Meshes of the Afternoon

John David Rhodes

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781838719722
• eBook ISBN: 9781838719715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), filmed by Maya Deren and her then husband Alexader Hammid in their bungalow above Sunset Boulevard for a mere $274.90, is the most important film in the history of American avant-garde cinema. The artistic collaboration between Deren and Hammid finds its distorted reflection in the vision of the film's tormented female protagonist. Its focus - through a series of intricate and interlocking dream sequences - on female experience and the domestic sphere links Meshes to the Hollywood melodramas of the period, while its unsettling atmosphere of dread, death and doubles makes it a counter-cinematic cousin to film noir. The film has influenced not only the subsequent history of experimental film, but also on the work of Hollywood auteurs. It is a touchstone of women's film-making, of modern cinema and of modern art. John David Rhodes traces the film's history back into the lives of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, but in particular that of Deren. He reads the film as a culmination of Deren's abiding interest in modernism and her intense engagement in socialist politics. Rhodes argues that while the film remains a powerful point of reference for feminist film-makers and experimentalists, it is also an example of political art in the broadest terms. In his foreword to this new edition, Rhodes reflects upon the film's continuing importance for and influence upon feminist and avant-garde filmmaking.

1 An Exile

Eleanora Derenkowsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine, on 29 April 1917, almost six months before the Bolshevik Revolution. Her father, Solomon Derenkowsky, was a physician, and her mother, Marie Fiedler Derenkowsky, an educated woman whose mother was a doctor, but whose own university education was interrupted by the Revolution. Thus Deren was born into a culturally privileged, upper-middle-class background. Her father was reported to have frequented the same intellectual circles as Trotsky, and both parents identified as Communists. They were secular Jews. (Deren consistently resisted referring to herself as a Jew.)

The name Eleanora was chosen by Deren’s mother in honour of Eleanora Duse, diva of the Italian stage and sometime lover of poet Gabriele D’annunzio. This name would be adapted (to Elinor or Eleanor) to suit the changed geographical and linguistic circumstances brought about by Deren’s immigration to the United States, or shortened (to Elinka) as a term of endearment between mother and daughter, and eventually lost altogether with Deren’s legal change of her first name to Maya in 1943. This first first name, Eleanora, with its allusion to one of the most colourful female artists and performers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, could be said to have a certain appropriateness.

The material conditions in the early years of the Soviet Union were extremely difficult – more so for Jews, even bourgeois secular Jews like the Derenkowskys. Deren’s father already had family in the US, in Adams, New York, who had emigrated before the Revolution, and these relatives smoothed the way for the family’s emigration in 1922. The Derenkowskys settled in Syracuse, New York, where Dr Derenkowsky found work as the director of a mental hospital. In 1924 the family name was shortened to Deren, and by 1928 they were naturalised as US citizens. At school, the young Eleanora Deren’s natural gifts were noticed, and she was allowed to skip two grades. Having undergone the ordeal of immigration to the United States as a child, she would, a mere eight years later as an adolescent, and at the beginning of the Great Depression, become an immigrant once again when she moved to Geneva for school. In 1930 Deren was enrolled as a student at the Ecole Internationale (International School) of Geneva, a boarding school established to educate the children of diplomats working at the League of Nations. According to Marie Deren’s (Deren’s mother’s) recollections, the move had less to do with the young Deren’s education and more with the strained relations between her parents. Marie lived in Paris and Geneva during Deren’s tenure in boarding school.

Deren’s archives richly document her time spent at the Ecole Internationale. One finds letters, cards, sketches for dress designs, diaries, photographs and even her schoolwork. If we want evidence that the young Deren’s involvements and reflections pointed necessarily to her eventual achievements, then we would rely on her friend and classmate Shirley Lyons’ recollection that Deren ‘had always been artistic, always. The slightest thing she did was artistic.’ But the same Lyons recalled, only moments later and in the same interview: ‘I thought we were all going to be great.’⁸

The documentary evidence suggests that the young Deren was entirely ordinary and entirely exceptional. Her diaries and letters are filled with the intrigues of school-age crushes, amateur theatricals, Oedipal anxiety and fleeting impressions. ‘Gathered up costume all morning. Gave play. Flop … Tish, tish. Went to All Quiet on the Western Front. Wonderful but horrible. Danced after supper. Alexis and Charlie quite awfully nice to me.’⁹ So goes boarding school life, then as now, presumably. Other documents found in the archive, however, possess an uncanny sense of fatality – or at least precocity. In an essay in which Deren attempts to explain what constituted a ‘good book’, she writes:

In my estimation a good book first must contain little or no trace of the author unless the author himself is a character. That is, when I read the book I should not feel that someone is telling me the story and forming the events but that the happenings are the consequences of circumstances which are naturly [sic] formed and not that some hand has formed them. The story sould [sic] be a drama or a comedy which rises out of itself and not by someone’s making.¹⁰

Apart from being fairly sophisticated thinking for a fourteen-year-old (to my mind anyway), the notion of an artwork arising ‘out of itself’ seems eerily to foreshadow Deren’s later theoretical and practical obsession with cinema’s ability autonomously and automatically to produce a lifelike image of reality. (This ability is referred to in film theory as cinema’s ‘indexicality’.) In An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, a work of film theory that she would publish in 1946, Deren writes:

The most immediate distinction of film is the capacity of the camera to represent a given reality in its own terms, to the extent that it is accepted as a substitute proper for that reality. A photograph will serve as proof of the ‘truth’ of some phenomenon where either a painting or a verbal testimony would fail to carry weight. In other art forms, the artist is the intermediary between reality and the instrument by which he creates his work of art. But in photography, the reality passes directly through the lens of the camera to be immediately recorded on film, and this relationship may, at times, dispense with all but the most manual services of a human being, and even, under certain preconditions, produce film almost ‘untouched by human hands.’¹¹

But I am getting ahead of myself, for surely making the comparison between the consistency in intellectual preoccupations that would seem to bind Deren’s juvenilia to her film theory (written in her late twenties – still precocious!) puts the cart before the horse. I want to offer up both the lure of this comparison and its potential frailty. On the one hand, the Deren who writes in the essay, age fourteen, seems to desire, perhaps unconsciously, something that eventually she would find in film. The essay would seem to confirm that Eleanora Deren was always waiting to become or in the process of becoming Maya Deren, maker of Meshes of the Afternoon, author of the Anagram. On the other hand, the trajectory that we trace, through the archive, from Deren’s school years through to her engagement with cinema, tells us that there was much about her life that was contradictory, inconsistent and unpredictable. Deren’s life was vibrantly various, but her interests – whatever medium they expressed themselves in – were surprisingly consistent.

2 A Young Socialist

One of the greatest affairs of Deren’s young life was her passionate involvement with the Socialist Party and radical politics. The story began almost as soon as she entered Syracuse University, following her return from her schooling abroad, and is inseparable from the story of her engagement and marriage to her first husband, a Socialist activist and labour organiser named Gregory Bardacke. Deren’s activity as a member of the Socialist Party consumed much of the time she could spare from her studies. Her involvement in Socialist politics on campus, however intense, was not unique, especially during this period in American history. This was the period of the Popular Front (roughly 1935–9), a period in which a broad and loosely affiliated scene of Communist and Socialist political activity, activism and cultural production managed to gain a remarkable degree of public support and acceptance. (College campuses were particularly fertile grounds of Popular Front activity.) It was, of course, the economic and social crisis of the Great Depression that gave the Popular Front its opening in the United States’s otherwise typically conservative political landscape. Deren’s activities and commitments during this period reveal her to be circulating in (and animating) a number of the numerous and bewildering spheres and demispheres of radical politics and cultural production of the Popular Front.

While at Syracuse Deren followed a broad liberal arts curriculum, apparently with the intention of majoring in journalism, and worked on the school paper, The Daily Orange. Her letters from the period (particularly those to Shirley Lyons, who was still back at the Ecole Internationale in Geneva) reveal a busy dating and social life. She joined Alpha Epsilon Phi, a Jewish sorority, went to football games and dances, and entered a dress design competition. She also ran away to New York over the Christmas holidays with a boyfriend, a trip that required enormous planning and effort to execute, an indiscretion that could have resulted in her expulsion had it been discovered. So, like the lives of most people, Deren’s combined contrarieties: an almost anal attention to social, academic and professional advancement on the one hand, and a wilfully bohemian disregard for convention on the other.

Deren met Bardacke through her father. Bardacke was on a football scholarship at Syracuse. As the child of Russian parents, Bardacke could speak some Russian but could not write it. In order to satisfy his language distribution requirements, he sought tutoring in Russian from Dr Deren. According to Bardacke, he and Deren met in her father’s home. Bardacke was already deeply involved in campus Socialist politics and, according to Bardacke, Deren found her way into Socialist activity ‘as a result’ of their relationship.¹² In a letter, again to Shirley Lyons, Deren narrates their meeting somewhat differently: ‘I think I told you about Greg. He is a socialist and I met him at a socialist protest meeting against discrimination against negroes.’¹³ Whatever the initial circumstances of their union, their mutual dedication to socialist politics and to each other seems to have been fairly complete. Witness her evocation of the relationship: ‘I love him and he loves me – that is all. It seems so clear, so inevitable, our life together. My writing career (he holds it above all else), his work (both as a chemist and socialist), our home – informal – in New York, an open house for the intelligentsia of the youth.’¹⁴ Both Bardacke and Deren were involved in the Liberal Club, a moniker that served to name (and to camouflage) the campus chapter for the League for Industrial Democracy, a student political organisation associated with the Socialist Party and which was banned at Syracuse.

Deren’s desire to be a writer manifested itself mostly during this period in her commitment to The Daily Orange, the Syracuse student paper. Like any student journalist, she covered student elections, sport and new curricular developments, including the establishment of Syracuse’s first film studies course, ‘cinema criticism and appreciation’, taught by Sawyer Falk in the autumn of 1934, a class Deren herself took and that is rumoured to be the first film studies course ever taught in the US. Deren had the opportunity to interview the actress Anita Page (whom she described privately as ‘a stupid scatterbrained chatterbox’) and Cab Calloway, the African-American bandleader and singer, with whom she ‘almost fell in love’.¹⁵ As her involvement with socialism became more serious, however, she seems to have transferred a good deal of her activity to publications associated with her political commitments, such as The Hill Monthly, a student publication preoccupied with radical politics and the peace movement. One of her last pieces of journalism written during her two-year stint at Syracuse was a call for participation in a student anti-war protest held on 12 April 1935. Deren’s article was titled ‘The Curtain Rises’: her call to political action articulated – tellingly, we might think – through a metaphor borrowed from spectacular entertainment.

Bardacke and Deren married in June 1936. Bardacke had just graduated from Syracuse. Deren was eighteen. The couple moved to New York City where Bardacke worked as an organiser, while Deren continued her education at New York University. At NYU she took a fiction workshop and several courses in journalism. She rounds off an autobiographical sketch that she wrote for her ‘Fiction Workshop’ course in the autumn of 1935 with the following hortatory note:

With so much of importance to be done in the world, I find myself impatient with those who would fiddle while Rome burns, those who are capable if ignoring the faults of social organization and, in an entirely egotistical manner, make themselves the center of the universe, those whom the chaos has overpowered and has driven to escape into a petty world of self, those who spend their lives pretending and convincing themselves that all is well.¹⁶

Her instructor’s response closes with the advice regarding her next assignment: ‘Try to be careful not to make it propaganda except indirectly, if you use a radical theme.’¹⁷ Deren’s somewhat awkwardly immature formulation of her political commitments is not the best evidence of what was very real and serious activity on her part during this period of her life.

At NYU she joined the local chapter of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) and became the organisation’s national secretary. The punishing (and perhaps necessary) officiousness of the letters she wrote in this capacity anticipate the frequent tone of her correspondence in later years. (She was often upbraiding other ‘Yipsels’ for failure to comply with party policy and procedure and often signed her letters ‘comradely’ or ‘with Socialist greetings’.¹⁸) These were the same years during which, according to Bardacke, Deren ‘would do anything at all – almost anything at all to promote her [writing] career. She was very determined.’¹⁹

It’s hard not to read this comment as an attempt to insinuate something slightly unflattering about Deren. She was, in fact, determined, and being a determined young woman in the 1930s, no matter how left-wing her social circles may have been, cannot have been terrifically easy. She clearly wanted to be done with university education as quickly as possible; attending summer school after each of her three years of university enabled her to graduate from NYU in the autumn of 1936 (with a major in English, a minor in Journalism and a second minor in French), only three years after she began her studies at Syracuse.

It would be difficult to separate neatly the determined busyness of her activities as an organiser from the busyness of her development as a writer and artist. As we see in the passage quoted from her coursework above, Deren articulates her impulse towards creativity inside a context that was plural and socially committed. Whether as party disciplinarian or as artist, the claims of particularity or personality needed, for Deren, always to be subsumed inside a generalising (or even universalising) project. When Deren, in an ‘organisational supplement’ on regional organisation from 1937, writes that ‘a worker alone, individually, cannot make any gains against his boss for himself’,²⁰ she describes a part–whole relationship that w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: ‘Hollywood 1943’
• 1. An Exile
• 2. A Young Socialist
• 3. Modernist Commitments
• 4. With Dunham
• 5. Exile in Hollywood
• 6. Couples and Doubles
• 7. Shadow of a Girl Appears
• 8. The General Audience and the Particular Film-maker
• 9. Reflections and Shadows
• 10. Particularly Universal
• Notes
• Credits
• eCopyright