Maya Derren - Meshes Of The Afternoon

Maya Derren's 'Meshes Of The Afternoon'

Length: 13 mins 30 Secs

I decided to research more into this film because it had a lot of similarities to my own idea. I wanted to use the 'doppleganger' effect, whereas in this piece, it shows the actress in different time spaces, overviewing what happened to her previously, watching herself make the same mistakes over again... Mistaking items for each other (the flower and the knife).  

The piece was created by Maya Derren in 1943. The narrative of the piece is circular, it follows a cycle of repetitive psychological images, such as the flower or the key falling, as well as the door unlocking and the knife in the bed. Derren also uses a cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, which immediately suggests the psychological element of the piece - it's reflecting the girl, therefore poses the enigma as to... is it actually another version of the girl that she's following?

The narrative follows a woman, who sees a mysterious figure in the streets as she's making her way home. She leaves the streets, enters her house and sleeps in a chair. As she sleeps, she starts to dream the experience of constantly chases this mirror-faced figure in the street. However she is never able to catch up to it. Each time she fails to catch up, she goes back to her home and sees different household items, such as the key, the knife, the phone and the flower.

Then, the woman follows the figure in her house, and into her bedroom where she witnesses the figure placing a knife under the pillow. Throughout the piece, she sees multiple versions of herself, repeating over and over. There are all pieces of her dream that she's already experienced, but is viewing from a different perspective.

The woman then tries to kill her sleeping self with the knife, however is woken up by a man. As the man leads her into her bedroom, she notices that everything she's been seeing in her dreams where actually real. She looks at man as notices a similar posture between him and the mysterious figure, when she realises, she panics and tries to attack or injure him, but fails. The end of the piece shows this man walking into the house and seeing a broken mirror being dropped on the floor, with the sleeping woman in the chair, who is now dead.

The piece uses creative camera angles and use of slow motion through the editing stage to make the surrealism of the piece stand out - the surreal world is created to make it harder to catch the reality of the piece. For example of camera work, the woman is walking up the stairs and she pushes against one of the walls. As she does, the camera moves in that direction, almost triggered - signifying that th camera is part of the woman herself.

I liked this piece because I wanted a similar idea for our work, as blogged before: having a darker side of a person following this normal version around. It gave me a lot of inspiration towards our idea, however, we did decide to change it slightly to make our work individual and creative. We wanted to 'dogglegang' the two sides of the girl, however we wanted the footage to be more unexplainable. We wanted to base it on a normal day in this girl's life.. she wakes up normally, and all these strange things start to occur. Like an episode, that just seems to never end...