On Not Being Maya Deren

Figure 1.

Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon. Photo from The Museum of Modern Art Film Still Archive.

Not being Maya Deren was something I had to admit. It came as a shock, as did seeing Maya Deren’s hallucinatory avant-garde film from the 1940’s, Meshes of the Afternoon.

The first time I saw Maya Deren’s film, I was nineteen and in a college film course. First in class came a surreal nightmare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and then the sweep of the Russian Revolution in Battleship Potemkin. In the dark auditorium, I was working on an idea of the world as a historical mindscape, full of protest, the intricacies of psychoanalysis, the mocking questions of surrealism—the kind of world that my former “nice” life in the suburbs was designed to studiously avoid. I was trained to dress in pert flowered outfits more suggestive of schoolgirls in small-town Kansas than of the hell-on-wheels bad girl I knew I deserved to be. I had been expected to skim lightly over life, not to speak of anything like guilt or lust, despair or dreams. So I eventually bought a leather jacket and sought out the worst boys at the edge of parking lots. Destiny took me to New York as a certainly bad-enough place, and I found myself in an auditorium watching the shortest, most perfect piece of black-and-white footage, created by a woman who had to be the most bad, the worst bad girl in the world, Maya Deren.

I had never heard of a woman filmmaker. Her name, Maya, was also unheard of. More like Mayan. Her face was as monumental looking on film as a Mayan temple. Maya, not Carol or Susan or Linda, the straightforward names of most girls I knew, names that never unnerved anyone. To make matters worse, or in this case better, since we were looking for the most bad, she not only directed her film (and this was the first time I considered how a woman’s body, maybe my body, would look, draped over a camera, suddenly jumping up to direct a shot, telling men and woman emphatically where to sit, how to look, when to speak)—she herself starred in it. She was not afraid to tell and enact a story that no one else could even begin to speak yet, whose messages I find it hard to admit even now.

Meshes of the Afternoon goes something like this: the film itself takes place in an afternoon, but an afternoon out of an archetype, a sunlit, sun-penetrated, Mediterranean-looking place with the kind of herbaceous things growing that smell in sunlight, eucalyptus or wild basil. A large flower drops to the ground, and the camera takes us inside a house full of alarm in the commonplace: a zigzag staircase, a too-big knife angled in a loaf of bread, a phone knocked off the hook, a worried-looking woman with a cloud of hair and severe black pants. A ferocious humming sound starts. Then a tall black figure, robed like a nun but with a big blank mirror for a face, strides hurriedly down the sunlit road outside. Back inside the worried-looking woman is asleep. She is awakened by a man—someone familiar to her—whose face in repose is sculpted, too handsome. There seems to be a menacing element between the man and the woman, aggravated by the mean humming music. It’s reminiscent of what you thought it was better not to think about.

The man takes his walk towards the sea, the mirror-nun walks up the stairs, and the woman struggles up the same dizzying stairs. Suddenly the mirror-nun appears in the bedroom, and now the too-handsome man comes forward with the same mirror face as the nun. Who’s who? Now there are two of the same woman, two Mayas sitting down at the table. We are left to look at a key, a flower, a knife, then a staircase, then the...