Meshes of the Afternoon is my favorite film, period. It’s a 14-minute dialogue-free experimental flic by Maya Deren centering around the dream state(s) of a woman (played by Maya herself) and her interactions with a man (Alexandr Hackenschmied), as well as a Death figure. You can watch it here with an amazing soundtrack by Maya Deren’s late husband Teiji Ito.
My ideas about this film revolve around the way it reflects the theme of the Hegelian Dialectic of Recognition. In the “Lordship and Bondage” section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel elaborates how humans can come to a sense of “absolute knowledge” through a process of coming to recognize each other.
In this process, Hegel says one must come to recognize that the existence of their self-consciousness is entirely contained within and dependent on the self-consciousness of the Other (in the sense of individual others generalized) – this is overcoming the first ambiguity. Next, they come to realize that the Other’s self-consciousness is reciprocally contained and existent through the self-consciousness of their Other (of which you are a part). This is the overcoming of the second ambiguity. When this recognition is reciprocal, one is able to come to the ‘Notion of Recognition.’ Now, because this process involves the dissolution of the stability of one’s own self-consciousness and the dissolution of the stability of the Other’s self-consciousness, Hegel reiterates again and again, to the point of redundancy, that in Recognition (in a symbolic sense), “each aims at the destruction and death of the other.”
As Maya enters her first dream state, she sees a Death figure walking down the street. Note that right at the beginning of the film, she was chasing Alexandr down the same sidewalk. This is the first parallel between the Death figure and Alexandr, but there are more: Alexandr, later in the film, places the poppy in Maya’s bed just as Death does, and then looks into the mirror, just as Death’s own face is a mirror. Thus, we can read the scene at the beginning as a parallel to the repeated scene of the Death figure walking down the street.
It becomes clear that this parallel represents that Maya is pursuing intimate knowledge of the Other – in the specific sense of an Other, with Alexandr, and in general terms of pursuing a sense of being through Recognition. To do this, she chases after the Death figure, just as a participant in the process of mutual Recognition must aim at the destabilizing (death) of their own self-consciousness and the self-consciousness of the Other. In addition the continued use of the poppy suggests that, as a bloomed flower, it represents the completion of Recognition. In the first act of the parallel, Maya has the poppy (reflecting her responsibility in the first ambiguity), and in the second act, the figure of Death (the Other) has the poppy (reflecting the responsibility of the Other in the second ambiguity).
This is in a very important sense a reflection of the cycle of desire and lack, and this is especially signified by the imposition of Alexandr (an object of desire to Maya, as depicted in the somewhat intimate scene late in the movie) as a stand-in for the Death figure. In seeking Death (literally, the figure, and symbolically, in the process of Recognition), she is seeking love through recognition (from the Other, Alexandr). Her desire is characterized symbolically entirely by depictions of lack and failure to achieve (loss of self-control in the antigravity scene, failure to prevent the objects in her home from returning back to normal such as with the phone and the record player, failure of the Mayas to pick up the key in the three-Maya scene, etc.). As within the Lacanian structure of analysis, the process of desire invariably and fatally results in failure.
From the dropping of the key (also a symbol of failure) from the beginning of the film, we are to understand Maya is aiming to return to some previous state in her life. Alexandr, who clearly shares a complicated relationship with Maya (note how she reacts to his intimacy), is perhaps what Maya needs to overcome to return to this state of comfort. The completion of Hegelian Recognition is perhaps the road to closure that Maya is seeking. That is to say that Maya is hoping to regain a sense of self and being-within-the-world that has ostensibly been lost after some traumatic event.
In this sense she is taking the step of recognition through the Other insofar as the Other is conceived in the general sense. She is, quite literally, negating the particular (Alexandr) to acquaint herself with the general (the Other) – since in order to know the Other she must first have a primitive sense of self-consciousness that she can seek the death of for the overcoming of the first ambiguity.
If Alexandr is preventing her closure, then overcoming him is the first step to allowing herself to achieve Recognition. In this process she is allowing herself the sense of freedom and self that she needs to complete the (via Lacan) impossible dialectic and thus to achieve the self-knowledge and sense of being she has sought. Thus, the key-turned-knife stands for the fact that a combination of both processes is the solution she seeks – she must seek death in the literal sense of the death of that which is holding her back from seeking death in the symbolic sense (as it is defined within the process of Recognition).
You might be saying that this is a bit much for an analysis of the film. There certainly are a number of more literal elements that can be interpreted in this film. But there’s a lot to be seen in this more abstract analysis. The long and short of it is that Maya’s film represents finding your place in the world by getting rid of things holding you back from realizing yourself. By looking at the parallels between Maya’s symbolism and various theoretical understandings of being and desire, we are able to flesh out the implications and intricacies of this transformation within this film and within the same processes of self-realization in our own life.
