THE COLLABORATION OF Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid shortly after their marriage in 1942 recalls in its broad outline and its aspiration the earlier collaboration of Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou (1928). By a surrealistic principle, Dali and Buñuel sought to combine images so that one would bear no logical or rational connection to the next. This principle was not original to the authors of Un Chien Andalou, although it never had so rigorous an application in cinema before them. Others, of course, had extended the mechanics of “the Exquisite Corpse” into literature and painting. The Exquisite Corpse, in its purest form, is drawn by a number of persons upon a piece of paper folded so that one can draw the head, another the neck and shoulders, another the trunk, and so on, without any one contributor’s seeing the work of the others. The unfolded paper reveals the synthetic, radically malformed figure—the Exquisite Corpse.
In his first autobiography Dali describes the effect of the film:
The film produced the effect that I wanted, and it plunged like a dagger into the heart of Paris as I had foretold. Our film ruined in a single evening ten years of pseudo-intellectual postwar advance-guardism.
That foul thing which is figuratively called abstract art fell at our feet, wounded to the death, never to rise again, after having seen “a girl’s eye cut by a razor blade”—this was how the film began. There was no longer room in Europe for the little maniacal lozenges of Monsieur Mondrian.1
Perhaps in 1928 Un Chien Andalou looked as indecipherable and shocking as Dali’s account would suggest. I doubt it. Buñuel too has written a note on the film:
In the working out of the plot every idea of a rational, esthetic or other preoccupation with technical matters was rejected as irrelevant. The result is a film deliberately anti-plastic, anti-artistic, considered by traditional canons. The plot is the result of a CONSCIOUS psychic automatism, and, to that extent, it does not attempt to recount a dream, although it profits by a mechanism analogous to that of dreams.
The producer-director of the film, Buñuel, wrote the scenario in collaboration with the painter Dali. For it, both took their point of view from a dream image, which, in its turn, probed others by the same process until the whole took form as a continuity. It should be noted that when an image or idea appeared the collaborators discarded it immediately if it was derived from remembrance, or from their cultural pattern or if, simply, it had a conscious association with another earlier idea. They accepted only those representations as valid which, though they moved them profoundly, had no possible explanation. Naturally, they dispensed with the restraints of customary morality and of reason. The motivation of the images was, or meant to be, purely irrational! They are as mysterious and inexplicable to the two collaborators as to the spectator. NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis.2
What Dali and Buñuel achieved through this method of compiling a scenario was the liberation of their material from the demands of narrative continuity. Far from being puzzling, the film achieves the clarity of a dream. The extremity of the violence and the calculated abruptness of changes of time, place, and mood intensify the viewing experience without satisfying the conventional narrative demands of cause and effect. The concentration on only two actors, male and female, and the insistence on tactile imagery set up a situation of identification that more randomly organized films do not have. The strength of the identification in the context of the abrupt dislocations and discontinuities provides us with a vivid metaphor for the dream experience. Had Dali and Buñuel set about to study their own dreams and clinically re-create a dream on film, they could not have surpassed Un Chien Andalou.
The film begins with a cliché and then a paroxysm of violence. After the title “Once Upon a Time,” a man, played by Buñuel himself, slowly and carefully sharpens a straight razor and slices the eye of the heroine. The horror of this opening is intensified by an extended visual metaphor. As he is sharpening the razor, Buñuel looks with entranced madness at the moon just as a sliver of cloud is about to cross it. At the moment of cutting the eyeball, the film shows the cloud slicing across the moon’s circle. The image is both a reflected horror and a relief: horrible in the precision with which it suggests the cutting of the eye, and a relief in that the viewer for a moment thinks that the metaphor has spared him the actual slicing. But immediately we see the razor finishing its work and the interior of the eye pouring out. The strategies of metaphor, synecdoche, and metonomy by which the illusions of causality and simultaneity in the film are sustained become the structural models of the film’s formal development. We are forced to see the metaphor of the moon, whose very tranquility evokes terrible violence, followed by an even more violent synecdoche.
The title which follows, “Eight Years Later,” seems to promise a causal account. The action disappoints the expectation. A man dressed as a clown, with a striped box held by a thong around his neck, rides his bicycle through city streets. When he falls from it a young woman rushes out of her house, embraces him on the ground, and removes the box around his neck. Back in her room, she lays out the articles of his clothing and the box as if to reconstruct the man from these mute objects. But suddenly she sees that he is at the other end of the room, now dressed in a suit, and staring at the palm of his hand, out of which ants are crawling.
In a series of dissolves the ants become a woman’s armpit, which in turn becomes a sea urchin and then the top of an androgynous head. The head belongs to a character who stands in the street where the bicyclist had fallen, poking a dismembered hand with a long stick. A crowd gathers around her like ants around the hole in the hand. The police intervene; they push back the crowd; and one of them picks up the hand, places it in the striped box, and gives it to her. As she clutches it to her breast, an automobile runs her down. The figure of synecdoche is at stake here. The film-makers create the illusion of ants emerging from the hand by means of a model shown in close-up. That illusion immediately engenders a hyperbolical series of metaphors, calling attention to the concept of metaphor. When they use the model hand as a prop in the street scene, it becomes a metaphor for a synecdoche. Similarly, the oozing eyes of the dead donkeys in the scene that follows this reveal a possible source for the montage substitution on the earlier sliced eye.3
The young woman and the cyclist watch this episode from their upstairs window. He is excited to madness. As blood trickles from his mouth, he feels the bare breasts and buttocks of his companion. She tries to escape him, but he pursues her, pulling after him two grand pianos loaded with dead donkeys. She rushes into the next room and slams the door, but she catches his hand in the process. The palm, caught in the door and crawling with ants, horrifies her. Then she notices that he is in the same room with her, although he is now dressed in the clown suit and lying on the bed.
The next episode begins with the title “Around Three in the Morning.” A new character, seen from the back for a long time, rushes in on them. He punishes the protagonist by throwing his collar, frills, box, and thong out the window and making him stand in the corner. The title “Sixteen Years Before” appears without a change of scene, but now the action is in slow motion. The features of the newly arrived man look remarkably like the protagonist’s. He seems to be chastising the cyclist as he would a schoolboy. The books he gives him turn to guns in his hands. With them the cyclist shoots his tormentor, who falls, not in the room, but in an open field against the back of a naked woman. Strollers in the field are indifferent to his corpse.
Back in the room, the cyclist and the young woman again confront each other. He has lost his mouth. Hair grows in its place. Annoyed by what she sees, she looks under her arm to find the hair there missing. She sticks her tongue out at him, opens the door behind her and finds herself on a windy beach with a new man. They laugh at the remnants of the cyclist—his collar, box, and thong—washed up by the waves. Arm in arm they stroll away.
Finally there is the title “In the Spring” followed by a still shot of the central couple, buried in sand, blinded, and covered with insects.
I have passed over many details of this very intricate film. The outline presented here preserves the abrupt changes of location, the basic action, and all the titles. Let us postpone for a moment further comment on this film, in order to present Meshes of the Afternoon and lay the basis for a comparison.
The fifteen years between Un Chien Andalou and Meshes of the Afternoon were not without scattered avant-garde film production.4 In America, the outstanding works of this period sought their inspiration from Expressionism or from the achievements of still photography. The sort of dream narrative that the Dali-Buñuel film offered as a new cinematic possibility was not often explored.
Maya Deren’s background had been literary and choric. She was born in Kiev in the year of the revolution, emigrated with her parents in 1922 to America, where her father, Dr. Solomon Deren, a psychiatrist, worked for and eventually directed the State Institute for the Feeble-minded in Syracuse, New York. After secondary schooling at the League of Nations School in Geneva, Switzerland, she attended the University of Syracuse as a student of journalism until she married. She and her husband moved to New York, where they were both active in the Trotskyist movement. She took her Bachelor of Arts from New York University and divorced soon after.
During her first years in New York and until she began to make films, Maya Deren wrote poetry, but she was never satisfied with it. At the same time she developed an interest in modern dance. She was not a dancer herself—at least not a trained dancer. Her mother and friends recall the sudden, inspired, but undisciplined dances she would privately perform, especially in later years after her fieldwork in Haiti and her initiation into voodoo. In the early forties she conceived the idea of writing a theoretical book on modern dance and looked for a professional dancer to work with her. She interested Katherine Dunham in her project and traveled with her on her tour of 1940–1941. The book never materialized, but Katherine Dunham had introduced her to Alexander Hammid when her company was in Los Angeles. They married in 1942.
Alexander Hackenschmied, who later changed his name to Hammid, was a professional film-maker born in 1907 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, then working on a minor Hollywood project. He was well known in filmmaking circles as a cameraman, editor, and director. The best-known films he had worked on by that time were the documentaries Zem Spieva (The Earth Sings, 1933), Crisis (1938), Lights Out in Europe (1939), and Forgotten Village (1941).
They shot Meshes of the Afternoon in two and a half weeks in their own home with primitive 16mm equipment. They played in the film themselves. There was no script. They worked out the overall outline together and talked over the shooting details while making the film.
It has an intricate spiral structure based on the repetition, with variations, of the initial sequence of the film, and it has a double ending. In the opening shot a long, thin hand reaches down from the top of the screen to leave a flower on a road. A young woman, played by Maya Deren, walks along the road, picks up the flower, and glimpses the back of a figure turning the bend ahead of her.
She goes to the door of a house, knocks, tries the locked door, then takes out her key. She drops it and pursues it as it bounces in slow motion down the stairs. When she finally enters the house, the camera pans a disordered room and ends in a dolly up to the dining room table. There is a loaf of bread, with a knife in it, on top of the table, but as the camera approaches, the knife pops out.
She climbs the stairs, passing a telephone with the receiver off. In the upper bedroom the wind is blowing a curtain. She turns off an unattended record player and returns downstairs to relax in an easy chair by the window. She slowly caresses herself as a shot of her eye and the window are intercut until they are both clouded over. This is the basic movement of the film. In the initial presentation there are no full-figure shots. We see first the shadow of the protagonist, then her hand picking up the flower. Within the house, the camera moves subjectively, imitating her field of vision and her movements. This is a clear-cut formulation of the idea of first person in cinema. In the initial sequence we only see what the heroine herself sees, including glimpses of her own body.
As this basic movement is repeated the transitions between the variations are fluid, so that the viewer finds himself in the midst of a recurrence before it is expected. The first person switches to third.
From the window in front of the easy chair, we can see the initial setting of the film, the road. Now a black figure, like a nun, with a mirror for a face, walks slowly in the same direction as the young woman had in the beginning. She is followed by the young woman again, who is running after her. As fast as she runs she cannot gain on the walking figure, so she gives up and climbs the stairs to the house. For the first time we see her face. She enters without a key and looks around the room, noticing the knife is now on the stairs where the telephone had been. She climbs up in slow motion, then slowly falls through a black gauze curtain into the bedroom. The phone is on the bed. She pulls down the covers, again revealing the knife, and sees the distorted image of her face reflected in its blade. She quickly pulls back the covers, replaces the receiver on the telephone, and glides backward through the veil down the stairs as the camera does a somersault to dislocate her motions in space. Once downstairs, she sees herself sleeping in an easy chair. With a long stretch she reaches across the room to turn off the phonograph next to her own sleeping figure.
The pace of the events accelerates with each variation. The terror increases as well. After turning off the record player, the second Maya Deren goes to the window from which she sees yet a third version of herself chasing the black figure, who again disappears beyond the bend. She presses her hand against the window and looks wonderingly. The third woman takes her key from her mouth and enters the house where she catches sight of the black figure again. She follows the figure up the stairs and sees it disappear (through stop-motion photography) after placing the flower on the bed. The knife is there too. A quick pan from it brings us back to the sleeper in the easy chair.
This time the camera looks out the window without the mediation of a woman through whose eyes or over whose shoulder the action is seen. We see the same pursuit and its frustrations. Again the key comes from the mouth, but this time it turns immediately into the knife in her hand. She passes through the unlocked door holding it. Within are two Maya Derens seated at the dining room table. She joins them, as a third, placing the key on the table. The first woman feels her own neck, reaches for the key, and holds it in her palm for a moment. The second does the same. The third reaches without feeling her neck; her palm is black; the key turns into the knife when she holds it. Wearing goggles, she rises from the table, holding the knife aggressively. We see her feet step on beach sand, grass, mud, pavement, the rug—five shots in all. Then, as she is about to stab her sleeping self, the sleeper’s eyes open to see a man who is waking her. They go upstairs. Just to reassure herself she glances at the table, which is perfectly in order. The man picks up the flower and puts the phone, which had been left on the stairs, back on its receiver.
Upstairs he lays the flower on the bed and she lies down beside it. His face is reflected in a shaving mirror. He sits next to her and caresses her body. The flower suddenly becomes the knife. She grabs it and stabs him in the face, which turns out to be a mirror. The glass breaks and falls, not to the floor, but on a beach. A wave approaches and touches it.
Without transition we see the same man walking on the original road. He picks up the flower, takes out his key, enters the house, and finds the young woman lying in the easy chair with a slit throat amid broken glass. That is the end.
“This film is concerned,” Maya Deren wrote,
with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the sub-conscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience….
This film… is still based on a strong literary-dramatic line as a core, and rests heavily upon the symbolic value of objects and situations. The very first sequence of the film concerns the incident, but the girl falls asleep and the dream consists of the manipulation of the elements of the incident. Everything which happens in the dream has its basis in a suggestion in the first sequence—the knife, the key, the repetition of stairs, the figure disappearing around the curve of the road. Part of the achievement of this film consists in the manner in which cinematic techniques are employed to give a malevolent vitality to inanimate objects. The film is culminated by a double-ending in which it would seem that the imagined achieved, for her, such force that it became reality.5
Until recently commentators on this film have tended to neglect the collaboration of Alexander Hammid, to consider him a technical assistant rather than an author.6 We should remember that he photographed the whole film. Maya Deren simply pushed the button on the camera for the two scenes in which he appeared. The general fluidity of the camera style, the free movements, and the surrealistic effects, from slow motion to the simultaneous appearance of three Maya Derens in the same shot, are his contribution. If Meshes of the Afternoon is, in the words of Parker Tyler, the most important critic of the American avant-garde film in the forties and fifties, “the death of her narcissistic youth,” it is also Hammid’s portrait of his young wife.
Before he came to America and worked in the documentary tradition, Hammid had made some independent films. His first, Bezucelna Prochazka (Aimless Walk, 1930), is particularly relevant here. In that film, a young man observes himself in his daily activities. Hammid, unfamiliar with montage or superimposition techniques in this first film, created the effect of self-observation without montage by having the protagonist quickly run behind the camera and take up another position while the camera was panning between his two selves. His subsequent films display a professional handling of the materials and an awareness of the achievements of the Russian and British documentary schools.
The visual style of Meshes of the Afternoon is particularly smooth, with cutting on movements and elisions to extend the continuity of gesture and action. From the very opening, there is a constant alternation of perspectives from synecdochic representation of the action to subjective views of what the protagonist sees, usually through the moving camera. Although the rhetorical figure synecdoche, the part for the whole, is an essential characteristic of all cinema, where the act of framing a picture can bring into play a potential field outside of the frame of which the filmic image is a small part (e.g., any close-up of a part of the body), I refer in this book to the deliberate and extreme use of framing portions of an action as synecdochic. For instance, in the first cycle of Meshes of the Afternoon, there is no establishing shot, no view of the whole figure in her environment; toward the middle of the film, as the situation takes on more symbolic dimensions, the camera tends to compensate by stasis and wider views.
The transitions between cycles are subtly achieved. In the first transition between waking and sleeping, the film uses the wavy shadow over both the eye and the window. That sequence is interrupted by a view of the original road, where the black figure is about to appear. But before it does, there is a dolly back from the window, now masked by a cylindrical pipe which emphasizes the transition.
The division between the second and third cycles has the same fluidity. The first shots of the new cycle are cut in before the last of the old one is seen. In this case, after looking at the sleeper, the protagonist goes to the window to see herself running after the black figure. Even after she disappears around the bend and the pursuer begins to climb the stairs, we see another shot of the protagonist in the window, peering out, her hand pressed against the pane.
When we compare the image of Maya Deren, framed by the window where the reflections of trees blend with the mass of her hair, with the parallel image of Pierre Batcheff, sadistically watching the androgyne and the dismembered hand from his window in Un Chien Andalou, one contrast between the two films becomes clear. It is, in fact, a difference which obtains between the early American avant-garde “trance film” (as I will call this type of film in general) and its surrealistic precursors. In Meshes of the Afternoon, the heroine undertakes an interior quest. She encounters objects and sights as if they were capable of revealing the erotic mystery of the self. The surrealistic cinema, on the other hand, depends upon the power of film to evoke a mad voyeurism and to imitate the very discontinuity, the horror, and the irrationality of the unconscious. Batcheff, leering out of the window, is an icon of repressed sexual energy. Deren, with her hands lightly pressed against the window pane, embodies the reflective experience, which is emphasized by the consistent imagery of mirrors in the film.
Meshes explicitly simulates the dream experience, first in the transition from waking to sleeping (the shadow covers the eye and the window at the end of the first cycle) and later in an ambiguous scene of waking. The film-makers have observed with accuracy the way in which the events and objects of the day become potent, then transfigured, in dreams as well as the way in which a dreamer may realize that she dreams and may dream that she wakes. They have telescoped the experience of an obsessive, recurrent series of dreams into a single one by substituting variations on the original dream for what would conventionally be complete transitions of subject within a single dream.
In the program notes for a screening of her complete works at the Bleecker Street Theater in 1960, Maya Deren warned, as was her custom, against a psychoanalytical reading of this film: “The intent of this first film, as of the subsequent films, is to create a mythological experience. When it was made, however, there was no anticipation of the general audience and no experience of how the dominant cultural tendency toward personalized psychological interpretation could impede the understanding of the film.” Within the film itself, the double ending mitigates against interpretation, showing the makers’ preference for sustaining the dreamlike ambivalence over the formal neatness of a rounded sleep.
A comparison can be made between this film and Un Chien Andalou, while suspending any question of influence. The Deren-Hammid film consciously uses much of what was beyond the intention of Buñuel and Dali. Buñuel and Dali did not set out to create a film dream; the dream-like quality of their work derives from the strength of their sources, from the ferocity with which they dispelled the rational while keeping the structural components of narrative. They show us neither sleep nor waking, but simply a disjunctive, athematic chain of situations with the same characters. The startling changes of place, the violence, the eroticism, the tactility, and above all the consistent use of surrealistic imagery, suggest the dream experience.
Meshes of the Afternoon is not a surrealistic film. It was made possible through a Freudian insight into the processes of the surrealistic filmmakers. Nor is it a Freudian film. Surrealism and Freud were the vehicles, either latent or conscious, behind the mechanics of the film. Thus some of its methods seem to derive from Un Chien Andalou. In the first place, both films have a “frame” and a double ending. In the case of the Dali-Buñuel film, the frame—the opening sequence of the eye slashing followed by the title “Eight Years Later” as if a causal flashforward were about to occur—diverts the narrative. The two endings—the beach scene, followed by the title “In the Spring” and a still of the two figures grotesquely buried in the sand—likewise confound our expectations. Deren and Hammid also made imaginative use of the convention of a frame. Had their film ended with the scene of the woman awakened by the man, that frame would have fulfilled the standard function of dividing imagination from actuality. But the continuation of the violence of the dream, and its dislocations, in the scene between man and woman, which is suggestive of waking, then lapsing back into sleep, changes the film’s dimension by its affirmation of dream over actuality.
(a) The window as a repressive barrier in Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.
(b) The window as a reflector of the self in Hammid and Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon.
Un Chien Andalou attempts to present us with a broken, violent, spatially and temporally unstable world, without final reference to a more conventional actuality. Meshes of the Afternoon, on the other hand, offers us an extended view of a mind in which there is a terrible ambivalence between stable actuality and subconscious violence. Many of the means of presenting this mind are the same as those of the earlier, more radical film. For instance, in Un Chien Andalou a door which we expect to open on a corridor opens on a windy beach, just as the broken glass from the mirror in Meshes falls not on the floor but on the lip of the ocean. In Un Chien Andalou, when the man is shot by a gun, he starts falling inside the apartment and ends in an open field with his hands clawing the back of a naked woman. The transition is smoothly made through the continuity of action. All through Meshes there is similar cutting on action across disjunctive spaces.
In the original shooting script for Un Chien Andalou, the man who enters the house to chastise the protagonist is his double:
At that instant the shot goes out of focus. The stranger moves in slow motion and we see that his features are identical to those of the first man. They are the same person, except that the stranger is younger, more full of pathos, rather like the man must have been many years earlier.7
In the actual production, this identity is obscure. They are not played by the same actor, though their similarity and the dream-like structure of their confrontation do suggest the idea of a double.
This coincidence of the theme of the double can provide us with a clue to the real relationship between the two films. It is possible that neither Hammid nor Deren had seen the Dali-Buñuel film before they made theirs. They could have seen it; and they could have read Dali’s book, published just a year before Meshes, and learned of it indirectly. If she had seen it, Maya Deren does not mention it in her subsequent writings. In speaking of Surrealism she is not enthusiastic. However, in the construction of the scene in which the stabbed face turns out to be a mirror, they pay homage, perhaps unknowingly, to a motif of the painter Rene Magritte. In several of his paintings a broken window gapes out upon a void, while the illusory image that one had seen while looking through it lies shattered among the glass on the floor.
In all likelihood Deren and Hammid were more conscious of the influence, however indirect, of Orson Welles’s then recent Citizen Kane, with its regular shifts of perspective, than of Un Chien Andalou. But regardless of the question of influence, it is true that the mechanics of Un Chien Andalou and of Meshes result from a theoretical application of the principles of cinema to the experience of the dream. The theme of the double, an archetype in dreams, could find two completely different treatments in the two films, yet the abrupt changes of location, so common in dreams, have the same cinematic meaning for both sets of collaborators.
The difference between the films is instructive. Un Chien Andalou is filled with metaphors—the eye and the moon, a drink shaker as a doorbell, the sea urchin, and underarm hair—but Meshes has none. Objects in the earlier film recur, especially the box of the clown figure, but without the symbolic dimensions of the knife, key, and flower in Meshes, which accumulate their deadly charge through repeated use in slightly different circumstances.
Finally, the space of the two films is quite different. Un Chien Andalou takes place in a deep space with axial co-ordinates in all four lateral directions and up and down. The virtual space behind doors and walls is much used, as in most surrealistic films. The space projected by Meshes of the Afternoon is more rounded and linear, less cubic than the earlier film. There is little movement into or out from the space of the images. Actors tend to move across the screen. There is a sense of depth only when the hand-held camera is moved in the subjective shots.
The articulation of space in avant-garde films is often unconscious. The conscious decisions about movement, fixity of camera, choice of sets, imply an inflection of space that the film-maker is often unaware of. We can in fact often observe a common attitude toward space among filmmakers who have deliberately tried to distinguish themselves from each other.
The surrealistic shattered image: Hammid in Meshes of the Afternoon before and after the knifing of the mirror.
A fluid linear space is just one characteristic that this particular film shares with many of the American films which were to follow it. Another is the evocation of the dream state. And a final characteristic of many avant-garde films from this period (most of them trance films as well) is the film-maker’s use of herself or himself as a protagonist. There are many reasons for this, and they vary with the film-maker. Obviously, there is a strong autobiographical element in these films. But beyond that, if the filmmaker has neither the ability to command amateur actors to do precisely what she or he wants nor the money to hire trained actors, it is logical that she attempt to play the role herself, thus completely eliminating the process of “directing.” There is also another, more subtle reason which accounts for the number of self-acted films, particularly at the beginning of the avant-garde film movement in America: film becomes a process of self-realization. Many film-makers seem to have been unable to project the highly personal psychological drama that these films reveal into other characters’ minds. They were realizing the themes of their films through making and acting them. These were true psycho-dramas.
As psycho-drama, Meshes of the Afternoon is the inward exploration of both Deren and Hammid. The central theme of all the psychodramas that marked this stage of the American avant-garde cinema is the quest for sexual identity; in their film, unlike those that follow in this book, it is two people, the makers of the film, who participate in this quest. With the exception of the surrealistic film Le Sang d’un Poète, which will be discussed in the next chapter, the avant-garde film of the twenties had no psycho-drama, even in a rudimentary form. The explosion of erotic and irrational imagery that we encounter in many of these earlier films evokes the raw quality of the dream itself, not the mediation of the dreamer.
If we turn from the Dali-Buñuel collaboration to another, but somewhat less successful, example of the period, Man Ray’s Étoile de Mer (1928), based on a poem by Robert Desnos, there are a number of remarkable coincidences of imagery and structure between it and Meshes. Yet the same essential difference of orientation obtains. Étoile de Mer opens with the encounter of a man and a woman on a road. They go to the woman’s apartment, where she strips and he immediately bids her adieu. Twice again in the course of this elliptical and highly disjunctive film, the same man and woman encounter each other at the same spot. The last meeting might even be a dream, since it immediately follows a scene of her going to sleep.
Then consider the use of the image of the starfish in Man Ray’s film. The hero first finds the glass-enclosed creature during his second meeting with the woman. Alone in his room, he contemplates it. Yet during two mysterious and completely unexplained scenes—one in which the woman mounts the stairs of her apartment brandishing a knife, another in which she steps barefoot from her bed onto the pages of a book—the starfish unexpectedly appears in the scene—on the staircase, and next to the bed—like the knife and the telephone of the Deren-Hammid film.
Most of Étoile de Mer is photographed through a stippled glass, which distorts its imagery and flattens its space. In the use of this distortion we see the first major difference from Meshes. The transitions between distorted and normal views are not psychologically motivated. They appear random, in fact. In Meshes, as I pointed out, the wavy field of vision indicated the transition to sleep. Like Un Chien Andalou, Étoile de Mer is full of metaphors, many of which are introduced by the titles which Desnos wrote. They are deliberately jarring. After an allusion to “les dents des femmes” we see a shot of the heroine’s legs, not her teeth. In the central section of Man Ray’s film all action seems to disappear, in order to be replaced by a series of verbal and visual similes comparing the starfish to the lines on the palm of a hand, to glass, and to fire. Narrative itself seems to exist within Étoile de Mer only to be fractured or foiled.8
The central tradition of the American avant-garde film begins with a dream unfolded within shifting perspectives. Much of the subsequent history of that tradition will move toward a metaphysics of cinematic perspective itself.
