Deren loops and splinters the afternoon until you can't tell which version of her is awake.

Plays here · source: Internet Archive

1943 · 14m · Indie

Directed by Maya Deren

public domain

US public domain — released silently without a copyright notice, which forfeited copyright under the 1909 Act.

A woman comes home, falls asleep, and dreams herself walking the same hallway again and again — a flower on the path, a key that becomes a knife, a hooded figure with a mirror for a face. Deren loops and splinters the afternoon until you can't tell which version of her is awake.

The founding text of American experimental film: fourteen minutes, a domestic setting, and a grammar of dream logic everyone still borrows from.

Watch on the original source (archive) ↗