UnderGround Thursday Patreon Film Screening

The Shawna Foundation Presents UnderGround Thursday in August with the Maya Deren's MESHES IN THE AFTERNOON (1943) 

 

Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential films in American avant-garde cinema. Created with Alexander Hammid in 1943, it pioneered a new kind of poetic, dream-like filmmaking outside the Hollywood system. Using repetition, shifting perspectives, and symbolic imagery—a key, a knife, a flower, a mysterious cloaked figure—Deren explored the fragmented, subconscious world of desire and anxiety.

 

What makes the film important is not just its surrealist style but its insistence that cinema could be personal, experimental, and independent at a time when the studio system dominated American film culture. Deren proved that an individual artist could create work as powerful as any feature by major studios, with nothing more than a 16mm camera and a vision. Her influence is visible in everything from David Lynch’s dream sequences to contemporary music videos.

 

For today’s audiences, Meshes of the Afternoon remains vital because it asks us to experience cinema not as narrative entertainment but as an exploration of the psyche. It reminds us that film can be intimate, subversive, and radically inventive—qualities that define the very spirit of underground cinema.

We give you the original silent version and the one with the score added in 1959 by Meiji Ito, Maya Daren’s third husband.



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