Avant Garde

Maya Deren

'Avant Garde' is a French phrase, translating as 'ahead of the crowd', but could also be considered as an adjective.  It is purely experimental and idiosyncratic in relation to the codes and conventions of feature-length films.  Avant Garde is a movement, brought about in the mid-20th century as an anti-mainstream stance.  The phrase is an accreditation to all film auteurs.  It marks a new era film and shuns out all aspects of the mainstream doctrine.  Ever since the inception of avant garde, it has been a dawning prodigy and it has traits in contemporary film, art-house film and indi film.

One such example of an Avant Garde director is Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 - October 13, 1961).  She was part of the key to the Avant Garde movement.  She made films throughout the 1940s and 50s.  One of her most well known films is Meshes of the Afternoon.  She says "I make my pictures for what Hollywood spend on lipstick.".  Her focus is on the story rather than making commercial success.





Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) begins with the very symbolic shot of a flower being put on the floor.  The flower is a representation of life, blooming.  We then see a tracking shot of a woman's shadow approaching the flower; it cuts to a closer shot of her shadow, overshadowing the flower.  We see her hand pick the flower up.  The music of a harp and flute playing make it a dream-like sequence.  We only see her shadow and hands - never the rest of her body.  The camera tracks her feet as she walks upstairs - her identity still unknown.  She comes to a door, but the key falls out her hand.  The camera does a lot of tracking: it has already tracked her shadow for the duration of her journey and now it's tracking her in to the house.  From her POV we see the seemingly desolate house.

Our attention is drawn to a knife, just left in the bread.  It falls out.  The knife suggests to us that she's going to get stabbed at some point.  The film's graphic and suggestive in a visual sense.  We hear the none-diegetic sound of a drum banging, which gives the scene a buildup.  She goes up to her bedroom to see a window open and the curtain wafting about.  There are close-ups of minor detail such as a telephone randomly laying on the staircase and a flower.  The close-up of these objects reverberate the actions later to happen in the film.  The flower laying on the staircase suggests that the woman's life will be taken later on.  This idea is reinforced by the woman in the black cloak (representing the grim reaper) taking the flower with her.

The woman goes downstairs, sits in a chair and we see an extreme close-up of her eye closing: she's dreaming.  We go in to her mind.  We see a wide-shot of a winding path in a wood.  A tribal humming is heard as the camera zooms out through a funnel.  The tribal humming gives the film a raw feel, a contest feel.  We see a woman dressed in black, walking on the path.  Her cloak gives her ambiguity but we can't make out her features.  Since we've seen an image of a flower - and this woman's dressed in black, she could represent the grim reaper.  When she turns around, her face is completely white.  We can't see her face.  Her inhumane presence is creepy.

The woman in her dream runs after this cloaked woman as she stole her flower and the woman might want to find out the identity of the cloaked woman.  The dream sequence is inter-wined with reality - but we can't tell which is which.  In the film, we see a woman entering the house where the woman we saw at the beginning, is sleeping.  Around the table are 2 other woman.  The 3rd woman picks up a knife and goes to stab the sleeping woman.  When the sleeping woman finally wakes up, we wonder if she's still dreaming because she is woken up by a man.  Somehow, we know that everything is not as it seems.  The man leads her to bed, she throws a knife at the man and his image shatters.  However, in the next few shots, we see that same man walking towards the house and upon entering, finding her dead.  This is where the film ends.

The film relies on symbolic close-ups being used conjunctly, so that we can associate one object with the next and this moves the plot on, without the need for any dialogue.  Slow-motion and stop-motion are used for dramatic effect.  The film doesn't use any background music with the visuals - in feature films, there'd be dramatic music to go along with the visuals to give it emotion.  This film shows that music isn't needed where there are good visuals.  No music gives the film an eerie tone because the visuals are so dramatic, but they don't explain enough on their own - so the viewer is left to speculate.

Shots are often repeated, such as the shot of the telephone, the key and the knife which crops up a couple of times.  The camera moves so as to give the film that dream feel that happens when you go to sleep.  There's only two pieces of background music for the film: one for the dream feel with the harp and flute and the other is that tribal raw humming that we hear whenever the cloaked woman comes.  The visuals give the viewer a sense of heedlessness, that you'd get in a dream.  The audience is left to figure out what's going on and it gets you to think harder because there's no dialogue.

Themes crop up during the film, such as life being taken (woman in cloak stealing the flower) and forbidden fruit (key being taken out of a woman's mouth) like in Adam and Eve.  This whole short film is Biblical in meaning.  The absence of dialogue makes it more interesting because it makes the brain work harder to solve the hidden meaning.  It resembles horror in the intensity of the film and how it stupefies the audience at the end when we find out that the woman has actually been murdered and all those close-ups of the symbolic objects that we thought to be vagrant actually meant something.  'Meshes of the Afternoon' can definitely be traced in style and elements in it to contemporary feature films that we are used to seeing in cinemas today.