Watch Meshes of the Afternoon, the Experimental Short Voted the 16th Best Film of All Time

It seems not to be doc­u­ment­ed whether the San­ta Ana winds were blow­ing when Maya Deren and Alexan­der Hack­en­schmied shot Mesh­es of the After­noon. But every­thing about the film itself sug­gests that they must have been, so vivid does its atmos­phere of lux­u­ri­ant­ly arid para­noia remain these 62 years lat­er. Despite its run­time of less than fif­teen min­utes and the obvi­ous­ly mod­est means of its pro­duc­tion, it’s long been can­on­ized as not just a stan­dard intro­duc­tion to exper­i­men­tal­ism in film stud­ies class­es, but also a crit­i­cal favorite. In fact, it placed in the last Sight and Sound crit­ics poll of the best films of all time at a respectable #16, above Abbas Kiarostami’s Close‑Up and below John Ford’s The Searchers.

Mesh­es of the After­noon ranks at #62 on the direc­tors poll, a spot that sounds low until you con­sid­er that it’s shared with the likes of Late Spring, Some Like It Hot, Sátán­tangó, Blade Run­ner, and Lawrence of Ara­bia. Still, it’s a bit sur­pris­ing that it did­n’t come in high­er, giv­en the obvi­ous influ­ence both direct and indi­rect of its ear­ly Los Ange­les-noir sur­re­al­ism on so many sub­se­quent major motion pic­tures.

“Had Cal­i­forn­ian sun­light ever looked as sug­ges­tive or sin­is­ter before the sharply etched dream world of Mesh­es of the After­noon?” asks Ian Christie in his short accom­pa­ny­ing essay at the British Film Insti­tute’s site. “Cer­tain­ly, it soon would, in Bil­ly Wilder’s Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and many lat­er films noirs” — not to men­tion the “many tra­di­tions over eight decades” it has inspired since.

Those include the oeu­vre of the late David Lynch, which con­sti­tutes a tra­di­tion unto itself, but even the most casu­al film­go­er could hard­ly watch Mesh­es of the After­noon with­out feel­ing deep res­o­nances between it and a great many of the non-exper­i­men­tal movies they’ve seen since. The sto­ry, such as one can deci­pher it, has to do with a woman alone at home, haunt­ed by a glimpse of a hood­ed fig­ure with a mir­ror for a face and unable to tell whether she’s on the inside or out­side of a dream. By the end, she is dead, but on which plane of real­i­ty? There are, of course, no answers, just as there is no dia­logue, explana­to­ry or oth­er­wise. But Deren and Hack­en­schmied knew they did­n’t need it, being ful­ly aware that they were work­ing in a medi­um where every­thing impor­tant can be con­veyed visu­al­ly — and, ide­al­ly, expe­ri­enced by view­ers just as if they were dream­ing it them­selves.

The film will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 1,639 Film Crit­ics & 480 Direc­tors: See the Results of the Once-a-Decade Sight and Sound Poll

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.