Deren's Meshes Of The Afternoon: Soundtrack as Narration

‘Meshes of The Afternoon’ baffled me the first time I saw it. The situation I was in did not allow me to fully appreciate it.  A crowded room full of chattering students without a satisfactory speaker system does not make the perfect viewing experience. It truly was a ‘silent’ film in this instance. Like most surrealist projects I encounter I do not like to delve deeply for meaning; I’d rather appreciate it for what it is; another persons mental expression through metaphor. Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hamid created the film and both star as husband and wife. Maya Deren’s character experiences a complicated lucid dream that involves her husband, multiples of herself and a specter with a mirror for a face. The film uses many symbolic props including a key, a single flower and a knife. It is important to note how ground breaking this film was at the time; it explores the subconscious well and includes the notion of ‘dreams within dreams’. This notion has become well used in many films and television series.

A second screening allowed me to hear the audio composed by Teiji Ito; it incorporates many different instruments to create a diverse musical range of emotion. The score adds the necessary element of ‘intrigue’ to the piece. What also stood out regarding the music is its incorporation into the narrative. Without the option of dialogue, silent films rely on the music to communicate the events further than what the visuals can. It doesn’t override the visuals as the key element, but it has a major part in the story and is definitely incorporated as a diegetic element. The basic element of this would be when Ito’s score is used as sound effect; at 01:37 the eclectic metallic drumming fits perfectly with the moment the key drops out of reach. However it seems that the director’s efforts to marry audio with visual goes further than that.

The first example of this is seen at 02:52; the first Maya enters the house, ascends the stairs and proceeds to remove a needle from a vinyl player. The music finishes at this moment; Maya then descends the stairs and falls asleep in a comfy chair. As her eyes shut the first act finishes, the dream sequence begins and the music continues. This sequence of events allows the audience to understand the difference between the characters conscious and subconscious. This notion is further explored at 06:44 when the second Maya (or first ‘dream Maya’) floats above her sleeping self, she notices the vinyl player beside the chair. She floats towards it and turns it off. However unlike before, the music does not stop when the needle is removed. Perhaps this event represents Maya’s own understanding that she is in a ‘lucid’ dream. This notion makes sense if you consider that she then, after turning off the player begins to walk rather than float and gives no sense of anguish as she observes the events that follow in the dreamscape. Her husband awakes her at 11:10 and the music continues. At first I thought this blew my theory out of the water, but the music gently fades moments later, signifying Maya’s emergence into reality once she realizes that there is nothing to be afraid of. The theory is put under further attack when the music starts up again; while supposedly out of her dream, Maya observes her husbands actions that mimic perfectly what the mirrored faced specter was doing beforehand. The foreboding music that always accompanies the specter now accompanies the husband.  The inclusion of the music also gives the audience the clue that she may not have actually woken up yet. Things get weird again and it becomes obvious that she hasn’t, the music relentlessly continues until she breaks out of this false world at 12:49.

 The end of the film still baffles me. Once she breaks the mirrored image of her husband, the shattered mirror reveals the open sea. Her husband walks into their apartment and is greeted by a dead Maya, covered in shards of mirror and seaweed. The music incorporates as many instruments as possible for the revealing finale, only adding to the confusion. If she turned off the vinyl player and she is not dreaming, how can the music continue? The only way to explain this would be to look towards Edgar Allen Poe’s poignantly named poem ‘A Dream Within a Dream’, which ends eerily similar to the film if thought from the perspective of the husband:

“O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?”