Meshes of the Afternoon + Spellbound

Which debut short film manages to still be pioneering as psycho-poetic avant-garde cinema decades after its release and influence filmmakers such as David Lynch? Maya Deren’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON fits that bill. With a 16mm Bolex camera in hand, a $250 budget and playing the lead herself, Deren made an experimental film about a woman coming home, falling asleep and being haunted by nightmares in which dreamworld and reality merge together. The rhythmical, innovative editing and camera angles ignore narrative conventions and reflect the subconscious. Deren uses a subjective camera to interpret the inner experiences of the woman in the film.

Feminist filmmaker and queer pioneer Barbara Hammer describes Deren’s aesthetic style as radically different from all those other male filmmakers dominated the film history books. “Her images were created from a different sensibility, an aesthetic I intuitively understood, creating an emotional and intellectual density within rather than between images.”

We screen MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON in a double bill with Alfred Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND.

“It’s quite remarkable to discover one isn’t what one thought one was.” – Ingrid Bergman als Dr. Petersen

Psychoanalyst Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) works at Green Manors mental hospital. When the head of Green Manors is forced in retirement, he is replaced by the young Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck). Romance blossoms between the two of them, but Dr. Petersen quickly notices strange traits and amnesia in her lover, which point to a personality disorder. “I’m haunted, but I can’t see by what!” Edwardsen is a victim of his own memory and dreams, but together the couple wants to figure out who he really is. But then a murder comes into play as well…

A murder mystery mixed with Freudian theories and a passionate love affair? Those are the perfect ingredients for a Hitchcock thriller. Add to that the star power of Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck and you get a cinematic recipe for success. SPELLBOUND is one of the first movies incorporating the theme of psychoanalysis as a narrative element and Hitchcock collaborated with surrealist Salvador Dalí on a 20 minutes long dream sequence to translate the workings of psychoanalysis to the screen. When producer David O. Selznick saw the scene, he decided to reshoot it and cut it down to 2 minutes. Luckily this intervention doesn’t take away from what makes SPELLBOUND one of the highlights from Hitchcock’s Hollywood career: entertainment and suspense with a touch of forbidden romance, the shock of the unexpected and an undertone of human interest that is never forgotten.

We also screen SPELLBOUND seperately as matinee on Thursday 26 and Sunday 29 November.