{"id":2730,"date":"2019-10-16T21:19:06","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T01:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/?p=2730"},"modified":"2019-10-16T21:23:20","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T01:23:20","slug":"meshes-of-the-afternoon-maya-deren-1942","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/2019\/10\/16\/meshes-of-the-afternoon-maya-deren-1942\/","title":{"rendered":"Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1942)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"700\" height=\"486\" src=\"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/meshes-of-the-afternoon.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2731\" srcset=\"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/meshes-of-the-afternoon.jpg 700w, http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/meshes-of-the-afternoon-300x208.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\" \/><figcaption>Meshes of the Afternoon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"text-align:center\"><em>I&#8217;ll be your mirror, reflect what you are,<br>\n                           in case you don&#8217;t know\u201d<\/em><br>\n                           -The Velvet Underground\n                           \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Meshes of the Afternoon pushes the viewer to ask questions of what  they expect from images. A knife is generally thought of as a weapon of  violence and an instrument of murder. When a woman&#8217;s body is used  parallel to the knife there is an assumption that the sexualization of  murder would occur due to the bevy of images produced by horror and  non-horror films alike. Identifying with the woman becomes precedent to  the horror film in order to feel the terror of being the victim and thus  holding up a mirror to the worst societal aspects of femininity. What  Deren does with Meshes of the Afternoon is to perceive the violence both  self-inflicted and otherwise in one woman&#8217;s life through  ground-breaking filmmaking techniques and attention to objects. Meshes  uses a dream sequence of repetition and complex layering to introduce  the possibilities of one woman and the difficulties of trying to break  through a mirror, or in this case a house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The film is loaded  with images that align themselves with easy identification like the  knife (masculine) and the flower (feminine). The mirror figure seems to  slip in and out of frame gracefully, but is always a looming presence,  perhaps a truth-sayer or a version of Deren herself. Meshes scatters  from any definitive subjective meaning, but the sensory terror of quick  pans and edits, and the woozy camera movements mixed with these  definitive images like the knife, flower, blood and the mirror create a  sense that the movie is about having a female body. But that is merely one reflection of many.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don&#8217;t know\u201d -The Velvet Underground Meshes of the Afternoon&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/2019\/10\/16\/meshes-of-the-afternoon-maya-deren-1942\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1942)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[462,461],"class_list":["post-2730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-maya-deren","tag-meshes-of-the-afternoon","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2730"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2735,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2730\/revisions\/2735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}