Background and production The film was the product of Deren's and Hammid's desire to create an avant-garde personal film that dealt with complex psychology, like the surrealist films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930) by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Deren and Hammid wrote, directed, and performed in the film. Although Deren is usually credited as its principal artistic creator, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who knew the couple, has claimed in his book Film at Wit's End that Meshes was in fact largely Hammid's creation and that their marriage began to suffer when Deren received more credit. Other sources claim that Hammid's role in the creation of Meshes of the Afternoon is mainly as cameraperson. Deren made extensive storyboards for all of her films, including camera movements and camera effects. She wrote about these techniques in professional filmmaking magazines. The ideas and execution of the film are mostly attributable to Deren. Hammid also acknowledged Deren as the sole creator of Meshes of the Afternoon. The original print had no score. However, a musical score influenced by classical Japanese music was added in 1959 by Deren's third husband, Teiji Ito. Analysis In the early 1970s, J. Hoberman claimed that Meshes of the Afternoon was "less related to European surrealism" and more related to "Hollywood wartime film noir". Deren explained that Meshes "...is concerned 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 subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience." Lewis Jacobs's discussion Writing about Meshes of the Afternoon, Lewis Jacobs credits Maya Deren with being the first film maker since the end of World War II to "inject a fresh note into experimental film production". Further in his discussion of experimental cinema in postwar America, Jacobs says the film "attempted to show the way in which an apparently simple and casual occurrence develops subconsciously into a critical and emotional experience. A girl comes home one afternoon and falls asleep. In a dream she sees herself returning home, tortured by loneliness and frustration and impulsively committing suicide. The story has a double climax, in which it appears that the imagined, the dream, has become real.” Deren uses specific cinematic devices in this film to convey deeper meaning. In a